CNN: "1 in 10 eligible voters in 2020 are immigrants. That's a record high"

As voters go to the polls today to vote in the “Super Tuesday” democratic presidential primary, many of those voters could be immigrants. More than 23 million US immigrants will be eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election, a record high, according to a Pew Research Center report based on Census Bureau data. The report, released last Wednesday, notes that the size of the immigrant electorate has nearly doubled since 2000 with immigrants making up roughly 10% of the nation’s overall electorate. The report notes that most immigrant eligible voters are either Hispanic or Asian with immigrants from Mexico making up the single largest group with sixteen percent of foreign-born voters.

The increase in immigrant voting population coincides at a time when immigration policy issues are a key consideration for many voters. "Many of the administration's proposed policy changes, such as expanding the U.S.-Mexico border wall and limiting legal immigration, have generated strong, polarized reactions from the public," the Pew Research Center says. "These proposals may also affect how immigrants see their place in America and the potential role they could play in the 2020 presidential election.”

NY TIMES: “Immigrants Aren’t Taking Americans’ Jobs, New Study Finds”

A new study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—private, nonprofit institutions that “provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and the world”—has found that immigrants’ long-term impact on overall wages and employment of native-born US workers is very minimal and that immigration has an overall positive impact. The non-partisan report includes research from fourteen leading economists, demographers, and other scholars, including those, such as Marta Tienda of Princeton, who believe immigration has positive effects and others who are skeptical of its benefits, including George J. Borjas, a Harvard economist.  

The report found that when measured over a period of ten years or more, the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small, and any negative impact is most likely to be for native-born workers who have not completed high school—i.e., those who share job qualifications similar to that of many low-skilled immigrant workers. Specifically, the research finds that while immigration does not affect employment levels for native-born workers who haven’t finished high school it may reduce the number of hours worked for these same workers. Francine D. Blau, Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and professor of economics at Cornell University and chair of the panel that conducted the study and wrote the report, comments that there are many reasons why those who haven’t completed high school struggle to find work and there is no “indication immigration is the major factor.”

For the effect of high-skilled immigrants on native wages and employment, the report notes that several studies have found a “positive impact of skilled immigration on the wages and employment of both college- and non-college-educated natives.” These findings are consistent with the view that “skilled immigrants are often complementary to native-born workers; that spillovers of wage-enhancing knowledge and skills occur as a result of interactions among workers; and that skilled immigrants innovate sufficiently to raise overall productivity.”

While the report found that immigrants had minimal impact on the wages of native-born workers, in terms of fiscal impact, first-generation immigrants at the state and local levels are more costly to governments than the native-born, in large part due to educational costs, and that when compared with the native-born, first-generation immigrants contributed less in taxes during working ages because they were, on average, less educated and earned less. The children of immigrants, however, as adults are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the US population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population.”

Immigration and the role of immigrants in the US has been a hotly debated topic this election season. Some American workers, still recovering from the recession, have blamed immigrants for lack of quality jobs. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has called for a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, saying they “compete directly against vulnerable American workers” while also proposing new controls on legal immigration to “boost wages and ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.”

Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies and one of the outsider reviewers for the report (and generally a critic of favorable US immigration policies) notes: “Immigration is primarily a redistributive policy, transferring income from workers to owners of capital and from taxpayers to low-income immigrant families. The information in the new report will help Americans think about these tradeoffs in a constructive way.”  

Dr. Blau says: “The panel's comprehensive examination revealed many important benefits of immigration—including on economic growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship—with little to no negative effects on the overall wages or employment of native-born workers in the long term.”

LA Times: "The loaded term 'anchor baby' conceals complex issues"

Donald Trump began his presidential campaign calling Mexicans "rapists" and drug dealers and now he and other presidential contenders have moved onto decrying so-called "anchor babies"—a term that has been denounced by many as offensive—and have advocated for changing the fourteenth amendment to repeal "birthright citizenship."

The Reason for Undocumented Immigration

In his policy paper, Trump claims that birthright citizenship "remains the biggest magnet for illegal immigration." While the paper does not provide further explanation, as the Los Angeles Times noted, the "impulses driving immigrants to have children in the United States vary widely, as do the economic circumstances of those who drop 'anchors.'"  

While there are some instances of “birth tourism”—when legal but usually temporary immigrants travel to the US to give birth in order to provide the child US citizenship—Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at UC Irvine, said that “the notion that parents have children in the U.S. to protect themselves from deportation is a departure from reality,” and observed that US-citizen children must be twenty-one-years-old to begin the process of sponsoring a parent who is in the country without legal status. He said in the Los Angeles Times: "It would take an amazingly tactical or Machiavellian parent to somehow think that the child's status protects the parents...They are not thinking 25 years in the future."

Zenen Jaimes, a policy analyst with United We Dream, which advocates for the rights of young immigrants, was born in Chicago to undocumented Mexican parents who came to the US because of the economic crisis in Mexico. He said in the Los Angeles Times that his parents did not intend to have children to protect themselves from deportation. “Once they got here they just went through the normal process of starting a family," he said. While his mother obtained legal residency after his older brother sponsored her, his father was deported. "That's the case for thousands of kids who grew up like me[.]”

What Would Happen if US Changed Birthright Citizenship?

The results could be very problematic, argues the Huffington Post, since changing the fourteenth amendment would create second-class and a large number of stateless individuals with limited rights. Citing examples from Germany, where it has historically struggled to integrate their Turkish population due in part to their citizenship policies, the Dominican Republic, which retroactively stripped Haitian-Dominicans of citizenship despite international condemnation, and Japan, which had previously denied citizenship to Koreans living in Japan, changing the fourteenth amendment would have a vast impact on not only immigrants but US citizens as well. 

The US would need a whole new government bureaucracy, argues Margaret D. Stock, a 2013 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and attorney with the Cascadia Cross-Border Law Group:

America has no national birth registry, no squads of skilled government lawyers who can determine whether a person’s parents hold a particular immigration status at the moment of a baby’s birth. We’d need a whole new government bureaucracy to make birth adjudications. Americans would have to pay for this new bureaucracy, which would be tasked to decide the citizenship of some 4 million babies born in America each year.

David Baluarte, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and the director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, said in Mother Jones that ending birthright citizenship would be “a disaster.” Creating a class of stateless migrants, he says, “would be a humanitarian crisis within the United States."