The Big Question
How can we Fix the US Immigration System
The United States has long been a nation shaped by immigrants—with newcomers coming legally and illegally in response to political and religious persecution, famine, and other situations at home or in search of economic opportunities. Each wave of immigration has contributed to the country’s melting pot— a rich tapestry of cultures, ideas, and innovations. But immigrants have not always been welcome. Since the country’s beginning, attitudes and laws around immigration have wavered, with each wave of immigrants looking down upon later arrivals; and since the late-nineteenth century, laws to immigration have vacillated between welcoming and restrictive,
Immigration remains a disputed topic. In recent years, the U.S.-Mexico border has experienced a higher level of migrants crossing the border seeking asylum legally and illegally, and more and more Americans, whose ancestors were immigrants themselves, are arguing that immigrants who seek to live and work in our country pose a threat. The immigration system today is widely recognized as broken, plagued by inefficiencies, outdated policies, and mounting challenges that affect millions of lives. Why does the system no longer work? How do we reform the system? We asked three faculty members from different academic disciplines to answer a big question: “How can we fix immigration in the United States?”
Nazli Kibria, professor of Sociology, teaches migration, race, family, and childhood. She focuses her research on South Asia and the Asian American experience.
Elizabeth Cohen is the Maxwell Professor of United States Citizenship in the Political Science department. She has published four books delving into the complexity of America’s immigration laws and citizenship.
Tarek Hassan, professor in economics, centralizes his research on international finance, macro-finance, and social factors in economic growth. His recent publications study the impact of uncertainty on firm behavior and the allocation of capital across countries.
Nazli Kibria
Professor and Interim Chair of Sociology
“We can start by talking and thinking about immigration as a resource rather than a problem to be fixed. To be sure, the regulatory system of immigration in the United States is in disrepair and in urgent need of reform. However, the problem-centered rhetoric dominating today’s public discourse on immigration is misleading, in fact dangerous in its consequences.
As someone who has been conducting research and teaching about the topic for many years, I am perplexed by the overwhelming discourse of danger and loss that surrounds immigration in the United States. Based in part on the idea of a fixed and finite economic pie, this framing, of immigrants costing and taking away from U.S. citizens ignores the role of immigrants in sustaining and enlarging the pie. Immigrants create jobs, bring innovation and fuel economic growth. They also perform essential jobs, in nursing, elder care, agriculture and meatpacking, to name just a few. The U.S. population is aging and without immigrants, it is difficult to know how we will fulfill our essential labor needs in the future.
What is sorely needed today is a comprehensive, multi-pronged policy approach that is premised on the idea of immigration as a resource, a net gain. In Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, “fixing immigration” is all about a single dimension of the regulatory system – building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. In reality, shoring up the border will do little to stem the flow of those trying to cross into the United States, certainly not without parallel reforms.
The current crisis at the U.S. border, of a system overwhelmed by asylum seekers, is due in part to limited alternative and legal pathways to entry into the United States. We need visa reforms to facilitate and expand paths of entry for immigrant workers of different skill levels. We need to reduce waiting times for those seeking to join family members in United States. We need pathways to citizenship for immigrants who have shown themselves to be established and valued members of U.S. society.
Once we recognize that immigration is a value-added proposition, we can start to make effective changes. Instead of the punitive, loss-centered perspective dominating the national stage at present, we can create policies anchored in the fact that the U.S. needs immigrants.”
Tarek Hassan
Professor of Economics
“Listening to the public debate on immigration, it might be hard to believe that immigrants bring economic benefits; however, recent studies by our research team find this is undoubtably the case.
Migrants contribute to the American economy in many ways. Firstly, immigrants tend to create their own jobs – they are not just workers, but consumers too. They purchase goods and services in the local economy, boosting demand and increasing sales, so that, for every new person arriving, on average one additional job is created. In addition, we find that immigrants also inject dynamism into the local economy by increasing innovation and attracting investment from their ancestral country. Through these channels, immigrants significantly increase the wages and living standards of the people who are already there – immigrants cause increases in native wages.
This is part of why US counties which can attract more immigrants are richer and able to grow economically faster than areas which cannot. America’s distinct ability to attract immigration from many countries around the world also means our communities benefit from a diverse set of migrant inflows, with each group establishing connections and bringing trade and investment in.1
In sum, immigrants increase native wages and local economic growth.
Despite these economic benefits, there are nevertheless legitimate concerns over immigration. For example, there are differences in these effects across education groups: immigrants with higher education bring the most benefits, and similarly, Americans with higher education tend to benefit the most from immigration2. Additionally, it is important to acknowledge that the share of our population born abroad is at an all-time high. We have had a lot of immigration over the last few decades, and there might be social, cultural, or political limits to the US’ ability to integrate newcomers.
To improve legal immigration, it makes sense to have a debate about the balance between high- and low-skilled immigrants. The largest flow, family-based migration, is regulated by Congress, and often makes up the bulk of those who immigrate with relatively less education. Because Congress has not adjusted the rules for family-based migration since 1990, the pressure to reduce immigration has fallen to the President instead, who controls the two other key kinds of legal migration: skills-based and refugees.
Does it make sense to privilege family-based immigration over these two groups – those most in need of shelter and those who bring the most benefits to the US economy?
Changing the balance between these groups requires hard decisions. For example, while restricting family-based migration would limit the ability of some to bring their relatives to the country, it might allow us to increase the flow of high-skilled migrants, bringing greater overall economic benefits. While we am not endorsing any position here, we believe this is a worthwhile discussion to have.
Illegal immigration is still beneficial to the economy, just like legal immigration. However, illegal immigration is clearly a problem for legal and humanitarian reasons. To regulate illegal immigration, it’s important to distinguish between two groups: those migrants who are considering coming to America illegally, and those who are already here.
Contrary to popular opinion, there are very effective policies that could drastically reduce the incentive for people to attempt illegal immigration – and they have little to do with border walls, mass deportations, or even punishing migrants: instead, many other countries have a lot of success with policies that simply punish employers who hire undocumented workers. If there are no jobs for undocumented immigrants, then the incentive to migrate for economic reasons falls away. In other words, the government could drastically reduce illegal immigration if it were willing to punish employers.
The problem with this policy is that second group: the existing undocumented population, who for one reason or another have built a life in the US without the proper paperwork. As long as this population is denied legal status, any effective policies reducing the incentive to immigrate would also deprive millions of hard-working undocumented residents of their livelihoods.
Creating a pathway to legal employment for this existing undocumented population is therefore a precondition for effective policies that can discourage illegal immigration: without legal status for dreamers and other long-time undocumented residents, it is hard to see effective policies reducing illegal immigration being implemented.
America is fortunate to attract immigration from around the globe, bringing economic growth and dynamism to our country. The prospect of new flows of migrants fleeing war and climate change means we need to think carefully about how to improve our approach, so that we can continue to bring new arrivals into society in a way that maximizes their contribution and is sustainable in the long term.”
Elizabeth Cohen
Maxwell Professor of United States Citizenship
“A moral panic about migration and the border has emerged in the United States. Moral panics are widely held feelings of fear that someone or something poses a threat to the norms, values, and well-being of a society. Moral panic feels organic to those experiencing it but is actually the product of media framing and influential figures’ intentional campaigns to create that panic. In the United States, moral panics about foreigners entering the country have happened before, prompted by but the current moral panic about immigration originates in an intentional campaign by a small group of white nationalists and white power activists who were explicitly focused on achieving this outcome as far back as the 1970s. The outcome is that we now have a far-right party intent on mass deportation and a center-left party whose immigration legislation and executive actions strongly resemble those of that far-right party. And in the minds of many Americans, there is no alternative to a violent border policed by a combination of Orwellian surveillance technologies and military grade weapons that, increasingly, are deployed to control citizens as well as the border.
Past moral panics about immigration, well before these technologies and weapons were invented, have cost our society dearly. They led to mass violence affecting citizens and non-citizens alike, the deportation of US citizens, and border closures that worked against many of the exact interests those actions were intended to protect. Elsewhere, they have also been associated with persistent support for extremist far right parties with authoritarian aspirations. It remains to be seen how this will play out in the US and much hinges on insisting that at least one political party resist the forces behind that panic. But neither party has done so for at least 40 years.
Border enforcement typically has very little impact on how many foreign-born persons enter the country. Its impact is largely on the ways that people seeking to enter go about doing so. Walls, surveillance, and weapons force people into more dangerous routes and support the use of trafficking organizations. Immigration slows when sending countries experience political and economic stability. This is what we saw happen around 2007, when net migration from Mexico to the US plateaued and then went into negative numbers, as Mexican-born residents of the US started leaving.
If the next Congress is serious about ending the grip that moral panic has on so many Americans it needs to work to direct the energy and resources that have already been proven useless to affect migration into the US toward the circumstances compelling people to leave their homes to travel to the US. Our next Congress should also take up the charge that President Johnson gave Congress in 1965: to open sufficient legal pathways for immigration and recognize the billions of dollars that immigrants add to the US economy and its state economies each year.”