Immigration Reform:  Promoting Opportunity for All

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Last spring hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to challenge inequality and injustice in this country. Demonstrators from all walks of life joined a national conversation about immigration in the “Land of Opportunity.” The results were a call for immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship, civil rights enforcement and an investment in the health and education of all communities, regardless of citizenship status. According to the United States Census Bureau, an estimated 35 million people—our families, friends, neighbors, and co-workers—are foreign born.¹  The contributions of immigrants in America are immeasurable, and their experiences have strengthened communities far and wide.

Opponents of immigrant opportunity sought to spread myths about immigrants.  But the fact is that all people fare better when every individual – regardless of nationality – has a fair chance to fulfill his or her dreams. This fact sheet gives a snapshot of some immigrant experiences, and dispels some common myths about immigrants in the workplace and in our health care system.


Strengthening Communities

American communities are strengthened by im-migrants from all over the world. Newcomers’ economic contributions are immense, while their cultural and personal contributions improve all aspects of American life.

• Revitalizing Communities. In Boston, for example, immigrant entrepreneurs have re-invested in neighborhoods that had de-clined. Their businesses have revived commerce, enhanced public safety, and they provide needed resources and prod-ucts.  The growth of small businesses and self-employment among immigrants creates jobs and demonstrates American innova-tion at its best.  In the late 1990s San Jose, California saw a boom in immigrant-owned technology companies that created more than 58,000 jobs and generated more than $17 billion in sales.
• Tax contributions. Immigrants in California give an estimated $4.5 billion in state taxes and an additional $30 billion in federal taxes.  Immigrant households in the Wash-ington, DC metropolitan region paid an es-timated $9.8 billion in taxes in 1999-2000. This amounts to 19% of the taxes paid from the entire region.
• Net contributors. Undocumented workers contribute to Social Security through pay-roll taxes – as much as $7 billion annually - but they are restricted from accessing those very benefits they subsidize.  In other words, they are net contributors to a system that all Americans rely on.
  

Facing Inequality and Discrimination

True opportunity requires that we all have equal access to the benefits, burdens, and responsibilities of our society. In order to fully contribute and participate in society, immigrants and the native born alike should be treated equally regardless of race, gender, religion, country of origin, and other aspects of what they look like and where they come from.  But too often immigrants are treated unfairly.

• Between 1992 and 2003 nearly 8,500 complaints were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on the basis of national-origin discrimination.
• The number of national-origin discrimination complaints filed with the EEOC by women increased 29% during this period.²
• In 2005 foreign-born noncitizens were nearly twice as likely to live in poverty than were native-born citizens. Strikingly, however, naturalized citizens had a poverty rate that was lower than that of native-born citizens.³
   

Immigration Policy Without An Integration Strategy

Immigrant integration programs are important to assist newcomers with basic needs, such as health care and English-language classes, and to help them become established in their new communities. Unfortunately, no national integration policy exists.

• While federal funding for adult basic education and English classes increased by almost 50% from 1992 to 2000, funding has not kept pace with the growing demand for such programs.⁴
• Recent federal and state policy developments have limited opportunity for many immigrants. The 1996 Personal Responsi-bility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other legislation barred many documented and undocumented immigrants from federal programs such as food stamps, Social Security, and student loans, which provide basic economic security. State referenda such as California’s Proposition 187, which sought to bar undocumented children from attending public schools, have contributed to the growing trend of anti-immigrant legislation, even though some of these policies have been successfully challenged and blocked in federal courts.⁵
  

Dispelling Myths about the Workplace and Emergency Care Utilization

Immigration policy that relies solely on economic and wage analysis is neither comprehensive nor truly accurate. The body of research around the “competition question,” that is, whether immigrants replace native workers in available jobs, is widely divergent. Thus no single conclusion can be drawn regarding the displacement of native-born workers by the foreign born.

A compilation of research by the Migration Policy Institute found that:

• Although immigrants make up 14% of the workforce, they are disproportionately represented in the low-wage population (20%). Still, immigrants make up higher proportions of the workforce in several high-skill occupations and sectors.
• A study of U.S.-Mexico border communities, revealed that an enforcement-only approach had no positive effect on the wages of native born workers.
• Research from 15 large states showed a correlation between an influx of immigrants and a shift in the employment sectors that relied on the skills of the new immigrants. This finding asserts that local markets are capable of absorbing immigrant workers without causing wages to fall.⁶

Using Census Bureau data at the state level, the Pew Hispanic Center analyzed the effect of foreign-born population growth on native-born workers from 1990 to 2000, and then again from 2000 to 2004. After factoring for education levels, age, and growth rate, the presence of foreign-born workers had no impact on the employment of native-born workers in the time periods 1990–2000 and 2000–04. Among the findings were:

• In 2000 nearly 25% of native-born workers lived in states with rapid foreign-born population growth from 1990 to 2000 and where favorable employment outcomes for native born were associated.
• Between 2000 and 2004 there was a positive correlation between foreign-born population growth and employment for native-born workers in 27 states and the District of Columbia. Native-born workers in those states accounted for 67% of the nation’s native-born workforce.
• Although many of today’s newcomers lack education and are relatively young, their arrival in the U.S. had no clear impact on their native-born counterparts: workers ages 25–34 with low levels of education.⁷

A study of emergency departments in 12 nationally representative communities found that the highest rates of usage were not by patients who were uninsured, low-income, racial or ethnic minorities, or noncitizens. The study, conducted by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Studying Health System Change, found that:

• Immigration is not a contributing factor to emergency department crowding nationally, even in communities with a large population of Hispanic immigrants.
• Compared to citizens, noncitizens had much lower levels on average of emergency department usage: about 17 fewer visits per 100 people.⁸
  

Recommendations

If America is to fulfill its promise of opportunity, we must implement an integration strategy that wel-comes immigrants and gives newcomers an equal chance to fully contribute to and participate in society. We recommend the following measures:

• Several strategies must be developed, including greater support for programs such as health care, English-language classes, and other social services that provide basic assistance to immigrants.
• Immigrant workers should be assisted in learning about workplace rights, fair wages and benefits, and the means to garner legal assistance to protect these rights.
• Other programs should encourage public education and outreach to raise newcomers’ awareness of the federal naturalization process, and to increase the availability of civics education and other pro-grams useful for gaining citizenship.
• Voter-education programs and other efforts to increase political participation should be provided to stimulate political engagement and empowerment among new citizens.

  Endnotes

1. United States Census Bureau, “2005 American Community Survey,” http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=
   ACS_2005_EST_G00_DP2&-ds_name=&-redoLog=false&-format= (accessed August 20, 2006).
2. R. Borges-Mendez, M. Gaston, M. Liu, and P. Watanabe, Immigrant Learning Center, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Neighborhood Revitalization,” December 2005, http://www.ilctr.org/news/pdf/Immigrant_Entrepreneurs.pdf.
3. California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative, “Looking Forward: Immigrant Contributions To The Golden State.”  May 1, 2006, http://caimmigrant.org/repository/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/CIWCsummaryreport06.pdf.
4. California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative, 2006.
5. R. Capps, J. Passel, and M. Fix, “Civic Contributions: Taxes Paid By Immigrants in the Washington, D.C. Metro-politan Area,” May 2006, http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411338_civic_contributions.pdf.
6. E. Porter, “Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions,” New York Times, April 5 2005.
   United States Census Bureau, “2005 American Community Survey,” http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=
   ACS_2005_EST_G00_DP2&-ds_name=&-redoLog=false&-format= (accessed August 20, 2006).
7. National Partnership for Women and Families, “Women at Work: Looking Behind the Numbers, 40 Years After the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” July 2004, http://www.nationalpartnership.org.
8. U.S. Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005,” Table 4: Peo-ple and Families in Poverty by Selected Characteristics: 2004 and 2005, August 2006, http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p60-231.pdf.
9. The Carnegie Corporation, The House We All Live In: A Report on Immigrant Civic Integration (New York: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2003).
10. Ibid.
11. J. Murray, J. Batalova, and M. Fix, Migration Policy Institute, “The Impact of Immigration on Native Workers,” Insight, no. 18 (July 2006), http://www.migrationpolicy.org/ITFIAF/TF18_Murray.pdf.
12. R. Kochhar, Pew Hispanic Center, “Growth in the Foreign-Born Workforce and Employment of the Native Born,” August 10, 2006, http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/69.pdf.
13. P. J. Cunningham, “What Accounts for Differences in the Use of Hospital Emergency Departments across U.S. Communities?” Health Affairs (Web Exclusive), Vol.25, No.5: w324-336, July 18, 2006.