Three Reasons Why the Impact of Our Illegal Immigration Is, Has Been, and Will Be Greater Than One Might Expect

The influence of illegal immigration on our country is much greater than many believe. This blogger has estimated that illegal immigration since the 1980s accounts for at least 11 percent of our nation’s current total population (see footnote 1). If we do not change certain of our immigration-related laws and continue to not enforce those laws presently in effect, our country will undergo significant changes – all without voter approval.

The majority of voters would never approve of 1) allowing unlimited illegal immigration into this country, 2) legal immigration laws which give significant legal immigration preferences to poor Hispanics, or 3) giving automatic American citizenship to children born here of parents neither of whom is legally residing here. Yet these three situations accurately describe what is happening in the U.S. today and they are contributing to increased poverty and poverty-related problems in our country. Since each of the three are big contributors to the overall impact of illegal immigration they are examined in more detail below.

As a follow-on observation it should be noted that the distribution of income in this country is made less equal by the low average incomes of our current legal and illegal immigration. Moreover, past history indicates that the offspring of our typical legal and illegal immigrants are expected to be characterized by lower than average educational achievement and income as well (more detail below). In general Democrats do not acknowledge this when they attack our current national distribution of income and conclude that government social engineering through changes in taxation and/or other means is required to make for a more level distribution of income. However, as noted on page 120 of the Economic Report of the President: 1994 (President Clinton): "...immigration has increased the relative supply of less educated labor and appears to have contributed to the increasing inequality of income within the nation." Looked at another way -- it makes no sense to devote significant amounts of energy and resources in an effort to reduce poverty in this country and import much more poverty at the same time.

Reason One – Unlimited and Understated Illegal Immigration

For many years our national government has elected to not enforce our laws which prohibit illegal immigrants from working and living in the United States. Certainly, millions of illegal crossers have been stopped at our borders. However, with no penalty for attempting an illegal crossing, those who are returned to their home countries (principally Mexicans) keep attempting to enter in this way until they get by the Border Patrol. It has been estimated that for every person caught trying an illegal border crossing, three get by.

In recent years, there have been a very small number of raids on suspected employers of illegal immigrants affecting just a few thousand illegal immigrants. These raids have been mostly for show since they have involved only a tiny percentage of the millions of illegal immigrants living here. Under President Obama, the enforcement envelope has been pushed back even further with a stated policy of no deportations of “law-abiding” illegal immigrants. (See blog of July 9 – “Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy.”)

An estimated 30 to 50 percent of our illegal immigrants do not even illegally cross our border. They enter the U.S. legally on visas and passports from all over the world for such purposes as tourism, visiting relatives, pursuing an education, or conducting business. After arriving in the United States, they overstay the time limits, find employment, and establish themselves as residents of our country. We have no system in place to determine whether visitors to the U.S. overstay the legal time limits of their visits – which reduces the ability to do anything about these violations of our law. In sum, our federal enforcement system has evolved to the point that whoever gets by the Border Patrol or enters the U.S. on passport or visa is allowed to remain here perpetually unless they are convicted of a serious crime while here.

Most of our illegal immigrants have been poor and poorly educated Hispanics. Three million were amnestied in the Immigration and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, a general amnesty in which very large numbers of immigrants fraudulently qualified for the amnesty (see footnote 2). In the 1990s another 3 million were amnestied during the Clinton presidency in a series of limited amnesties. The latter amnesties only applied to subsets of our illegal immigrant population, primarily illegals of certain Latin American countries.

Aside from our periodic amnesties, there has been an ongoing steady stream of our illegal population who have achieved legal permanent residence in other ways such as by marrying a citizen, finding employers who will declare that they cannot find an American to do a particular job (including unskilled jobs) at the "prevailing wage", joining our military, applying for asylum, or some other means. In most instances these alternative methods of becoming legal have been facilitated by being here illegally. They have added up to millions of individuals over time, and they have fattened up an influencial immigration bar.

Today our illegal immigrant population is estimated by the media and the federal government at about 12 million. This number understates illegal immigration’s dimensions because it does not include the 6 million previously given amnesty since 1986 and the many millions more of illegals who have obtained and continue to obtain legal permanent residence in ways facilitated by living here illegally. Additionally, this blogger believes the current U.S. illegal population is many millions greater than this widely quoted current estimate of an illegal population of 12 million (see footnote 2b).

The inflow of illegal immigrants has likely slowed with the current recession. Nevertheless, the illegal population is still growing since prospective illegals perceive that no matter how bad things become economically in the United States, wages, job availability, and quality of life will continue to be worse in their home countries. Those who are just entering the United States and those who have lost jobs here have many friends and relatives here with whom they can live until their situations improve. Moreover, it is widely perceived that an amnesty is coming and that deportations have stopped except for those convicted of serious crimes in the United States.



Reason Two – Legal Immigration Which Largely Mirrors Earlier Illegal Immigration

Our present legal immigration system discourages the immigration of individuals with advanced educational backgrounds and skills that would benefit our country. Instead of giving preferences to the best and brightest immigrants whose talents are in short supply here, since 1965 our legal immigration system gives most preferences to the close relatives of citizens. Since it is the recently legalized citizens, including many millions of formerly illegal immigrants legalized by amnesties and other means, who have by far the largest number of close relatives living outside the United States, the typical characteristics of our legal immigrants are now mirroring that of our illegal immigrants – poor, low-skilled, little educated, and predominately Hispanic. Moreover, the amount of permitted legal immigration, including the admission of refugees and asylum seekers who also tend to be poor and unskilled, has been trending up over time and is now running about twice the level it had been prior to the 1990s. During the 2006-2008 period, for each year there were between 1 million and 1.3 million newly designated legal permanent residents, about two-thirds of whom were classified as receiving family-sponsored preferences.

By today’s immigration laws, citizens who are at least 21 years old are entitled to sponsor parents, siblings and their families, and married children as future legal immigrants, subject to annual limitations on category totals. This can be the start of an extended chain of legal immigration with the spouses of siblings or spouses of married children having entirely different families of their own that they will be able in turn to bring into the United States, all subject to restrictive annual limitations. The annual limits on some categories of family-sponsored preferences has led to a current immigration waitlist of an estimated eight million “overseas” relatives of American citizens, many of whom are living in the U.S. illegally today rather than wait outside the country for what is likely to be many years before it will be their turn to enter legally (see Footnote 3).

It should also be noted that legal immigration has been subject to large-scale fraud as shown by DNA testing. In August 2008 a humanitarian program to allow the reuniting of thousands of African refugees with relatives living in the United States was suspended after it was discovered through DNA tests that a "large portion" of the the relatives from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea, and Ghana were not the blood relatives they claimed to be. "We had high rates of fraud everywhere, except the Ivory Coast," said a State Department official (see footnote 3b).

Who knows how much other legal immigration has been fraudulent? It is well known that many immigrants gain legal residence here through fraudulent marriages to American citizens, sometimes referred to as "green-card marriages." Some Americans participate in green-card marriages out of sympathy for the foreigner, some do it for money, and some are deceived into thinking the foreigner is in love with them. In most of the green-card marriage cases the foreigner is already living illegally in the U.S.


Reason Three – The Children of Immigrants

The American born children of illegal immigrants are automatically granted U.S. citizenship. The effect of our illegal immigration on our national population is thereby multiplied. This is especially true since our largest class of illegal immigrants, the poor from Latin America, have high birthrates. About 10 percent of all new births in this country are to illegal immigrants (see Steven A. Camarota, “Birthrates Among Immigrants in America,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2005). Thus our large base of illegal immigrants who are permitted to live here continually adds to our legal population through childbirth.

Birthright citizenship is the term given to the automatic citizenship granted to children born in the United States. This policy has been applied to the children of illegal immigrant parents since an 1898 Supreme Court interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which was enacted shortly after the Civil War in order to make it difficult for the South to ever again deprive blacks of their citizenship rights.

As applied to the children of illegal immigrants, birthright citizenship has no logical justification – why should children born of parents who are in this country in violation of our laws be rewarded only because their parents are illegally in the country? This practice encourages illegal immigration since it offers foreigners an opportunity to obtain a very valuable life benefit for their newborn children. And under our present immigration law, the children can return the favor when they are 21 and sponsor their parents for citizenship if they have not already become citizens by amnesty or other means. Moreover, birthright citizenship rewards the poor illegal immigrant parents since it enables them to immediately obtain some welfare benefits through their American born children.

Today, few developed countries award birthright citizenship to children whose parents are both illegal immigrants. Great Britain eliminated this practice effective 1983. Australia significantly restricted it effective 1986. Ireland eliminated it effective 2005, followed by New Zealand effective 2006.

Rep. Deal (R-Ga.) with 95 co-sponsors have proposed a bill which would limit automatic citizenship to those cases where at least one parent was a citizen or a legal permanent resident. If such legislation gets enough support to become law, its validity would eventually be argued before the Supreme Court. Then the Supreme Court would either approve it or possibly rule that a new Constitutional amendment would be required to change the present practice of granting automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrant parents.

For many years illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and immigrants who became legal through amnesty or other means have all been largely Hispanic with high birth rates. Thus our immigrants are adding to our population substantially beyond their original numbers through childbirth. It should also be noted that over the years the impact of this childbirth is even greater than the high birth rates alone might lead one to expect because the Hispanic childbirths tend to occur at a relatively early age, thereby increasing the effect of generational compounding.

An estimated 80 percent of our current illegal immigrant population is Hispanic with limited education, an estimated 60 percent not having graduated high school. Calling on the work of a number of different researchers, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has gone to some lengths to document the ways in which our illegal immigrant population and their offspring are likely to impose significant future costs on our society (footnote 4).

The fact that Hispanics in the United States have had a history of high welfare use (footnote 5) contributes to the expectation that today's Hispanic immigrants and their offspring will also come to be characterized as having high welfare usage. The extent of welfare usage of Hispanics in the United States has been attributed to: persistent low incomes related to low educational attainment, high teen birthrates, high rates of births out of wedlock (footnote 6), and cultural factors (footnote 7).

Professor Borjas of Harvard found that "the longer that immigrants live in the United States, the more likely they are to use welfare...." (footnote 7b). Among his observations were that there were “large differences in welfare propensities among national origin groups.” Among the nationalities with high percentages of welfare usage after at least ten years in the United States (1998 data) were Dominican Republic (58 percent of households), Mexico (33.6 percent), Cuba (28.6 percent), and El Salvador (25.9 percent). By contrast Ireland (5.6 percent), India (5.6 percent), Poland (6.8 percent), and Germany (7.8 percent) were at the low end of the range.

Although studies of educational levels achieved by second and third generation Mexicans in the United States show improvements over the educational attainments of the immigrants, they also unfortunately show that educational deficiencies still persist with relatively high percentages dropping out of high school and relatively low percentages attaining college degrees (footnote 8). This does not auger well for the future children of our immigrants.

Rector also notes that additional societal costs will result if the newly amnestied immigrants and their offspring adopt the cited high crime rate of Hispanics in the United States (footnote 9). The fact that most of our Hispanic immigrants come from countries where corruption and lawlessness are widespread may have an influence on their U.S. crime statistics (footnote 10). Illegal immigrants themselves do not have above average crime rates – probably due to a combination of appreciation for their improved economic situation and the knowledge that criminal convictions are the one thing that will get them deported. It is an entirely different story for succeeding generations which have a much higher crime rate. There is evidence that a significant number of the descendents of poor Hispanic immigrants are slipping into the same vicious circle that has trapped too many of our poor citizens: the circle of poverty, low educational attainment, drugs, high numbers of teen births out of wedlock, broken families, gangs, crime, and prison time (footnote 11).





Footnotes

1 The present population of the U.S. recently passed the 300 million mark. The following population sources tied to illegal immigration since the 1980s together account for the author’s rough conservative estimate of 34 million people whose presence in the United States can be traced to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants legalized by seven amnesties enacted since 1986 total more than 6 million (source: Vernon M. Briggs, “Immigration Reform and the U.S. Labor Force: the Questionable ‘Wisdom’ of S.2611,” statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 29, 2006, footnote 4). Illegal immigrant births in the United States were estimated at 380,000 for 2002 (source: Steven M. Camarota, “Birthrates Among Immigrants in America,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2005). Extrapolating for 2000-2008, births of illegal immigrants should have added about 3.2 million in this period. With fewer illegal immigrants here in the 1990s, we estimate 2 million births for that decade, and .5 million for the 1980s. For the decade of the 1990s, the INS estimated that it granted 1.5 million illegal immigrants legal permanent residence for reasons such as marriage to a citizen or job certification. Conservatively, we used that data to estimate 1.5 million from that source for the 2000-2008 period, and .3 million for the 1980s (source: an INS source cited in Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants at Mid-Decade,” Center for Immigration Studies, December 2005). Illegal immigrants who have awarded legal permanent residence status or been subsequently naturalized have rights to sponsor relatives for legal immigration. For the fiscal year 2006, family sponsored preferences accounted for about 800,000 new legal immigrants according to a statistical publication of the Department of Homeland Security: Annual Flow Report – U.S. Legal Permanent Residents: 2006. Many of these 800,000 must be relatives of former illegal immigrants who were amnestied or were awarded legal permanent residence status since few other Americans would have qualifying relatives living out of the country to sponsor. We conservatively estimate legal immigrants sponsored by individuals who were former illegal immigrants at 3 million for 2000-2008, 1.5 million for the 1990s, and .15 million for the 1980s. Lastly we must estimate the number of children which were born to the 6 million amnestied illegal immigrants, the 3.3 million who obtained legal permanent status in other ways, and the estimated 4.65 million legal immigrants sponsored by former illegal immigrants. We conservatively estimate these births at 1.6 million for the 2000-2008 period, 1 million for the 1990s and .2 million for the 1980s. To the above we add the conservative estimate of 12 million illegal immigrants here at the end of 2007, to come up with a grand total of 34.27 million of our current population that is here illegally today or attributable to immigrants that took up illegal residence here since the 1980s.

2 Our first amnesty for illegal immigrants, The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), was a general amnesty for nearly all illegal immigrants who could prove that they had lived in the United States continuously since January 1, 1982. In addition, as a concession to agricultural interests, the same Act contained an amnesty for those who had worked in perishable agriculture for at least 90 days in the year ended May 1, 1986. IRCA was the subject of massive fraud, especially the agricultural worker component which had an application total that was many times what had been expected. This fraud resulted from our federal bureaucracy being overwhelmed by the number of applicants, giving it little time and resources to determine whether an application was fraudulent or not. As a consequence, an estimated 70 percent of the approximately three million who were granted amnesty under ICRA had applications which were fraudulent in one way or another (See Otis L. Graham Jr., “Amnesty Repeats Itself,” The American Conservative, June 18, 2007). Included were three terrorists are known to have successfully used IRCA to establish legal residence in the United States under the agricultural worker provision! (See Janice L. Kephart, “Immigration and Terrorism,” Center for Immigration Studies, September 2005.)

2b) See chapter entitled "Current Estimated Illegal Immigration Population" beginning on page 34 of Illegal Immigration -- The Myths and The Reality.

3 Mark Krikorian, “Limit Relatives Rights,” USA Today, June 18, 2007 mentions the eight million estimate. This article also mentions that the failed immigration bill of May/June 2007 proposed to eliminate extended family categories of legal immigration as a tradeoff for amnesty, but only after admitting the millions on the waiting list over the next eight or ten years. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a staunch immigrant advocate, is quoted as saying of this proposal: “The day it passes, we’re going to put in legislation to try to fix it [restore extended family preferences in legal immigration].” As part of its recommendations, the Jordan Commission proposed that the level of legal immigration be reduced by eliminating some of the family preferences which can give rise to extended chains of legal immigration.

3b Miriam Jordan, "Refugee Program Halted As DNA Tests Show Fraud," The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2008.

4 Robert Rector, “Amnesty and Continued Low Skill Immigration Will Substantially Raise Welfare Costs and Poverty,” Testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 2, 2006.

5 Robert Rector cites Gordon H. Lester and Jan Tin, “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Program Participation, 1996 to 1999 Who Gets Assistance?” Household Economic Studies, Current Population Reports, P70-94, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington D.C., January 2004 which shows that for 1999, Hispanics in the United States were almost three times more likely to receive welfare than non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, among families that received aid, the median aid received for Hispanic families was significantly higher than the median for non-Hispanic white families. In addition, Hispanics were more than three times as likely to be long-term welfare program participants than non-Hispanic whites.

6 Hispanic mothers born in the United States had an illegitimacy rate of 50 percent in 2003 (the most recent year of the data used) in contrast to 43 percent for Hispanic immigrant mothers and 24 percent for whites. Data from Steven A. Camarota, “Illegitimate Nation – An Examination of Out-of-Wedlock Births Among Immigrants and Natives,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 2007.

7 George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Chapter 6.

7b) Ibid.

8 Rector cites Richard Fry and B. Lindsay Lowell, “Work or Study: Different Fortunes of U.S. Latino Generations,” Pew Hispanic Center, May 28, 2002. A different study which shows a lower high school dropout rate for Hispanics also shows that the third generation has a higher dropout rate than the second, both also being significantly higher than the non-Hispanic dropout rates: Pia Orrenius, “Is the U.S. Still a Melting Pot?” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Southwest Economy, May/June 2004.

9 From Rector: “The age specific incarceration rates in federal and state prisons (prisoners per 100,000 residents in the same age group in the general population) are two to two and a half times higher for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic whites. Relatively little of the higher imprisonment rate of Hispanics seems to be due to immigration violations.” Rector cites Paige M. Harrison, and Allen J. Beck, “Prisoners in 2003,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ 205335, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C. November 2004, table 12. Also cited was Thomas P. Bonczar, “The Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population 1974-2001,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ197976, August 2003.

10 Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors, subtitled A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 113, states: “Mexican officials find difficulty in admitting – above all to foreigners – that corruption is essential to the operation and survival of the political system. But the system has in fact never lived without corruption and it would disintegrate or change beyond recognition if it tried to do so.” On 116: “In a sense, the fact that corruption continues to flourish in myriad forms elsewhere [in addition to that found in the upper levels of the Mexican government] confirms that the problem is cultural….”

11 See Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Malanga, The Immigration Solution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). This book extensively documents the social and economic fallout from our current illegal immigration.

The High Unemployment Rates of Those Americans Who Most Compete With Immigrants for Jobs

As a result of job competition with legal and illegal immigrants, the little educated and younger Americans, especially those who are disadvantaged minorities, are hurt by having lower wages and benefits and fewer job opportunities than would otherwise be available to them. Our lowest paying jobs in businesses such as restaurants or motels are very appealing to immigrants who find the pay is six to ten times what they could earn in their home countries if they were able to find any employment there at all. Thus the immigrants will do whatever it takes, including doing more work for less compensation and working “off the books” in order to obtain low paying American jobs. As a consequence, in all too many cases employers choose to hire immigrants instead of native Americans. (For more advantages stemming from off the books work see blog of August 9 -- "Illegal Immigration Results in Understatement of U.S. Employment.")

Using data from the June 2009 Current Population Survey, Karen Jensenius and Steven A. Camarota have compiled unemployment and underemployment data for different subsets of native-born Americans who are most likely to be competing with immigrants for jobs(see Center for Immigration Studies piece entitled “Worse Then It Seems,” Backgrounder/Report August 2009 which can be found at their website www.cis.org).

The data show that for June 2009 the unemployment rate for all native-born Americans is 9.7 percent. By comparison, the unemployment rate for native-born Americans with less than a high school education is 20.8 percent. For native-born blacks with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate rises to 27.5 per cent.

For all young (18-29) native-born who have only a high school education, the unemployment rate is 18.5 percent. For all young native-born blacks with only a high school education the unemployment rate is 25.8 percent.

These data become much worse if one includes 1) the underemployed (those working part time who would like to work full time) and 2) those too discouraged to have sought employment in the prior four weeks (none of whom are counted as unemployed in the official statistics). Adding these two categories to the unemployment rate gives percentages of 16.3 percent for all native born and 33.2 percent for all native born with less than a high school education. Similarly, the rate rises to 42 percent for native-born blacks who did not graduate from high school. For the young (18-29) who have only a high school education, the percentage rises to 30.3 percent for all native-born and 37.4 percent for native-born blacks.

Conclusions from the Jensenius and Camarota report: “The [unemployment] situation is particularly bad for minorities, the young, and less-educated Americans. These are the workers who face the most competition from immigrants – legal and illegal.” “…there is no shortage of less-educated [citizen] workers in this country. If the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return to their home countries over time, we have an adequate supply of less-educated natives to replace these workers.”