Texas Immigration Lawyer Blog

U.S. Chamber refutes common myths about immigration

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Labor, Immigration & Employee Benefits Division has prepared this pamphlet to refute seven of the most common myths about immigrants coming to our country. The pamphlet summarizes the facts on the relationship of immigrants to Jobs, Wages, Taxes, Population, Crime, Integration, and Welfare.

 

Welcoming more immigrants could help boost the U.S. economy

APM: Marketplace

Immigration policy may be a place to look for economic growth in the U.S.

 

Jeremy Hobson: President Obama says he is planning another push for immigration reform in the coming weeks and months. He met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about the issue earlier this week. The President wants to provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are already here illegally.

And we're going to dig into the economics of this now with our economics correspondent Chris Farrell. Good morning.

Chris Farrell: Good morning, Jeremy.

Hobson: Is immigration policy a place where we should look for economic growth?

Farrell: Look, Jeremy, I know it's controversial, but there's just a large body of economic research that says immigration, immigrants -- it's the steroids of economic growth. So if you think of companies like Intel or Google, a lot of their employees -- they're immigrants. The high-tech sector: 52 percent or about half of all companies starting up in Silicon Valley -- started up by immigrants. So one of the best things that we could do for this economy is just to tone down the rhetoric and put out the welcome mat.

Hobson: Put out the welcome mat. And I saw that Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City recently said that one day to do that is say, yeah sure, immigrants come on in, as long as you promise to move to Detroit for a while.

Study: Illegal immigration from Mexico declines overall, but not in Texas

Dallas Morning News  Dianne Solis reports on the Pew Hispanic Center report that was released recently:

"The unlawful flow of Mexican immigrants into the U.S. continues to slow, and the nation's illegal immigrant population is down by nearly 1 million people, the Pew Hispanic Center said in a report released today.

"But Texas didn't show a decline in the most recent period of study, 2007 to 2009.Instead it showed an increase of 200,000, which the reports' authors said was not statistically significant. 

"The report by the Pew Hispanic Center avoids naming causes for the contraction to 11.1 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. But it notes that the recession and tougher immigration enforcement paralleled a trend that "represents the first significant reversal in the growth of this population over the past two decades."

* * *

"Why Texas' population of illegal immigrants hasn't declined is up for debate.

"Mexican officials and others have speculated that Texas became a destination state for some immigrants from more economically battered U.S. states. Texas' jobless rate — now at 8.2 percent — has been 1 to 2 percentage points below the national average for much of the recession.

"The Pew study follows another report this week that says in Texas one out of three young students under the age of 8 has an immigrant parent. The Washington-based Urban Institute says nationwide one out of four students under the age of 8, roughly third-graders, has an immigrant parent.

"And Texas continues to have one of the nation's highest percentages of illegal immigrants in the labor force, at nearly 9 percent. Illegal immigrants account for 6.5 percent of the state's 24 million residents, or an estimated 1.6 million people in 2009. It's the third highest rate in the nation in a cluster led by California (with a 6.9 percent share).

"In Dallas, Vanna Slaughter, the longtime head of immigration services for Catholic Charities, said the report reflected what she saw in the population.

"The contraction doesn't surprise me," Slaughter said. "That it doesn't show up in Texas does."

"Slaughter said the State Department is seeing a similar trend in the legal flow of immigrants who petition to bring in relatives. Mexico leads in legal immigration, as well."

Report: Immigrants make you richer

Immigration Chronicles Houston Chronicle

The Wall Street Journal has a post on a new report by the San Francisco Fed that finds that immigrants help increase the wealth of most Americans.

This is an excerpt from the WSJ article:

The report, published Monday, was written by Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis. He is currently a visiting scholar at the bank. The report counters those who believe immigrants to the U.S. take away the jobs of citizens and depress wages.

"There is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run," Peri writes. Instead, the evidence suggests "the economy absorbs immigrants by expanding job opportunities rather than by displacing workers born in the United States." 

Help Wanted: Border Patrol Agents to Fight Terror, Drugs and Undocumented Aliens

Texas Business reports  

"It’s a case of where people seeking jobs and a better life create jobs and perhaps a better life—just not for themselves.

"If protecting the American borders from terrorists or people just seeking a better life sounds like a job for you, you're in luck.

"The job is not only open, it's part of an active recruitment program by the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) that is accepting applicants for U.S. Border Patrol Agents for the Southwest Border, specifically South Texas, West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

"In a prepared statement, the CPB said the ideal Border Patrol candidate would be someone "interested in preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States." Additionally, of course, agents look for and apprehend drug smugglers and "undocumented aliens... in violation of the immigration laws.""

 

MUDBLOODS (ILLEGAL ALIENS) and the Dangers They Pose to a Peaceful Society

“The Ministry of Magic is undertaking a survey of

so-called “Muggle-borns,”  the better to understand

how they came to possess magical secrets. …

The Ministry is determined to root out such usurpers

of magical power…”[1]

  

The rhetoric in the anti-immigration debate reminds me of the campaign by “Pure-blood” wizards to criminalize and vilify “Muggle-born” wizards--also called the derogatory term “Mudbloods”-- in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

 

It begins as an ugly undercurrent of suspicion and prejudice against wizards whose parents were Muggles (or non-magical folk), and gradually gains mainstream acceptance, becoming official governmental policy. Studies are issued that assert that magic can only be passed on when wizards reproduce and conclude that Muggle-borns can only acquire magical skills by theft. Muggle-born wizards are forced to present themselves for questioning before a commission whose purpose is to interrogate, terrorize and imprison “these thieves of knowledge and magic.” Muggle-born wizards who are not in prison are forced into hiding or falsifying papers to prove “blood status.” Bounties are paid to “snatchers” who turn them in to the government. They are denied an education and the right to work. Those who support Muggle-born rights are called “blood traitors” and considered “as bad as the Mudbloods.”

 

This parallels the attitude of intolerance and prejudice voiced by many in the immigration debate. People who come to the U.S. to find work and a better life for their children are called “illegal aliens.”

 

Politicians and commentators make claims about the criminal activities of aliens that are not supported by the facts, calling them “drug mules," extortionists, and terrorists, or burglars and “thieves of our jobs.”

 

Letters to the Editor in the Waco Tribune Herald in response to an article about Grecia Cantu, compared this Valedictorian of University High School in Waco, Texas, to a drunk driver who kills someone or a car thief. One writer said that Grecia should “return her valedictorian honor to her school and let it go to the person most deserving of this: the student who has achieved the grades and whose parents are U.S. citizens. That person worked hard and didn’t come from a family who cheats our government by allowing taxpayers to pay their way.”

 

Calls for changes to the 14^th Amendment that would strip children born in the U.S. of their citizenship if their parents are not U.S. citizens is further evidence of the ugly and offensive undercurrents to the debate that is ongoing. Proponents of the change advocate amending the Constitution of the United States in order to create an underclass of stateless children. Also heating up is a debate about whether undocumented children should be educated in public schools (even though the U.S. Supreme Court answered that question definitively in the 1982 case, Pyler v. Doe).

 

The Obama Administration has increased deportations and removals of aliens. Although the administration says that it is targeting aliens with serious criminal convictions, 79 percent of the people deported due to the Secure Communities program are non-criminals or were picked up for lower level offenses, such as traffic offenses or petty juvenile mischief, and 28 percent of the people transferred to ICE custody have been non-criminals.

 

All but three states have stopped issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. This forces the undocumented to drive without a license and often without auto liability insurance. .Arrests for driving without a license have increased, and combined with the Secure Communities program of I.C.E. has increased the number of removals of noncriminal aliens.

 

States and municipalities have enacted anti-immigrant laws—Farmer’s Branch, Texas, has spent millions of dollars defending its ordinance that bans renting to the undocumented, Arizona (with many states planning to follow) has enacted a law that criminalizes undocumented immigrants and requires law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of any person they suspect of being "illegal."

 

Hate crimes against Hispanics have increased. “Once limited to hard-core white supremacists and a handful of border-state extremists, vicious public denunciations of undocumented brown-skinned immigrants are increasingly common among supposedly mainstream anti-immigration activists, radio hosts and politicians. While their dehumanizing rhetoric typically stops short of openly sanctioning bloodshed, much of it implicitly encourages or even endorses violence by characterizing immigrants from Mexico and Central America as "invaders," "criminal aliens" and "cockroaches."”

 

The Harry Potter series ends in the defeat of those who have discriminated against and oppressed Muggle-born wizards. The cost is great.

 

We must examine the immigration crisis without vilifying those who come to the U.S. to work and seek better lives. We need to fix our broken immigration laws by dealing with the realities and not with sound-bites that are motivated by the politics of fear.

 

 

"Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open." Albus Dumbledore[2]

---

[1] J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007), p. 209.

[2] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Scholastic Books, 2000), p. 723.

Jobs Available, Unemployment Remains High

Immigration Policy Center  - Immigration Impact blog

Despite a stagnant economy and unemployment rate, Mark Whitehouse at the Wall Street Journal reports that some companies are still struggling to hire workers. As Whitehouse explains:

Since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009, the number of job openings has risen more than twice as fast as actual hires, a gap that didn’t appear until much later in the last recovery. The disparity is most notable in manufacturing, which has had among the biggest increases in openings. But it is also appearing in other areas, such as business services, education and health care.

FALSE: U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, "We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers."

PolitiFact -  Austin American Statesman Truth-O-Meter says:

"In December 2008, the Perryman Group, a Waco-based economic research firm, prepared an analysis of the economic impact of undocumented workers on business activity for Americans for Immigration Reform, a Houston group founded by "Americans concerned with the destructive measures being taken and considered regarding immigration and its impact on the business community, employees and consumers."

"Upshot: Eliminating the undocumented workforce would result in an immediate loss of 8.1 million jobs, according to the report, and a total eventual loss of 2.8 million jobs after the market has had time to adjust.

"If all undocumented workers were removed from the workforce, a number of industries would face substantial shortages of workers, and Americans would have to be induced into the labor pool or provided incentives to take jobs far below their current education and skill levels," according to the report. "For this phenomenon to occur to a meaningful extent, substantial wage escalation would be necessary."

"Ray Perryman, the economist behind the Perryman Group, told us that skill level is a key factor. "A lot of the unemployed people right now are highly skilled professionals, and would have no experience with these primarly manual labor-type jobs that the undocumented workers perform," he said. Plus, he said, the demand for jobs that undocumented workers often hold, like construction and hospitality gigs, is low thanks to the recession.

"Smith offered no studies backing up his statement, while we found two studies that found that employment would actually decline if undocumented workers were suddenly deported. Meantime, for various reasons experts across the spectrum said it's not believable that unemployment would halve should illegal workers vanish.

"Smith's simple logic is too simplistic. We rate his statement as False."