The Economic Impact of Immigration

In a recent study by the Immigration Policy Center, the research arm of the American Immigration Law Foundation many of the myths surrounding the immigration debate have been discovered to be skewed, biased, overstated or simply unfounded. In their November 2007 report, “The Economic Impact of Immigration” they find that:

Most studies claiming to calculate the net “costs” of immigration to the U.S. economy suffer from one or more fatal flaws:
• They rely upon single-year “snapshots” of the immigrant population that fail to account for the fact that the income levels and tax contributions of immigrants increase over time and from generation to generation;
• They count the education and care of the U.S.-born children of immigrants as “costs” incurred by immigrant households, but classify these same children as “natives” when they are working, tax-paying adults;
• They do not consider economic contributions such as consumer purchasing power and the formation of businesses, both of which create jobs and provide federal, state, and local governments with additional revenue through sales, income, business, and property taxes.

Here is a brief overview of the findings of their study:

• Immigrants use relatively few federal or state public-benefit programs
• Immigrants account for very little of the increase in poverty in the United States
• Immigrants do not strain the U.S. healthcare system
• Immigrants are a net fiscal benefit to the U.S. economy
• Immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in public benefits
• Undocumented immigrants are taxpayers too
• Immigrants—legal and undocumented alike, contribute to the Social Security system
• Immigrants climb the socio-economic ladder
• Immigrants are essential to the growth of the U.S. labor force
• Immigrants create jobs
• Immigrants are a driving force in the housing market
• Immigrants do not undermine the wages of most native-born workers

I’ve posted a link to the document (in .pdf) in the Immigration Knowledge Garden on this site, or you can also get it by clicking here.