FiveThirtyEight (Opinion)
By Ben Casselman
August 17, 2015
Donald
Trump wants to build a wall on the southern border of the United States
and get Mexico to pay for it. He wants to end birthright citizenship.
He wants to deport
tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants.
What he doesn’t want, apparently, is to get his facts right on immigration.
Trump
on Sunday released a six-page immigration plan, which represents the
most detailed policy proposal of his campaign to date. In substance, it
doesn’t stray far from
Trump’s earlier remarks on immigration, stressing the need for more
border security, stricter enforcement of existing laws and better
protections for American workers. Also like past speeches, the new
policy plays fast and loose with the evidence, frequently
citing numbers without proper context.
FiveThirtyEight’s
political gurus don’t give Trump much chance of winning the Republican
presidential nomination. But his rhetoric on immigration has helped
catapult him
to the top of most early GOP polls, and many of his positions aren’t
far out of step with more mainstream Republican candidates. So it’s
worth highlighting some of what his plan gets wrong.
“A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.”
Underlying
Trump’s entire immigration policy is the image of thousands of people
illegally streaming across the southern border. There are two big
problems with this:
There are far fewer unauthorized immigrants entering the U.S. today
than in past years, and many of them aren’t coming across the Mexican
border.
According
to the latest estimates from the Pew Research Center, there were about
11.2 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2012. That’s down
from a peak of about
12.2 million in 2007, and basically unchanged since 2009. In other
words, there has been essentially no net illegal immigration in recent
years — the number of people entering the country illegally has been
offset by those leaving, voluntarily or otherwise.
(For more on how Pew calculates these numbers, see my explanation from
last year.)
Moreover,
the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico has been steadily
declining since 2007, while a rising share are coming from Central
America and Asia. According
to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly half of undocumented
immigrants initially entered the country legally and then overstayed
their visas. The number of people taken into custody at the border has
decreased since 2012, according to the Department of
Homeland Security, despite an improving economy that makes the U.S. a
more attractive destination for workers from Mexico and Central America.
“The
costs for the United States have been extraordinary: U.S. taxpayers
have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs,
housing costs, education
costs, welfare costs, etc.”
Most
government social programs — food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance
and similar public benefits — require a valid Social Security number and
aren’t available to
people in the U.S. illegally. In fact, many benefits aren’t available
even to most legal immigrants until they have been in the country for
five years.
That
doesn’t mean undocumented residents don’t receive any benefits at
taxpayers’ expense. Public education, school lunches, nutrition
assistance for mothers and children
and some other programs are available regardless of immigration status,
and all programs are open to the U.S.-born children of undocumented
immigrants. And, of course, some undocumented residents may successfully
receive benefits they aren’t legally entitled
to.
But
there’s another side to the equation: taxes. Many undocumented
immigrants work off the books and don’t pay taxes on their earnings. But
many others do pay taxes. One
recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
estimated that undocumented workers paid nearly $12 billion in state and
local taxes in 2012. They pay billions more in federal income taxes
and, critically, in Social Security and Medicare taxes,
despite being ineligible for those benefits. A 2013 report from the
Social Security Administration estimated that unauthorized immigrants in
2010 paid $12 billion more into the Social Security system than they
got out.
“The
impact in terms of crime has been tragic. In recent weeks, the
headlines have been covered with cases of criminals who crossed our
border illegally only to go on
to commit horrific crimes against Americans.”
Trump
has seized on the horrific rape and killing of a California woman,
among other recent crimes, as evidence that undocumented immigrants are
especially dangerous.
But as PolitiFact and others have concluded, there’s little evidence to
back up that claim. A recent report from the Immigration Policy Center
found that immigrants as a whole have lower crime rates than the
native-born population, while an earlier report
from the same group found that Mexican and Central American immigrants —
who make up the majority of undocumented residents — are also less
likely than native citizens to be incarcerated for crimes. (Separate
research has found that immigrants’ lower incarceration
rates are not due to their being deported rather than imprisoned
domestically.)
Other
researchers have raised questions about the Immigration Policy Center’s
conclusions, pointing to potential irregularities in census and other
data sources. But researchers
generally agree that there is little evidence that immigrants,
documented or undocumented, commit crimes at a higher rate than the
native-born.
“In
2011, the Government Accountability Office found that there were a
shocking 3 million arrests attached to the incarcerated alien
population, including tens of thousands
of violent beatings, rapes and murders.”
Trump’s
“3 million arrests” number comes from this 2011 General Accountability
Office report on arrests and convictions of people in the U.S.
illegally. But there are
a couple of problems with the way he’s using the figure.
First,
the 3 million number is a count of “arrest offenses,” not individual
arrests; someone might be arrested one time but be charged with three
different offenses. The
GAO report looked at 249,000 “incarcerated criminal aliens”
(immigrants, documented or undocumented, convicted and incarcerated for a
crime) and estimated that they had been arrested 1.7 million times on
2.9 million separate charges.
Second,
those “3 million arrests” were spread out over decades. The GAO sample
includes arrests as far back as 1955, although the vast majority took
place after 1990.
Finally,
the GAO’s arrest statistics include arrests on immigration offenses.
Some 65 percent of the “criminal aliens” in the report had been arrested
at least once on
an immigration charge. (The next highest category was drug offenses, at
48 percent.) “Violent beatings, rapes and murders” (assaults, sex
offenses and homicides) account for a bit more than 10 percent of the
offenses in the report.
“The
influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high,
and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans — including
immigrants themselves
and their children — to earn a middle class wage.”
The
notion that immigration, and particularly illegal immigration, drives
down wages and pushes up unemployment is a widely held belief. It also
makes intuitive sense:
If there are thousands of immigrants willing to work for low wages, it
seems logical that native-born workers would be unable to compete.
Economic
research, however, has consistently demonstrated that this simplistic
framework fails to account for the full effects of immigration.
Immigration increases the
supply of workers, but it also increases demand for products and
services. Economists on both the left and right generally agree that
immigration has made the U.S. economy more productive and has benefited
the average American worker, according to a University
of Chicago survey of leading academics.
Benefiting
the “average worker,” however, is not the same as benefiting all
workers. It’s possible that immigration could benefit the economy as a
whole while still hurting
the less educated native-born workers who compete most directly with
immigrants for jobs. Economists are divided on this question: Some
research finds that immigration tends to hurt less skilled workers,
while other research finds that it benefits workers
across the educational spectrum. The University of Chicago survey found
that a narrow majority of economists believed that immigration of
low-skilled workers can negatively affect less educated native workers.
This
much, however, is clear: The “influx of foreign workers” that Trump
talks about has ebbed in recent years. After rising rapidly in the 1980s
through 2000s, the growth
of the U.S. immigrant population slowed dramatically during the
recession, as the lack of jobs made the U.S. a less attractive
destination for foreign workers. The Census Bureau expects immigration
to start picking up again now that the economy is improving,
but the aggregate growth of the foreign-born population remains far
below prerecession projections.
“Requirement
to hire American workers first. Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no
such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americans outside
the workforce
and incomes collapsing, we need to [require] companies to hire from the
domestic pool of unemployed.”
The H-1B guest-worker program is meant to help companies hire foreign
workers in “specialty occupations” that can be hard to fill with
qualified Americans. But critics
on both the left and the right argue that the program is rife with
abuse and that companies use it as a back-door way to pay lower wages.
It’s
a serious stretch, however, to connect H-1B abuse to the broader trends
of falling labor force participation and stagnant wages. For one thing,
incomes aren’t rising
as quickly as economists would like, but they’re hardly “collapsing” —
wages are rising at a rate of about 2 percent per year, and
inflation-adjusted household incomes have been basically flat since the
recession ended. The “92 million Americans outside the
workforce,” meanwhile, are mostly retired, in school or raising
children. Declining participation in the labor force is a worrying
trend, but not one that has much to do with immigration — indeed,
immigrants have, on average, a higher participation rate than
native-born workers.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment