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The leading Copyright |
Immigration and the Graying of
America DISCLAIMER:
There is a critical labor shortage in America. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently
reported that the unemployment rate fell to 4% in January, the lowest it has been in 30
years; the economy created 50% more new jobs than economists had expected. The experts had
predicted non-farm jobs to grow by 255,000, while 387,000 new workers cashed a paycheck.
Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Northern Trust Bank in Chicago, spoke of retailers
actually "hoarding" labor and told the New York Times that the nation seemed on
the verge of a total labor shortage. In testimony before the House Banking
Committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the high priest of our sustained
national boom, told legislators in no uncertain terms that expanding legal immigration to
this country was the answer to the labor crunch in both the agricultural and high tech
sectors:
"Not only in high-tech and in the farm area but throughout the country, aggregate
demand is putting pressure on an ever decreasing supply of unemployed labor. One obvious
means one can use to offset that is expanding the number of people we allow in either
generally or in focused areas. I think an appraisal of our immigration policies in this
regard is on the table...So I think that reviewing our immigration laws in the context of
the type of economy that we will be enjoying in the decade ahead is clearly on the
table."
In 1998, the National Immigration Forum joined with the Cato Institute to publish a study
by Stephen Moore on the fiscal impact of immigration. What he found was startling and
directly relevant to the problem so much on the mind of Chairman Greenspan. Most
immigrants arrive in the United States in the floodtide of their working years; more than
70% of them are over age 18 when they get here. Stephen Moore estimated that there were
roughly 17.5 million immigrants now in America whose education was paid for by their home
countries, not US taxpayers. He concluded that this represented an infusion of unearned
human capital worth some $1.43 trillion into the US economy .At a time when fewer and
fewer wage earners will have to be paying for growing retirement benefits enjoyed by more
and more elderly, it is worth remembering that the total net benefit to the Social
Security system from keeping our current immigration levels right where they are now would
be nearly $500 billion for the 1998-2022 period and almost an astonishing $2 trillion
through the year 2072! Immigration is an essential strategy that responsible policy makers
must use in a robust way to solve the systemic problem of financing Social Security.
Immigrants add some $10 billion every year to our national coffers and, in 1997 alone,
paid an estimated $133 billion in direct taxes to all levels of government. A 1998 study
by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average skill level of legal
immigrants from 1975-1995 actually rose faster than that of native-born Americans. While
much press and political attention has been directed towards the very real, and growing,
high tech shortage, not enough concern has been registered on the need for more employees
in the hospitality and consumer service sectors of our economy. In a recent speech in
Nashville, Tennessee, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the US Chamber of
Commerce, Thomas Donahue, predicted that the economy would need 52 million new workers
over the coming decade and that 30 million of these would have to come from outside the
existing workforce.
At a time when the economy needs more immigrants, the INS is giving it less. Out of a
commendable desire to turn out more citizens, the Service has lengthened the average
waiting period for a green card application from 21 months in August 1998 to about 33
months now, according to Eileen Schmitt, an INS spokesperson in Washington, DC. This, of
course, is only the final stage known as "adjustment of status"; add in the
labor certification and immigrant visa petition processes, and you are nudging close to
5-6 years, during which no promotions are allowed in many cases, so that the careers of
the alien beneficiaries are put on hold and intelligent business planning becomes
impossible. The INS simply cannot keep up, thus serving as a drag on the very economic
expansion that has created the demand for more immigration in the first place. From
1995-1999, according to Donna Coultice, Director of the INS California Service Center,
while the number of employment-based immigrant petitions jumped by 80%, she could only
hire 25% more INS adjudicators to handle the avalanche of new filings. The will to clear
out the backlog is there, but not the bodies. The larger point is not that Service
gridlock makes life difficult for the immigrant, but fails to serve the legitimate
interests of American workers and employers by tightening the choke hold on the supply of
qualified labor that the nation so desperately needs to breathe.
In a recent poll conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Group for USA Today and Public
Television, despite all of the furor over immigration in recent years, public support for
it remains strong and steady. Only 36% of those polled said that immigration should be
reduced as compared to 65% in 1993. When the nativist Federation for American Immigration
Reform ran a series of immigrant-bashing television advertisements during the recent Iowa
caucuses, it backfired badly. Texas Governor Bush, Vice President Gore and Iowa Governor
Tom Vilsack joined to denounce them, perhaps the only time that they agreed on anything.
While the embers of xenophobia smolder in many communities, and especially on the House
Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, it seems that most Americans not only need, but
accept, the need for legal immigration. If only their government did. |
