Experts warned that lawmakers could harm the U.S. economy if they push forward with proposals to cut immigration.
A bipartisan Senate agreement to tighten border security and reduce immigration has stalled over objections from House Republicans who are pushing for even stricter limits.
While Republicans have pushed for more aggressive measures to stop thousands of immigrants from crossing the border, experts argue that such measures could dampen economic growth and exacerbate demographic problems that are holding back the American workforce.
“The vast majority of the population growth we're seeing in the U.S. right now is due to immigration,” Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview.
“This is one of the main reasons our workforce has grown in recent years, and if it continues, it will be a key reason our workforce continues to grow,” she added.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan budget auditor, noted in a recent report that increased immigration is an important source of new workers and a boost to economic output.
The CBO estimated that the labor force would grow by more than 5 million people over the next decade largely due to increasing immigration. The agency said it also forecast a smaller federal budget deficit over the next decade than before, partly due to increases in immigration.
Overall, U.S. gross domestic product is expected to rise by nearly $7 trillion, and government revenues are expected to rise by $1 trillion thanks to the immigration surge.
Despite the well-documented positive economic impact of immigrants, managing their arrival has become a political issue.
Republicans largely blame President Biden's border policies for the surge in migration to and through Latin America, but the high number of border crossings is due in large part to economic and administrative differences between the U.S. and other countries.
And an immigration system designed to curb irregular immigration from Mexico is struggling to adapt to changing migration demographics, even as successive governments have pumped money into border and internal surveillance.
The steep upward trend in border encounters began in 2019 under President Trump, although the number of encounters fell sharply in 2020 due to the pandemic as phased closures took place in both the U.S. and Mexico.
The 2019 surge continued through the first three years of the Biden administration and was more or less unaffected by changes in U.S. border policy, although border crossings were closed last summer following the end of Title 42, the pandemic designation authority retained by Biden from the Trump era, briefly subsided.
According to official figures, immigration numbers have risen above their early 2000s peaks; Border officials recorded 1.6 million encounters – then known as “arrests” – in 2000.
Immigrants crossing the border at this time were more likely to attempt to sneak through than to face Border Patrol to seek asylum, and were more likely to be single Mexican adult men looking for work.
Beginning in 2014, U.S. officials met more and more families and children, first from the so-called “Northern Triangle” — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — and increasingly more people from countries outside Central America, particularly Venezuela and the Caribbean. particularly Haiti and Cuba.
Most immigration experts agree that these trends — and the globalization of Latin American pathways — are largely due to conditions in expulsion countries and the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
But how long the increase will last remains an open question for experts.
In its latest forecasts, the CBO expects the increase to continue into 2026. But even CBO Director Phillip Swagel acknowledged that the increase represented a “source of uncertainty” in his estimates.
Advocates view the upcoming presidential election as a key indicator of what immigration policy might look like in the near future, especially as Biden and Trump likely head toward another face-off in November.
“It will be about what happens with the November elections,” Cris Ramón, a senior immigration adviser at UnidosUs, said in a recent interview, predicting a “very strong focus on stopping legal migration and imposing even stricter ones Measures”. “Line politics at the border” in the context of a possible second Trump term.
Ramón said the border is a political issue that could be added to Biden's list of re-election challenges, describing Democrats' “return” to focusing on “single-issue immigration legislation” as opposed to broader efforts – like the so-called gang of Eight Border and Immigration Reform Acts of 2013.
At the time, both sides praised that package, also known as the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, for measures they said would have increased border security, opened pathways to citizenship while boosting the economy.
The CBO also released an analysis of an iteration of the bill in June 2013, detailing its projections for a larger labor force and higher GDP if the bill were passed.
This package followed the pattern of comprehensive immigration reform negotiations in which increased border and internal controls were generally traded for work permits for the existing undocumented population and improvements to the legal immigration system to absorb new arrivals.
Senate negotiations leading up to the recently doomed border deal took a different approach: Democrats called for fewer and more targeted improvements to the immigration system and acknowledged reforms to the asylum system that would have limited the number of people allowed to apply for asylum.
The Senate border package would also have funded immigration processing to reduce the backlog of applications and speed up the asylum process, but overall it likely would have resulted in fewer migrants receiving work permits through asylum. It is unclear whether it would have stopped migrants from making the journey.
“This was intended to slow the flow of immigration,” Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in an interview. “And I think the practical impact of that would have been – or would have been if it went through – that we would get less economic growth overall.”
While experts generally agree that higher immigration could help the economy grow, the math can become more difficult when examining the potential impact of immigration on some federal spending.
“What we're seeing with this immigration pathway is what CBO believes is that immigration increases the size of the economy in the short term, but decreases the size of the economy per person,” Goldwein said while discussing the latest CBO report.
“And in the long run, it may increase both.”
“When young immigrants come to the country assuming they can work legally or obtain a Social Security number illegally, they pay taxes. And so these taxes reduce the deficit, and as they get older, they will eventually collect Social Security and Medicare,” Goldwein added.
Edelberg also said that while she was sure that “immigration boosts overall economic growth,” she added that “there are a lot of other things that people care about besides the size of the GDP.”
Edelberg pointed to a December 2022 policy proposal she co-authored with Tara Watson, an economist at Brookings, that addressed how states and local governments could pay disproportionate immigration costs compared to the federal government Opportunities to redirect “federal profits” away from immigration to these communities.”
“While immigration is good for the overall economy and, indeed, good for the federal budget, certain types of immigration place a significant burden on local governments, which do not receive all the revenue benefits but certainly find any spending challenges all the greater.”Immigration creates.” said Edelberg.
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