…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Citizenship Day (September 17) is an appropriate time to take stock of the growing number of U.S. citizens who are immigrants to this country—or who are the children of immigrants.  Roughly one-in-seventeen U.S. citizens are foreign-born, and tens of millions of native-born U.S. citizens have immigrant parents.  This demographic reality has important political ramifications.  A rising share of the U.S. electorate has a direct personal connection to the immigrant experience, and is unlikely to be favorably swayed by politicians who employ anti-immigrant rhetoric to mobilize supporters.  This is particularly true among the two fastest-growing groups of voters in the nation: Latinos and Asians.  The majority of Latinos and Asians are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, and they comprised 1 one out of every ten voters in the 2008 election…

Read the rest…

…for the Immigration Policy Center…

The public debate over immigration reform, which all too often devolves into emotional rhetoric, could use a healthy dose of economic realism.  As Congress and the White House fulfill their recent pledges to craft immigration-reform legislation in the months ahead, they must ask themselves a fundamental question: can we afford any longer to pursue a deportation-only policy that ignores economic reality?  At a time when the budgets of federal, state, and local governments contain more red ink than revenue, in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, what can we realistically afford to do with the roughly 12 million unauthorized-immigrant men, women, and children whom the Pew Hispanic Center estimates now live in the United States—plus the four million U.S.-born, U.S.-citizen children who have an unauthorized-immigrant parent?  Even more to the point in the present economic climate, how can we best tap these millions of unauthorized workers, consumers, and—yes—taxpayers as a force for economic recovery?…

Read the rest…