The broken U.S. immigration system is flooding federal courts with low-level cases involving non-violent defendants, and inundating federal prisons with individuals whose only crime was to enter or remain in the country without permission. Thanks to this ever-widening immigration dragnet, a disproportionate share of the Latinos and non-U.S. citizens who wind up in federal courts and prisons are there solely because of immigration violations. In other words, the federal government is wasting its limited law-enforcement and criminal-justice resources on immigrants who do not pose a threat to public safety or national security…

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Prominent immigration restrictionists such as Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) like to pretend that federal and state governments could simply deport their way out of massive budget deficits and high unemployment.  By this flawed line of economic reasoning, removing unauthorized immigrants from country would magically free up both jobs and budgets.  In reality, removing millions of workers, consumers, and taxpayers would cause national and state economies to contract, resulting in fewer total jobs and less tax revenue.  In addition, it would cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to locate, round up, detain, and deport the 11 million unauthorized men, women, and children now living in the United States.  This is not a recipe for economic recovery; it is a recipe for economic disaster…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Recent estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) indicate that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has remained unchanged at roughly 11 million since 2009.  This comes after a two-year decline of approximately one million that corresponded closely to the most recent recession, which ran from December 2007 to June 2009.  Despite that decline, the new data make clear that the current population of unauthorized immigrants is very much part of the social and economic fabric of the country.  Three-fifths of unauthorized immigrants have been in the United States for more than a decade.  Unauthorized immigrants comprise more than one-quarter of the foreign-born population and roughly 1-in-20 workers.  Approximately 4.5 million native-born U.S.-citizen children have at least one unauthorized parent…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Immigrants are not the cause of unemployment in the United States.  Empirical research has demonstrated repeatedly that there is no correlation between immigration and unemployment.  In fact, immigrants—including the unauthorized—create jobs through their purchasing power and their entrepreneurship, buying goods and services from U.S. businesses and creating their own businesses, both of which sustain U.S. jobs.  The presence of new immigrant workers and consumers in an area also spurs the expansion of businesses, which creates new jobs.  In addition, immigrants and native-born workers are usually not competing in the same job markets because they tend to have different levels of education, work in different occupations, specialize in different tasks, and live in different places.  Because they complement each other in the labor market rather than compete, immigrants increase the productivity—and the wages—of native-born workers…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Some observers have suggested that immigrants are to blame for the high unemployment rates and low wages experienced by so many minority workers in the United States.  However, the best available evidence suggests that immigration is not the cause of dismal employment prospects for American minorities.  For instance, cities experiencing the highest levels of immigration tend to have relatively low or average unemployment rates for African Americans.  This should come as no surprise; immigrants go where jobs are more plentiful.  The grim job market which confronts many minority workers is the product of numerous economic and social factors: the decline of factory employment, the deindustrialization of inner cities, racial discrimination, etc.  Immigration plays a very small role.  However, that role is generally positive…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Recent estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center indicate that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has declined by roughly one million since 2007—bringing the total size of the unauthorized population to approximately 11.1 million.  Coming after the release of similar estimates by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in January, these figures have provoked considerable speculation as to how much of the decline is attributable to the current recession, and how much is the result of heightened immigration enforcement.  DHS, for instance, was quick to take credit for the drop, citing the money and manpower that have been poured into immigration enforcement by the Obama administration.  However, immigration researchers were just as quick to point out that unauthorized immigration has always responded to the state of the U.S. economy, and that the downward trend captured by both Pew and DHS matches up closely with the beginning of the recession in December 2007…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Arizona politicians who support the state’s sweeping anti‐immigrant law (SB 1070) are not particularly fond of facts.  For instance, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) has made all manner of ludicrous statements about unauthorized immigrants typically carrying drugs, killing cops, and leaving headless bodies in the desert.  But the most hypocritical of the anti‐immigrant statements made by politicians such as Brewer concern kidnapping.  Not only do Brewer and company pretend that kidnappers are lurking behind every corner in Arizona, but they usually neglect to mention that unauthorized immigrants are the primary victims of the kidnappings that do occur.  In other words, the kidnapping of unauthorized immigrants is being used as a justification to crack down on unauthorized immigrants.  This is a nonsensical policy that attacks the victims rather than the perpetrators of the crime…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

An oft-repeated claim in the debate over Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, is that tough immigration-enforcement measures are needed to prevent violent crime from engulfing the state.  In particular, supporters of SB 1070 often cite kidnappings in the state’s capital, Phoenix, as a reason to crack down on unauthorized immigrants.  Arizona politicians such as U.S. Senator John McCain and State Senator Russell Pearce, for instance, have justified their calls for more immigration enforcement by claiming that Phoenix is the “the number two kidnapping capital of the world” after Mexico City.  Not only is this claim false, but it ignores two inconvenient facts.  First of all, the victims of most kidnappings in Phoenix are unauthorized immigrants.  Second, crime rates in Arizona have been falling for years.  Cracking down on the unauthorized immigrants upon whom so many kidnappers prey is a classic case of blaming the victim.  Moreover, this blame-the-victim posture diverts attention from the fact that the broken U.S. immigration system has created a lucrative market for kidnappers…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) underscores not only the diversity of the foreign-born labor force in the United States, but also the myriad roles that immigrant workers play in the U.S. economy.  The report, which analyzes data from the Current Population Survey, finds that 15.5 percent of the U.S. labor force was foreign-born in 2009, up slightly from 14.5 percent in 2004.  Moreover, immigrant workers and their native-born counterparts differ significantly in terms of occupation and education, as well as where in the country they live.  As other, more detailed analyses have confirmed, this suggests that immigrants and natives are filling different niches in the U.S. labor market and are therefore not in direct competition with each other for most jobs…

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The criminalization of immigration has garnered considerable media attention in the United States due to the harsh new anti-immigrant law recently enacted in the state of Arizona.  That law makes it a state crime to not carry proper immigration documents (making it a misdemeanor for the first offense and a felony for the second offense).  Moreover, the law requires police in Arizona to determine a person’s immigration status if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person is an unauthorized immigrant.  Needless to say, this new directive to the police is so broad and ambiguous that it is likely to promote racial stereotyping of all Latinos in the state, including legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens.  The law has provoked a furious outcry from advocacy groups on behalf of immigrants, Latinos, and civil rights, which object to what they see as the targeting of an entire group of people in Arizona based on nothing more than ethnicity.  Adding insult to injury, the new law comes at the same time law-enforcement officers in the state’s Maricopa County, under the leadership of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, have transformed themselves into immigration-enforcement agents.  Among many other ethical and human-rights transgressions, the sheriff and his deputies in Maricopa County have used the state’s anti-smuggling law to criminally charge unauthorized immigrants with conspiring to smuggle themselves into the United States…

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