Immigrants in U.S. communities

[00:00:23]

RICK WEISS: Hello, everyone, and welcome to SciLine’s media briefing on immigrants in U.S. communities. I’m SciLine’s director Rick Weiss, and for those of you not familiar with SciLine, we are a philanthropically funded, editorially independent, entirely free service for reporters. We’re based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science. Our mission is straightforward. It’s to make it as easy as possible for you as reporters to include scientist sources and scientifically validated information in your news stories, whether those stories are about a topic that has something directly to do with science, or your story is about something going on in your community where some scientific evidence relevant to that would help strengthen your story.

Today’s briefing is part of a special series of briefings. It’s the third of six that we’re hosting this month, all on topics that are in the news because they are issues at the top of the political agenda in the lead-up to November’s elections. We’re doing this because many of the topics that candidates are disagreeing about during this campaign season, topics like access to abortion, the trustworthiness of the electoral system itself, and, yes, the impact of immigrants on the economy, are often covered as though they were simply matters of political opinion, when in fact these topics have been rigorously studied by scientists across multiple disciplines. And our hope is that when you do produce stories about what candidates are saying about these issues, or what members of your news-consuming public feel about these issues, that you’ll also include in those stories what carefully conducted research has found to be true on these topics. Please check out the link that will pop up in the chat here to see the full schedule of this month’s election-related briefings. A couple of quick logistical details before we get started. We’ve got two panelists today who are going to make short presentations of up to 10 minutes each before we open things up for Q&A. To enter a question, just go down to the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and hover over that. Put in your question along with your name and news outlet, and let us know if you want to direct that question to one speaker or the other. A full video of this briefing is going to be available on our website pretty immediately at the end of this briefing, and a time-stamped transcript will go up within a couple of days after that.

And finally I’m not going to take the time to do full-blown bios for our two speakers today. Those are on our website under the Panelists tab. But I do want to let you know that we will hear first from Dr. Nancy Foner, who is a professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and who’s going to provide a snapshot of current U.S. immigrant demographics so you know what the situation really is, including where immigrants have been coming from and where they’re settling. And how those factors have changed over the last several decades, along with some implications of those changes. And then second, we’re going to hear from Dr. Pia Orrenius, a labor economist serving as vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank at Dallas, who will focus specifically on immigrant impacts on the U.S. labor force and economy. And who can address a lot of the back and forth we’ve been hearing in political discourse about immigrants and jobs. So let’s get started. And over to you, Dr. Foner.

[00:03:50]

NANCY FONER: Thank you very much. You can see the—let me just start with this snap—we’ll start off with a snapshot and some trends. And if we look at contemporary immigration to the U.S., I think the most extraordinary astonishing thing really is—are the numbers. They are truly astonishing. After five decades of extraordinarily high immigration, 46 million immigrants now live in the U.S.. That’s the highest number since Census records have been kept. And I should say this includes 11 million undocumented immigrants. They’re really 1 out of 4 immigrants in the nation. And you add on to the 46 million, their children, it’s 90 million. And to give some perspective, this is actually more than the population of Germany. If we look at percentages, not number, absolute numbers, about 14% of U.S. residents are foreign-born. And that’s a huge jump from 1970 when the 10 million immigrants were a little under 5% of the population.

So we hear another—not just the numbers, well, the numbers are astonishing, but it’s not just the numbers. It’s also where the immigrants are coming from that is new. And this has led to very dramatic transformations in the racial order in the U.S. In 1960, and I say 1960 because this is five years before the federal legislation, the 1965 immigration act, really opened the door to massive immigration in the U.S. Again, by abolishing the national origins quotas that had been in place since the 1920s. So in 1960, 75% of immigrants in the U.S. were from Europe. Today it’s 10%. Now, many of those who came from Europe, by the way, had come earlier in the 20th century. But you can see the huge change in where immigrants are coming from. And this has had a very dramatic effect. It is one of the—one of the impact—one impact has been on race and ethnicity of the U.S. population.

So if you look here again, comparing 1960 to 2021, non-Hispanic whites, which, by the way is a new post ’65 category in the census. Non-Hispanic whites were 85% of the population in 1960. They are now just under 60%. Hispanics, 3.5%n of the population of the US in 1960. In 2021, 19% due to immigration, also to births. Asian immigrants—not Asian immigrants, Asians, sorry, take that back, Asians, 1960, less than 1% of the population. Tiny. 2021, Asians are now 6.1% of the population, and most of the Asians are foreign-born. Blacks in the United States in 1960 were 11% of the population, now around just a little under 14%. And what’s interesting about the Black population and immigration is that the growing number of Black immigrants in the U.S. Blacks in the United States, 12% now, are foreign-born. And if you add on the children, it’s about a fifth. So that’s another big change. Next slide. Next. Next.

Hello. Okay, here we are. Good. Other demographics. Now I can go on. This is just a few of the demographics that stand out. In education, never before has such a large proportion of immigrants in the US been so highly skilled and educated. Again, some figures. In 2022, 35% of immigrants over 25 had a bachelor’s degree or more, and that was almost exactly the same as US-born adults. For them, it was 36%. What’s—in addition, what’s actually quite astonishing, again, is some of the groups. Look at among Indian immigrants, and they are one of the three largest immigrant groups in the United States in terms of national origin. 80% of adult Indian immigrants have a BA degree or higher. Among Nigerians, another 65% have a BA or higher. Chinese and Koreans are above 50%. So this is really something different and something I think many people are actually not aware of this. Settlement. Immigrants today are living everywhere. They’re not just in traditional gateways like New York or Chicago. That was true, you know, in the last great wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century. And just to give some—they’re in rural areas, they’re in urban areas, they’re in suburbs. There are more immigrants living in suburbs than in central cities. And just to give you an idea of some of the changes, I just wanted to point out what we could call three new immigrant meccas. One is Dallas-Fort Worth, which went from 34,000 immigrants in 1970 to 1.4 million in 2014. Phoenix, in the same years, is from 87,000 to 650,000. And the Las Vegas area, 35,000 to 460,000 immigrants are living now in the far west. They’re living in the south, which never had large immigrant populations. They’re all over the Midwest. They’re in cities, as I said, suburbs and rural areas, all throughout the country. Next.

Immigrants are also integrating into America, something very important, because this is a big issue in the U.S., and it’s important. Over time, immigrants and their children are becoming more like the native-born. This is very clear from the National Academy of Sciences report on immigrants and the integration—and their integration to America. I have the link down below. I actually was on that panel and what it did, the panelists, we sifted through massive numbers of studies to look at the data that were available. And what’s clear is that in educational attainment, in income, and occupational distribution, living above the poverty line, residential integration, and English language ability, immigrants and their children are becoming more like the native-born over time.

I also just wanted to mention two myths, and there are many myths about immigration, but these I thought are the ones that perhaps stand out the most. One is that immigrants are not learning English the way earlier Europeans did, and that is false. Immigrants who arrive without English, and of course many today do come with English already, which is unlike the past. But those who come without English are acquiring English as rapidly, and actually, some studies show even faster, than European immigrants did in the early 20th century. And by the third generation, that’s the grandchildren of immigrants. That the third generation is, to a large extent, monolingual in English, leading some social sciences to actually say that the U.S. is the graveyard of languages. Maybe I wouldn’t go quite that far. But that’s, I mean, if English—we should not worry that immigrants and their children and grandchildren are not learning English. Another myth is that immigrants commit more crimes than the native-born. And that, again, is false. The foreign-born, in fact, are much less likely than the native-born to commit violent crimes. And in fact, cities and neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants have much lower crime and violence than comparable non-immigrant neighborhoods. Again, leading a well-known sociologist to say, If you want to be safe, move to an immigrant neighborhood. Next.

And then there are some immigrant contributions. Now I could go on forever on this, but let me just mention a few. One is that immigrants have fueled population growth in cities, suburbs, towns, and revived deteriorating urban neighborhoods. Even in rural areas, they have staunched in many cases population loss, and even in some places led the population to grow. Many cases of deteriorating urban neighborhoods that have been quite saved by immigrants moving in. One in my own city of New York, Brighton Beach, which was really very much in decline, immigrants from the former Soviet Union have been a major factor in reviving the neighborhood. Little Village in Chicago, again, an area where the ethnic whites moved out to the suburbs in the Sunbelt, and Mexican immigrants have let this become a thriving commercial center.

There are many ways that immigrants have added to our culture, new foods, tastes, dishes. I like to say that there are more Chinese restaurants in New York than in the U.S. There are more Chinese restaurants—let me rephrase that—in the U.S. that all the McDonald’s, Burger Kings and Kentucky Fried Chickens combined. They also—salsa sells more, has higher sales than ketchup. And immigrants have been injecting new energy and forms into popular culture, new parades and festivals, Cinco de Mayo. And now here in New York, the West Indian American Day Parade on Eastern Parkway every Labor Day, it attracts 1 to 2 million people. And popular music, hip-hop is often thought to be an African-American creation, but in fact it really was a Caribbean creation. And to mention, musical theater has been revitalized or add more vitality to musical theater. I’m thinking here of “Hamilton” with a combination of rap and storytelling. And let me just end with a phrase from “Hamilton” that Hamilton himself sings or raps at one point in the musical. He says, “Immigrants, we get the job done.” And I think this is a nice segue into hearing now about jobs and the economy.

[00:14:19]

RICK WEISS: That was a beautiful segue and a really great introduction with a lot of useful information. I’m reminding reporters that all these slides will be up immediately after the briefing so you can take a closer look at those data. Thank you, and over to you, Pia Orrenius.

[00:14:35]

PIA ORRENIUS: Great, thank you so much. I’m going to share my screen. That was a wonderful introduction. Can you see my screen?

[00:14:43]

RICK WEISS: Yes.

[00:14:44]

PIA ORRENIUS: Awesome. All right, so I probably have a few more slides than we can cover but at least you guys will have access to them so you can look through them, even the ones we may not get to. So the economics of immigration. Let me make sure—okay, so let’s just start with an overview. So in terms of recent trends, we’ve, you know, and Nancy covered it so well. But just looking, especially the last couple of years, we’ve had a record volume of migration since 2022. Official data has been slow to catch up to the surging inflows along the southwest border. This latest migration surge, which I assume is relevant to all of you given your profession, but just like earlier migration though, the effects of the economy are pretty straightforward. Migration boosts economic growth because it’s population growth and it’s labor force growth, and with little impact on inflation. There are effects on natives and prior immigrants. So, the net economic effect on natives is positive. But of course there are winners and losers. And wages may take some time to adjust to rapid influxes of immigrants. And we’ll get to some more details on that here in a minute. And we need to note that the fiscal impact of immigration, it can be negative at state and local level if immigrants have low wages and income. So that’s another consideration we should bear in mind. And lastly, I’ll just look briefly at sort of the demographic outlook and implications for policy.

So I think maybe I have one year more of data than Nancy because I just want to show the foreign-born population. I think it’s close—right now it’s closer to 49 million. That’s really the immigration surge that we’ve been experiencing here in the last couple of years. As a share of the foreign—as a share of the population, we’re actually about to surpass, depending on which data you use, about to surpass or we have surpassed the 1910 record. So that’s a news story for you guys if you want to go out and write something about immigration right away. You can write this really important news story I guess. Although it’s still—15% of the population is not huge. Lots of countries have much higher shares of immigrants, Sweden, Canada, lots of—so it’s not a huge outlier, it just happens to be a record share when you look back at the 20th century. Immigrants in the U.S. labor market, they make up about 19% of the workforce and they make up about half of US job growth since 2010. Even if you go back further, you’ll see a similar statistic. So what this means, even though they’re a smaller share of the workforce, they have a very important contribution to growth, okay? So that’s the difference between level and growth. As this share of growth that we can attribute to immigrants will increase as the U.S. labor force growth slows, which it will, which it already is, and that’s due to aging and low birth rates. It’s important to note that foreign-born, the immigrants, have higher labor force participation rates than natives, although they do have slightly lower income on average, and they have a similar unemployment rate to natives. Currently, sometimes, some years, they have lower unemployment rates than natives, in fact. Other benefits of immigration, they complement native workers at high and low ends of the skill distribution.

So in terms of education, Nancy was right to say we’ve had more high-skilled immigration now in recent decades than we’ve ever had before, but there’s still a really important contribution at the low ends of the education distribution. They also tend to fill jobs that natives typically shun, and that has a number of knock-on effects and benefits for native workers as well. They’re more innovative, we measure that through patenting, than the natives. And that’s also partly an artifact of the fact that we bring in so many high-skilled immigrants on STEM visas that we get a lot of STEM workers and they’re typically in research and development, and they also start businesses at a higher rate. So these are a number of the benefits that have been shown in the research over and over again. This is just to show you really a cool graphic of the contribution of immigrants by education level to the labor force.

So you can see at the bottom in terms of workers with less than a high school degree or just a high school degree and nothing more. You see those orange bars are the native-born declines in the labor force at the low skill end of the distribution and you see that immigrants have been contributing positively there in the mid skill. So for high school—jobs that require high school diploma or jobs that require some college or a college degree, those are real positive contributions of immigrants. If you look at it a little bit differently, if you look at just the stock of workers in the economy, here’s another way to look at just the disproportionate contribution of immigrants at the bottom of the skilled distribution and the very top of the skilled distribution.

So the foreign-born share of the labor force is very, very high for the low-skilled workers and also disproportionate at workers with Ph.D.s for example. If you look by occupation, again these high-skilled—I’m just looking at high-skilled here, not low-skilled—I have a similar chart for low-skilled, but you can just see in certain occupations the tremendous impact of immigration. Whether software developers, oh whoops, economists, physicians, and dentists. I mean, there’s just a lot of contributions here in healthcare and in science and technology, engineering. Where you see the least immigrants is where typically jobs that require—they’re either culture or linguistic sensitivities. Like lawyers and judges, it’s hard if your English is not your first language, it’s—there’s certain occupations that are more difficult to access than others.

The economic impact of immigration, just to be wonky here for a minute, so the labor force grows with immigration, that means that the output in the economy rises. We call the output of the economy the gross domestic product, or GDP. Again, immigrants account for about half of labor force growth. In the theory in that in terms of the economic effects of immigration, because of the positive impact of immigration, we call it an immigration surplus. Some of that rise in GDP accrues to natives. But the important thing to remember is the immigration surplus is not shared equally and so, again, this is a more economic theory around immigration. So what happens, you have more workers, wages initially fall But the return to capital, the return to land, rises. So owners of capital and land benefit a little bit more when you first have an immigration—a rise in immigration. But then you have an adjustment in business investment and that’s really important because that will put the economy back to where it was before, and wages rise again. This again is the theory around immigration and the economic impact. One question that we ask in economics is we need the business investment to adjust to the labor—the increase in the labor supply and that’s what’s going to put us back—wages rise again, and so how long does that take? And so that’s kind of an argument or a debate in economics. But in tight labor markets like we’ve had here in the last three years with rampant labor shortages, these negative labor market effects of immigration are not going to be widespread or easily detected.

So we’ve had in the pandemic and the recovery from the pandemic, say, two vacant jobs for every unemployed workers. We’ve had record wage growth in immigrant-intensive occupations and industries. Under these conditions, you’re not going to be able to see for the most part any negative impact on the labor market of immigration when you’re looking at native workers that are competing with immigrants. The fiscal impact of immigration is another topic. We have a lot more information on that now than we used to. What is the fiscal impact? It’s what, you know, an individual or household contribute in taxes minus what they consume in publicly-provided goods and services. What we find is that high-skilled immigrants have very large positive fiscal impact, as do high-skilled, high-income natives. I think in the National Academy’s study, the sister study to the one that Nancy cited, they found that these high-skilled immigrants contribute something like $850,000 each to the net fiscal balance over their lifetime. So it’s almost a million dollars. So it’s a significant fiscal boon. But of course low-skilled immigrants, if they have low incomes and especially if they have large families, they’ll have a negative fiscal impact, and that’s also documented in the National Academy’s study that was conducted on this issue. Interestingly for that class of immigrants, that negative impact is concentrated at the state and local level. It mostly comes from education. So K-12 is expensive. It’s—depending on where you live, 10 to 15,000 per student per year. And so you can see how that can quickly add up. Now, of course what I remind people, when you’re writing about the fiscal impact, remember that the spending on education is an investment that’s going to pay back over time.

So if you look at the lifetime fiscal impact, those investments in education are going to pay back many times what’s invested in in education On policy, U.S. immigration policy is interesting. I would say right now we’re not sure what immigration policy is, but what it’s supposed to be is priority is family, not worker skills. And I actually have a book with my co-author about advocating for more employment-based immigration that would base more immigration on employment and skills rather than family. There are few alternative pathways for unauthorized immigration, which is the reason that we have systematic unauthorized immigration into the U.S. Another thing we should note, we’ve had a lot of humanitarian migration here in the last couple of years. Many of those will not qualify for asylum. And so that’s setting us up for a situation that has to be resolved here in the next 5 to 10 years. In general, our work-based visa quotas are very insufficient to accommodate immigration. They’ve been fixed for decades in many cases, and also temporary visas are completely inconsistent with the number of permanent visas that are available. So many, many immigrants have to actually return to their countries because they will not get a green card. And skilled workers typically face long queues if they want to stay permanently. And there’s country quotas that prevent permanent migration of particularly people from places like India and China. This is just a picture of the family-based immigration system, which is currently our system. So you can just see how much is family, much less is employment, and then of course we have the humanitarian categories.

Let me summarize. So there are net economic benefits to immigration, which means it’s in the country’s interest to have immigration, obviously. But some natives and prior immigrants may lose from immigration in the short run if they’re competing head-to-head with immigrant workers. It’s important because business investment and capital adjustment really is the magic that makes the economy adjust to higher labor supply. So that’s really the answer to integrating large amounts of immigrants, is to just whatever the government can do to facilitate that mechanism. Migrants are the biggest winners from immigration. So I think we can look at immigration policy and say we don’t need to confer many more additional benefits. And that really has to do with the argument about family-based immigration which benefits mostly immigrants. But we can get back to that if any of you are interested in that particular argument. Low-skilled immigration does have a negative fiscal impact. That can also be addressed with more high-skilled immigration which has a very large positive fiscal impact, and it also can be addressed by transferring funds from federal government to state and local governments because even low-skilled immigrants have a positive impact on average at the federal level. It’s just state and local where it’s negative for certain households, and that’s, again, mostly related to education. And that’s the reference page. So I’ll stop there.

[00:28:41]

RICK WEISS: Fantastic. First of all, thank you both for such excellent introductions. There’s so much good information there, so much of it either counter to what we often hear or read about this topic, and the rest of it just things not talked about enough or known enough. So a fantastic foundation. Thank you. I want to remind reporters if you have questions, please put them into the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and while you’re doing that, I like to take the prerogative here to ask the first question of the briefing, typically the same question for all our briefings. And that is to ask our speakers to address themselves to you, the media, as news consumers and as professionals who read the news on the topic that they study, what do you think, our speakers, what do you think about things you see in the news that seem to be working well, that reporters are doing well on this topic, or mention something where you think reporters are going off track or could do better in some way. And Nancy, I’ll start with you if you’ve got some feedback.

[00:29:45]

NANCY FONER: Okay, well, of course, reporters are doing a very good job on lots of things, right? So—and particularly I was going to say issues that are in the news. Well, yes, but I mean, the issue of asylum, I think reading—I don’t read all the papers, I just read some, right? But the problems that asylum seekers are having, the experiences that asylum seekers are having coming to the U.S., the problem. So I think they’ve done a very good job of that. But I wanted to say just issues maybe that what happens I guess is that the focus is on immediate crises, right, or things that come up. But I think in the long term, looking at more long-term issues in terms of an emphasis in the future, thinking about I would like to see more about why the U.S. needs immigrants, why more on the positive contributions of immigrants, not just obviously economic contributions but other contributions as well. And more emphasis on the fact that immigrants are integrating into the U.S. I think that’s maybe something that’s not stressed enough, particularly since there are so many myths about how about immigrants and so many fears that they’re not integrating into the U.S. So I think that that would be things that could be emphasized.

[00:31:05]

RICK WEISS: Great. Thank you. Pia, how about you?

[00:31:09]

PIA ORRENIUS: Yeah, so I guess in general, I think in terms of the news I read, I think the coverage is pretty good, but I think it also—there’s definitely—there’s a lot out there. I guess I would say if I was in the media, I would try to—I agree with everything that Nancy said. But I also think that as media people, and I try to do this too. I mean, try—don’t be dismissive of other views. So I guess we want to be honest. There’s no, there’s always two sides to every issue. And so I think when journalists cover those two sides, when they’re honest about the research, and validate views, I think to a certain extent, I think that it makes for a more powerful story. And I think at the end of the day, immigration is a net benefit for the nation. But I think it’s harder for us to make that argument if we go out there and claim that there’s nothing difficult about immigration. There’s nothing—there’s definitely issues out there that have to be addressed. So I think—I just—I always look for journalists to cover in an even-handed way, not take one side or the other. I think that is the biggest benefit to the consumers of media that y’all can make.

The other thing I would say is there’s a lot of—one thing that doesn’t get covered and I guess because it’s such a morass, immigration policy. There’s so many sad, tragic stories in immigration policy because we have such weird policy and there’s so many holes and gaps in it. But the tragedies of immigration—the victims of immigration policy, I guess I would write more—it’s rare that we see that but I wish policymakers would see with very easy fixes, we could really make thousands of lives better, and what’s one example? One thing I did on H-1B visas for the media, and then afterwards I got—all the email I got was from spouses of H-1Bs who were not allowed to work. So you have these high-skilled immigrants who come in, they give a visa typically to the man, and then the wife is also a high-skilled professional and she’s not able to work. And so that doesn’t serve anybody’s purpose. And so with these small fixes, policymakers could just make for a better economy, for better lives for immigrants, for better integration. It’s better for—little stories like that I think would also really shine light on—put some of the onus on policymakers to address some easy fixes. That doesn’t cost anything. That’s free, and you could really make thousands of people’s lives better.

[00:34:07]

RICK WEISS: Those are super interesting. I think it’s very interesting especially mentioning telling kind of both sides of the story on some of these economic issues. Because in science journalism, a lot of us have been talking about false equivalence. And the problem when science reporters or other reporters give equal time to, say, climate deniers when the science is so clear that climate is a problem, in economics it does seem like it’s a little bit less one-sided and it might be more important, what I hear you saying, Pia, to give credence and credibility to competing ideas. Because it’s not quite as slam dunk in some of these issues as it might be in other areas of science. So that’s fascinating. Okay, let’s get to some questions. I’ve got one here from Sarah Matusek from the Christian Science Monitor. Many unauthorized immigrants are ineligible to apply for work permits, at least initially. Since we’ve so far talked about foreign-born residents and workers overall, do we know how an immigrant’s legal status or their work authorization status impacts their economic contributions?

[00:35:14]

PIA ORRENIUS: Sure. So one stress point we’re seeing recently is that we’ve had—I mentioned these two years of record migration that we’ve had. And the interesting thing—and I think a good thing—is that given that people are being let in, humanitarian migrants at the border, they are being given work permits. And I think there’s a lot of benefits from that, conditional on them being here. We definitely need immigrants to work because the economic benefits flow directly from the participation of immigrants in the labor force. So that’s very important. And if they’re going to work, the fact that they have a work permit and can work, then they can be—more easily have jobs in sort of the formal sector. They’ll be contributing, they’ll be subject to tax deductions, they’ll be contributing to payroll taxes, which is very important, and they will be in the data. So Nancy and I want those immigrants in our data. So there’s a lot of benefits to the fact that immigrants have work permits. But yeah, there is definitely millions out there, unauthorized immigrants who don’t have the benefit of work permits. Some of them find their way around that. They’re using other social security numbers that belong to other people, or they’re making up social security numbers. So some of them are still on the payroll and they’re still contributing taxes. But of course they’re not going to see the benefits of that in terms of those social security contributions that they’re making, et cetera. And I know now they’re quite resentful because the illegal—the undocumented immigrants that have been here for decades some of them, they’re watching new people arrive and get work permits right away, and of course they’ve been here struggling for 10, 20 years, and they don’t have that. So it does, I don’t know, it’d be interesting to see a story, a news story, that interviewed those two groups and kind of—I’d be curious. I haven’t seen that.

[00:37:15]

NANCY FONER: Another point Pia mentioned, something like two-thirds of adult undocumented immigrants have been here more than 10 years. So this is a long-standing population. So then not being able to work affects what kind of jobs they can—having a work permit affects the kind of jobs they can get, and also the health and welfare of their families. And many of them have US citizen children who are going to stay and they are staying, they’re Americans. And so I think this is also important.

[00:37:47]

RICK WEISS: Interesting. Great, thank you. A question from David Lee from the Downtown Albuquerque News. Can you speak to remittances? Are they a form of foreign aid? Are they harmful to the U.S. economy?

[00:38:00]

PIA ORRENIUS: Do you want to go first, Nancy?

[00:38:05]

NANCY FONER: Well, I mean, they’re not—I mean, I think they’re a form of foreign aid. Yes, I guess you could look at it that way, that immigrants are sending back remittances that countries are very dependent on and families are very dependent on in the home country. Is it detracting? You know, it’s very interesting. When you look at this—one of the things I do is I look at and I compare immigration in the past and present. And early in the 20th century, there was great concern about remittances. It was a big issue. They didn’t have much undocumented immigrants. It was really—a lot of it was around remittances, that they were ruining America. They came here to work. They were going to go back. They were sending money back. Interestingly, I don’t think you hear that very much about the issue of remittances, that that’s a problem. I think there’s a more—that’s not—it hasn’t been a focus of anti-immigrant sentiment, that somehow immigrants are working here and sending money home. But it certainly is helping the people back in the home country. In fact, there’s a lot of debates on—in—a discussion in the literature on, in fact, whether it’s a net plus for the countries or not, and where is the money going. Is it just going to setting up another small shop in some little town, or is it really going to development and improving the economy of local economies back in the sending countries? I don’t know. I mean, Pia must have more data on this, right? The economic data on it?

[00:39:31]

PIA ORRENIUS: Well, yeah, I’ve seen people make this argument. I don’t buy it. I mean, the whole point —the whole point of in economics we look—what we really—what you would want in economics is for the world to be—for the rising standards of living in the world. And that—in order for that to happen, what we’ve been trying—what people who care about this have been trying to do forever is get more capital to poor countries. We need investment in poor countries. We need money for poor countries. We need—we need poor countries to become rich. And we know when there’s economic development abroad, that that’s going to increase the demand for U.S. goods that we export, for services that we export. I mean, this is like, Are you better off if your neighbor is poor or rich? Now, I mean, come on. We—obviously we want the—this is exactly the kind of mechanism that you want for economic development in the world. You want capital to flow to poor nations. So I’m—and you can go into more detail about that, and we certainly can. But the other thing I want to say is does anybody say like, Oh, for American savers, like in your 401k or your kids’ 529 or whatever, are you investing in international equities? Are you vacationing abroad when you go abroad this summer? Is that bad for the US economy? I mean, it’s the same argument. So, I’m not buying it.

[00:41:07]

RICK WEISS: Look in the mirror. Thank you very much. Interesting. Here’s a question from Annie Dance, a freelance reporter from North Carolina. This might be for you, Nancy. As you mentioned, crime is one of the myths you addressed related to crime. Can you elaborate how you know immigrants are not committing crime? It’s tough to report about when there’s a lot of rhetoric, even from officials. How can reporters access better data around that?

[00:41:33]

NANCY FONER: Well, I guess you have to look at the studies that have been done. I wouldn’t advise going out and looking at arrest records yourself. I mean, you have to go to the overall studies. There is quite a large literature on it. And I actually cite in my—you have the National Academy of Sciences report on the integration of immigrants in America. I would look at that actually, because that sifts through a lot of the studies that have been done on crime. And they look at arrest records, and, I mean, it’s very systematic that it has been done. So you could just look at that data. I don’t know, that’s what I would recommend doing because I don’t think you’re going to be able to do this yourself through your own studies.

[00:42:14]

PIA ORRENIUS: I agree with Nancy, that really the research is very well-established on this in the U.S., and we actually I have a paper I can send to whoever’s interested. It’s a short paper written for the—sort of the general reader, but that also goes through all the literature and shows that, yes, crime rates among immigrants in the U.S. are significantly lower than crime rates among U.S.-born individuals. That’s not always the case. We’re—in Europe, if you look, I think there’s countries in Europe where the crime rates of immigrants are actually higher than those of natives. So I think this is some of the special sauce about immigration in the U.S. I think it has to do with the fact that they have access to the labor market, they’re participating in the labor market, sometimes even without documents they’re participating in the labor markets. But hey, guess what? If you have a paycheck, you don’t have to commit a crime. So, I think it’s an important distinction with immigration in the U.S. and I think definitely from everything I’ve seen, it’s true.

[00:43:14]

NANCY FONER: Yeah, I think, well, the Europe connection. Of course, in Europe if you don’t work you get more government benefits. So I think that in the United States, immigrants have much more of a—they want to work because if they don’t work, they’re in trouble. They don’t have the kinds of government supports that they do. Interestingly, just to add one dynamic element to the discussion of crime. What the studies do show, though, is that the children of immigrants of the grandchildren of immigrants have higher crime rates, which leads to this other notion. And some people might be interested in doing this, is this becoming American is bad for you approach, right? That in many ways, for example, health deteriorates as people eat more lousy food in the United States and don’t exercise as much. There is some literature on that. And the same thing, many of these measures, as you go down the generations, becoming more American makes—it’s not always a benefit.

[00:44:07]

RICK WEISS: Interesting. It would be also interesting to see a study of whether there’s a disproportionate number of news stories about crime involving immigrants. That’s a separate topic. Here’s a question from Rachel Spacek from Investigate West. Does Dr. Pia Orrenius have any thoughts or data on employer exploitation of undocumented immigrants?

[00:44:33]

PIA ORRENIUS: So, I don’t. And it’s not something I’ve looked into very carefully. I usually rely on other people who are more familiar with the topic to sort of brief me on that. I know Phil Martin, who’s an ag economist at UC Davis, I think he’s retired, but he works extensively in the ag sector in particular, and he also consults on these legal cases against employers. And so he’s definitely seen some of that up front. So I think on—in particular undocumented workers and workers on temporary visas, there’s definitely examples of poor working conditions and exploitation.

[00:45:20]

NANCY FONER: Yeah, I think whenever you see in New York City, where I live, somebody falling off a building when they’re working on it, right, and having some terrible accident. It’s almost always an undocumented—it’s near almost always an undocumented immigrant. I think there is some literature on—in the various and certainly in construction and a lot of immigrants are in the construction field. I mean, it’s one of the major sectors. And they are often in the non-unionized sector and in the most dangerous jobs.

[00:45:51]

PIA ORRENIUS: One interesting strand of research that’s come out in recent years is that they’ve shown, and it’s true here and in Europe, that as immigrants have come into these jobs that Nancy was mentioning, and I mentioned in my presentation, that jobs that natives shun, that their immigration—I mean, their injury and illness rates and fatality rates have gone up, but then you can look at the natives, you know, in those occupations or in those industries, and their injury and illness rates have gone down. So, you’ve moved the injuries and the illnesses to the immigrants and away from the natives.

[00:46:30]

RICK WEISS: Is there an explanation for why that’s happening? Are they not getting protective equipment?

[00:46:36]

PIA ORRENIUS: Yeah, we talked about that a little bit in a paper we did a while ago, but yes, so definitely some of it is they’re not getting the equipment or the training that they need. In some cases they’re underage in bad conditions. But also we talking about, again, you want to be careful to tell both sides. So sometimes also culturally, they come from countries where they’re not used to taking protections and they’re not—and maybe they don’t as quickly adapt to those measures or they don’t advocate for those measures because they come from countries where they have been used to working in really unsafe conditions, so that could be part of it.

[00:47:18]

RICK WEISS: That’s fascinating. Question from Alisa Reznick from KJZZ Public Radio in Phoenix. Can you talk about how recent executive actions like the parole program for Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, or more recently the Parole in Place program for undocumented spouses, how that could impact the labor market? Is it too early to tell?

[00:47:45]

PIA ORRENIUS: They’re impacting the labor market because as we talked earlier about work permits, so there’s actually the humanitarian parole program is quite a few people, actually. I looked at that, I think it’s 30,000 people a month. And so that’s a lot of people in a year. And they’re given work permits and most everyone, I think they’re prime working age and they have a network here. So I think they’re probably working, although we don’t have data on that. So again, that’s another sort of economic benefit of this type of immigration, especially since they have work permits, they can work legally, and they can be contributing fiscally and so forth. And the parole in place, I think, for the spouses, the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, I think it’ll be interesting to see—that’s another very large—that’s a great program in the sense that they’ll obviously—those are people that are stuck. This is one of those stories where I was telling you, the tragedies of the U.S. immigration policy, there’s just certain little groups that are really stuck. And so we can really make a lot of lives better by addressing these types of issues. And it’s really—those are small things we can do to make a big difference.

[00:49:04]

RICK WEISS: Nancy, anything from you on these recent policies?

[00:49:06]

NANCY FONER: No, I think—no, I think I’ll just leave it at that, yeah.

[00:49:10]

RICK WEISS: Okay. Here’s a question from Elena Neale-Sacks from KAZU Public Radio in California. With federal immigration policy in disarray, as you’ve talked about, how can states like California do more to improve the experience for immigrants and native-born residents in their states?

[00:49:32]

NANCY FONER: That’s a big question.

[00:49:34]

RICK WEISS: Yeah. You’ve talked about a lot of the burden.

[00:49:36]

NANCY FONER: We talk about all the things that can be done. I mean, right?

[00:49:43]

RICK WEISS: Sounds like education was one thing you mentioned that is a worthwhile investment. Perhaps there’s other areas that states need to beef up.

[00:49:53]

NANCY FONER: Well, some of the states and some locations are doing things to try to ease the situation of undocumented immigrants. I mean, that is one thing clearly that states can do. I mean, the issue—for example, a lot of states don’t allow immigrants to get driver’s license—undocumented immigrants to get drivers licenses. Some states charge out-of-state tuition for immigrant—undocumented students. So there are some obvious—now, California is not one of those states, but there are a lot of states that are very—undocumented young people—undocumented can’t get other—driver’s license, access to certain kinds of health care, having to pay out-of-state tuition. I’m just thinking of three of them, but there are other things so that states can do that. I mean, New York City for example has a card that undocumented people can get so that they have some identification. There are some cities that do that. Not all. It’s a small—relatively small number now. So there are things that I think certainly when it comes to undocumented immigrants, states can try to be more—help people more. I mean, there’s a limit to what they can do in terms of that. And so—but they can try to put into place policies that would help the undocumented. New York City even passed a law, you know, about letting immigrants who are not citizens—that’s another issue—vote. Now, I don’t think that’s going to probably go through, but that’s another issue, because immigrants, you’re talking about non-citizens, that they’re paying taxes, their children are in the schools, we’re talking about lawful—so we’re talking about lawful permanent residents, and yet they’re not allowed to vote on measures that affect them in cities. So that’s another issue. There are endless laws that are—that affect them.

[00:51:49]

PIA ORRENIUS: I mean, I think it’s very hard politically, right, because especially when you’re dealing with undocumented immigrants, and so I think it’s that very tough political question. But if we just talk about immigrants more broadly and just think about immigrants more broadly and maybe legal immigrants that maybe are not citizens yet for example, I think there’s certain things that—occupational licensing, that’s one thing that keeps—there’s some occupations that you scratch your head, why is—why is all this training, education, and licensing required to cut hair, or I don’t know. There’s some of those head-scratchers and I think that those are barriers for everyone but for an immigrant they’re a bigger barrier because it’s harder for them to get the financing to go to school to get the student loans because a lot of times they won’t be able to access those, for example, so that’s an issue. And then another one I would mention is English—English classes. So adult immigrants come over, certainly they’re working and so forth, but they could really better their situation if they learned English. And I think that also has one of the biggest payoffs of any investment that state and local governments can put into the community. So, the English language classes, like adult classes for immigrants, I think that’s a huge—that’s huge. It’s going to make their lives so much better and speed up assimilation, and get them higher paying jobs and they’ll be better taxpayers and stuff. Those are one of those no brainers that that I would do.

[00:53:24]

NANCY FONER: Yeah, I agree. In fact, when I was on the panel of the National Academy of Sciences, now that was one of the things that we talked about a lot. Why does the US have so few—there’s a real desire of immigrants to take the classes that don’t exist, right? That they’re hard to get to, their hours, I mean, that would be a huge benefit. Well, although we shouldn’t forget that many immigrants do come speaking English. I mean, that’s another—again, they really—there are a lot who come from countries where English is the—either the main language or it’s the language—the political language of politics and their classes. But for those immigrants who don’t have English, that’s a huge barrier that they face. And they want to do—I think we should remember that. I mean, they, of course, want to do better, and they also want their children to do better. I mean, that’s why immigrants come here. That’s why they take jobs that are often of lower status than they had in their home country, which is another thing that I think we should be aware of. That just because somebody is working in a low-status job here does not mean that that’s what they did when they were in their home country. They’re often—because they don’t speak English, because they don’t—have licensing requirements, because they’re not familiar, you know, don’t have connections into the mainstream economy, for a whole variety of reasons they’re in lower-status jobs. And they’re willing to do that, and they’re willing to work hard at them, in jobs that Americans shun.

Many native-born Americans shun because they want to send money home, to lead up to the remittance issue, but also because they want their children to do better. They’re very heavily invested in that. I mean, it’s a big issue to move yourself to another country. To experience this is huge. And so I think that they are very motivated for themselves to learn English, but also for their children to do well. And I’m not sure that people really appreciate that enough and I also don’t think that people appreciate in the United States that the person who’s cleaning your house, for example, or caring for your grandmother, might have had a really good job in the home country. I say this because of my first life of academics, I was an anthropologist and my field was the Caribbean. And I lived in a Jamaican village and the woman that I lived with was a teacher. And she came to this country because she wanted to actually send her daughter to university in Jamaica. And she took a job caring for an old person, and it was a terrible job, her first job, really a terrible job. But what bothered her the most in many ways was she said that they—she couldn’t tell the person that she had been a teacher. And, you know, her whole status had changed. And they didn’t, you know, people didn’t recognize her that way. They saw her as a person doing this menial job. But she was a very respected person and a teacher in her home country. I’m just saying, I think that’s a—maybe that’s an angle people could develop it because many—this exists and experienced from many, many immigrants. And it’s hard, but they want their children to do better.

[00:56:29]

RICK WEISS: That’s a great reminder, both for journalism and just for all of us in our everyday lives as we interact with people. And it’s relevant to a question I have here. Asking whether immigrant families tend to have more or fewer children than non-immigrant families. And related to that, how much are immigrant communities contributing not just to the growth in jobs—in the job market, but the overall rate of population increase in the U.S.

[00:56:56]

NANCY FONER: I don’t know. Pia, do you know the answer to this, on the demography of the number of children? I don’t know that off the top of my head.

[00:57:05]

PIA ORRENIUS: I think they have more children on average, yes. I think so. But even groups that have larger families, like Hispanics, the birth rates are falling really fast there. So that’s—that’s changing, although they still have more children than other families on average. And—but obviously this is part of sort of the difference with immigration, is that you have the original immigrant cohort, but then you have all their children. So this is the—this is the reason that immigration has such long-run impact on the economy and on the country. Because you have descendants that remain here. And so that also is why integration and assimilation is important. And that’s why it’s also important that what happens in the first generation with these original immigrants, as Nancy was mentioning, if they’re living in undocumented status, if they can’t move up or succeed and access healthcare and so forth, then that’s going to have a cascading effect into future generations. And so I think we need to think about that.

[00:58:16]

NANCY FONER: Another—this is another topic that relates to that is if we’re looking at the children of immigrants, is large percentage and numbers of them are marrying somebody or having children with someone of another group, in mixed unions. And I think that has an impact that—will have an impact on the racial order in the United States, but also means that you’ve got this sort of melding of cultures. It’s not just that. I teach undergraduates at Hunter College. And when I ask people where they’re from or where their parents are from, and I know this is not a random sample, but still, many, many of them will say their parents are from different countries, right? And so they have dual—they have mixed identities, right? And we know from the data that many children of immigrants are in mixed unions with native whites. And that’s another impact. How’s that going to affect the racial system in the United States, actually. So—and I also think, yeah, so I think that that’s another area that we’re reporting, actually, on these, not on the marriages, and also on the families that are mixing people from different countries. Yeah.

[00:59:30]

RICK WEISS: I can imagine some wonderful stories there, personalized, and yet getting into the economy and the sociology and so many interesting factors.

[00:59:38]

NANCY FONER: Yeah, I think so.

[00:59:38]

RICK WEISS: We are just about out of time here, top of the hour. I want to remind reporters before we get a last question in here to give you all reporters a nice take-home nugget from each of our speakers that as you do log off today, you will get prompted for a very short survey. It will take you a half a minute to fill out a few questions and I really encourage you to take those few seconds to do that for us. It helps us design these briefings in ways that are most useful to you. So please take a moment to do the survey. And I do want to wrap up now with a quick question and quick answers from our speakers. If you’ve got one take-home message, one thing you want reporters to leave with today in their heads, what would that be? Dr. Nancy Foner.

[01:00:20]

NANCY FONER: Okay, I have a mixed one. Well, I think one message would be that immigrants are good for America. I think that’s an important one. And as in the past, immigrants and their descendants are integrating into the US. I think that’s really an important message.

[01:00:35]

RICK WEISS: Thank you. And Dr. Pia Orrenius.

[01:00:38]

PIA ORRENIUS: Yeah, I had the same thought as Nancy. Hey, if people want to come to your country, that is a good problem to have. So, you can start there. They want to come, then we can craft our immigration policies. We can make it work. We can figure it out. But just think of what it’s like to live in a country where nobody wants to come to your country. I mean, that’s a—that’s a terrible problem.

[01:01:04]

NANCY FONER: Or a country where people are forced to leave their country, even though they want to stay.

[01:01:09]

PIA ORRENIUS: Absolutely. So, we have a great thing going here. Let’s make the best of it.

[01:01:15]

RICK WEISS: Fantastic. I love that wrap up. Thank you so much, Dr. Foner, Dr. Orrenius, for a spectacular briefing. So interesting and informative. Thank you, reporters, for covering this topic in an evidence-informed way and adding this kind of substance to the rhetoric that’s getting thrown around a lot on this topic, especially in the months ahead. We really appreciate your work in this area. And I look forward to seeing you all at our next media briefing this coming Thursday afternoon. Check it out. So long.