State of the Union 2010

President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010. Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi applaud at rear. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

In tonight’s State of the Union address, Obama said … “we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system – to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.”

At first glance, it makes sense that fixing the suffering economy would take precedence over all other domestic matters this year …we’re fighting two wars and struggling with job losses and severely cash-strapped families across the middle and lower socioeconomic classes. But why can’t we use immigration reform to work to our economy’s benefit and solve a serious humanitarian problem in our country simultaneously? We can.

Immigration reform will generate needed economic growth, create jobs and increase tax contributions by ensuring that everyone working here s is doing so legally. Here are some points the American Immigration Council stressed again this evening following Obama’s speech:

Immigration Yields Tremendous Economic Benefits to America

• A 2007 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers concluded that immigration as a whole increases the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by roughly $37 billion each year because immigrants increase the size of the total labor force, complement the native-born workforce in terms of skills and education, and stimulate capital investment by adding workers to the labor pool.
• Immigrants do not compete with the majority of natives for the same jobs because they tend to have different levels of education and to work in different occupations. In fact, The roughly 90% of native-born workers with at least a high-school diploma experienced wage gains because of immigration between 1990 and 2004, ranging from 0.7% to 3.4% depending on their level of education, according to a 2006 study by Giovanni Peri, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California-Davis.
• Immigrant entrepreneurs are twice as likely as Americans to start business and immigrant inventors account for more than one quarter of all U.S. patents according the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, 2008..

If Comprehensive Immigration Reform is Enacted the Benefits Will Be Even Greater

• According to a 2010 study by UCLA professor Raul Hinojosa, comprehensive immigration reform that includes a legalization plan for the unauthorized would contribute a cumulative $1.5 trillion to the Gross Domestic Product over ten years, as more tax revenues are collected, wages increase for U.S.-born and legalized workers, and immigrant workers spend more in our economy.  The report also finds that wages for immigrant and native-born workers would rise in part because workers will have more bargaining power in the workplace.
• The libertarian Cato Institute also reported that “legalization of low-skilled immigrant workers would yield significant income gains for American workers and households.”

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Immigration reform in the current economy

The Center for American Progress put out an excellent report today from UCLA researchers, laying out the economic benefits of immigration reform, in which they argue that legalizing the nation’s unauthorized workers and putting new legal limits on immigration that rise and fall with the U.S. labor demand would “help lay the foundation for robust, just and widespread economic growth.”

In the wake of discussion of possible immigration legislation this year, recent reports indicate that President Obama will support the move, according to Kansas House Represenatative Jerry Moran. Moran said this in his weekly newsletter and also reiterated that he’s “strongly opposed to any legislation that would create an amnesty program rewarding illegal immigration” and that “Obama is proposing another disastrous idea that will further bankrupt the country.

I think it’s a fair question to ask whether legislation that would provide a pathway to documentation — I really hate the term amnesty, as it implies that individuals have not only made political offenses but moral ones, too — would encourage more migration across our borders. While I agree with the Congressman that securing borders — and ensuring that people are not putting their lives in danger to cross them! — should be one of the top priorities in any immigration reform debate, again, how we can’t ignore the fact that there are already 7 to 8 million undocumented workers in America who are not paying income taxes and who may be exploited physically and fiscally by unscrupulous employers, driving down the wages of all low-skilled workers, native-born or not?

The Center for American Progress has an accompanying video to their report, which I encourage everyone to check out. It highlights why a pathway to documentation would be the best approach to solving the humanitarian problem while moving forward with America’s economic goals. Requiring these millions of “invisible” workers would generate $1.5 trillion in economic growth over the next decade. In the same breath, let’s not forget they’re already here; UCLA researchers estimate deporting all of them would cost the country $2.5 trillion dollars. The latter sounds more like it would “bankrupt the economy” … let’s collect taxes from these workers instead!

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