High unemployment reframes immigration debate

In the wake of President Obama's "jobs summit," the debate about how illegal immigration impacts

unemployment has risen in volume. For Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the summit was fatally flawed because it did not directly address illegal immigration.

"Notably absent from the President's jobs summit is any discussion of how to take back the 8 million jobs currently occupied by illegal immigrants and make them available to outof work U.S. citizens and legal immigrants," he wrote on Politico.com.

Rep. Smith, a fifth-generation Texan and a known Capitol Hill immigration hardliner, asked, "How can the administration justify giving millions of jobs to illegal immigrants when the economy is struggling with a 10 percent unemployment rate?"

He's right about the numbers. An estimated 5 percent of the U.S. labor force is made up of undocumented immigrants, meaning they hold 8 million jobs (that number is generally not disputed). But what's not so clear is how many of those positions are truly jobs Americans would compete for, at the wages offered, even with high unemployment.

Several studies suggest that among U.S. citizens and legal residents, it's mainly those lacking high school diplomas who are competing directly with undocumented immigrants for jobs (and by most estimates, that's less than one out of every 10 U.S. workers).

A 2006 study by Giovanni Peri, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, concluded that immigration actually benefits more educated U.S. workers by boosting overall productivity, resulting in wage increases for degree-holders.

A widely cited 2008 study by the Perryman Group for Americans for Immigration Reform, a business-led coalition, went even further. Deporting undocumented workers en masse -- the study calls the workers an "essential resource" -- would have the net result of erasing thousands of jobs permanently in many states, not to mention being a prohibitively expensive exercise.

Of course, that's cold comfort to millions of U.S. workers who lack a high school diploma and feel they are being undercut by undocumented foreign workers. A study released this month by Gordon H. Hanson of the University of California, San Diego

and the National Bureau of Economic Research, cites an estimate that American high school dropouts lost 9 percent of their income over one recent 20-year period, due to illegal immigration. But Hanson, who prepared his study for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, also states that despite the controversy it generates, illegal immigration has no significant impact on the overall U.S. economy.

Hanson's study doesn't gauge the effect of innovation (for example, new techniques undocumented immigrants may have introduced in construction). But it does account for most other relevant factors such as undocumented immigrants' contribution to GDP and tax revenue (a majority have payroll taxes deducted), as well as public monies they drain, mainly via public schooling and emergency room visits. In the end,

That might be accomplished writes Hanson, "It's a wash."

through temporary worker programs

In this, Hanson coincides with Marcelo

Suárez-Orozco, co-director of the that could be taxed, higher visa quotas,

immigration studies program at New

or a path to earned citizenship for the

York University, who said late last year

12 million undocumented immigrants

as the economy crumbled, that despite

living in the country, or a combination

the evidence that proponents and critics

of these tactics.

of immigration pile on either side

The conservative Heritage Foundation

of the issue, the impact on the economy

opposes giving citizenship to

isn't as dramatic as either side would

anyone who entered the country illegally,

arguing that "amnesty" creates an incentive for future illegal immigration. However, Heritage still endorses providing "legal avenues that meet the needs of employers and immigrants."

Congress last tried to pass immigration reform in 2007, at a time when unemployment levels were far lower than they are now. The legislation, which included higher quotas for foreign workers and a path to citizenship for the undocumented, floundered against many conservatives' cries that it represented an immigration amnesty.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who has been drafting a sweeping immigration overhaul, has said that he is including language in the current bill that would limit visas for industries that have high

unemployment, so native-born and

legal residents workers don't have to

like to think. For Hanson, the key question

compete with the undocumented. Immigrant

is how to create an immigration

labor would make it into niches

system that offers incentives against

of the economy where it's needed.

"We believe that every American illegal immigration, channels foreign

should always have first crack at every workers onto legal entry paths and provides

the U.S. labor market with all the job," Gutierrez was quoted as saying

in the Washington, D.C., political unskilled labor it needs (particularly

newspaper, The Hill. "Having said during an upswing), but with enough

that, where the opportunities exist, we flexibility to decrease influxes when

need to sustain our economy. And so the labor market contracts, as it has in

we need workers. the last couple of years.

Even in this very unstable economic

His answer is a visa program for

situation we find ourselves in, there are unskilled foreign workers far larger

still crabs that need to be picked, there and less restrictive than it is now.

are still onions going un-harvested. It's

The current visa regime allows in

just true," he added.It may be true, but only a ludicrously low number of temporary

selling this complex vision to a jobhungry unskilled workers, 150,000 at

nation will be a challenge for any given time by Hanson's count, a

Gutierrez and the Obama administration, number dwarfed by the 8 million immigrants

which, with an eye on the Latino who are working here illegally.

vote, has promised action on immigration

The basic formula is to turn "illegal"

reform in 2010. immigrants into legal residents.