…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?…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Voting data from the 2008 election, released in late July by the U.S. Census Bureau, illustrates the growing electoral power of minority voters.  A comparison of Current Population Survey data on voters in the 2004 and 2008 elections reveals the extent to which the ranks of Latino, Asian, and black voters have increased in only four years.  This data should serve as a demographic wake-up call to politicians that they cannot ignore the concerns of minority voters without paying a price at the polls.  In the case of Latinos and Asians—the majority of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants—one of these concerns is immigration reform.  Political candidates should pay particular attention to the rapid rise of Latino and Asian voters in electorally pivotal states such as Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and North Carolina…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

According to the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, immigration to the United States is all about arithmetic: immigration increases the U.S. population, and more people presumably means more pollution, more urban sprawl, more competition for jobs, and higher taxes for Americans who must shoulder the costs of “over-population.”  At first glance, this argument is attractive in its simplicity: less immigration, fewer people, a better environment, more jobs, lower taxes.  However, as with so many simple arguments about complex topics, it is fundamentally flawed and misses the point.  “Over-population” is not the primary cause of the environmental or economic woes facing the United States, so arbitrary restrictions on immigration will not create a cleaner environment or a healthier economy…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

The United States and the colonial society that preceded it were created by successive waves of immigration from all corners of the globe.  But public and political attitudes toward immigrants have always been ambivalent and contradictory, and sometimes hostile.  The early immigrants to colonial America—from England, France, Germany, and other countries in northwestern Europe—came in search of economic opportunity and political freedom, yet often relied upon the labor of African slaves working land taken from Native Americans.  The descendants of these first European immigrants sometimes viewed the European immigrants who came to the United States in the late 1800s—from Italy, Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in southeastern Europe—as both “racially” and religiously suspect.  And the descendants of these immigrants, in turn, have often taken a dim view of the growing numbers of Latin American, African, and Asian immigrants who began to arrive in the second half of the 20th century…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

Election experts tend to agree that modern-day voter fraud is a very rare occurrence in the United States, primarily because it is so irrational.  The potential payoff (a vote) is not worth the risk of jail time, thousands of dollars in fines, and—in the case of non-citizens—possibly deportation.  The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law succinctly summarizes this point in a 2006 fact sheet: “Each act of voter fraud risks five years in prison and a $10,000 fine—but yields at most one incremental vote.  The single vote is simply not worth the price. Because voter fraud is essentially irrational, it is not surprising that no credible evidence suggests a voter fraud epidemic.”  But lack of evidence is not an obstacle for the Heritage Foundation, which on July 10 issued a rambling “legal memorandum” claiming that an unknowable yet large number of non-citizens are voting illegally and subverting the electoral process…

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…for the Immigration Policy Center…

For more than two decades, the U.S. government has tried without success to stamp out undocumented immigration through enforcement efforts at the border and in the interior of the country, but without fundamentally reforming the broken immigration system that spurs undocumented immigration in the first place.  While billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into enforcement, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically.  Rather than reducing undocumented immigration, the enforcement-without-reform strategy has diverted the resources and attention of federal authorities to the pursuit of undocumented immigrants who are not a threat to anyone, and who are drawn here by the labor needs of our own economy.  It has fueled the growth of increasingly profitable and sophisticated businesses in human smuggling and the production and sale of fraudulent identity documents…

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