How Smart Will Immigration Reform Be?

By Robert Brischetto

The overhaul of our immigration laws is likely to be the first significant bipartisan legislation to break the deadlock that has characterized Congressional politics in recent years. But how smart will reform be?

Republicans took a beating in the November elections from two emerging language minorities with large immigrant populations, Latinos and Asians, who turned out in greater numbers than ever.

Republican interest in mending fences with Latinos was evident when Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio was tapped to give the Republican response to the president’s State of the Union speech.

At least some members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have now come out in favor of providing an expedited path to citizenship for children brought to this country by their parents in violation of the law. Support for a version of the DREAM Act represents a reversal for Republicans, who have repeatedly rejected it.

Many GOP lawmakers have not yet expressed a willingness to grant a path to citizenship for adult immigrants. They argue that the last set of reforms in 1986, providing both amnesty and eventual citizenship for the undocumented in the country at the time and employer sanctions for those hiring persons without documents, failed to solve the problems they addressed.

There were 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States then; there are now more than twice that number. Furthermore, they argue, only two in five of the 2.7 million who were legalized went on to become citizens.

But the comparison with the reforms offered a quarter century ago is unfair. Employer sanctions were never fully implemented after the 1986 reform. We now have the technology and the will to build a national database of immigrants and issue biometric identity cards.

More importantly, studies of the economic impact of the 1986 immigration reforms show that the amnesty granted a generation ago was actually beneficial to the immigrants, their families and the country.

The independent Pew Research Center released a study recently of 20 million adult children of immigrants from census data and national surveys. On measures of economic progress, educational achievement and social integration, they were not only better off than their immigrant parents, but at least as successful as the general U.S. population and even more educated.

There are currently 16 million children of immigrants age 17 or younger who call the United States home. They are the largest and fastest growing portion of the working-age population, projected to nearly triple from 2012 to 2050, while the rest of the working-age population increases by only 32 percent. The U.S. economy will depend on them to replace the retiring baby boomers in the workforce.

The Immigration Act of 1924 created quotas to “preserve the ideal of American homogeneity” with the intent of engineering the racial composition of the population in favor of white Protestant Europeans. Many of these quotas are still in place and need to be eliminated.

As Congress remakes the immigration laws, it would be wise to rethink their purpose and create smarter immigration policies aimed not at isolating a subclass of non-citizens but benefiting the economy of the future by integrating immigrants as productive citizens.

Robert Brischetto is former executive director of the Southwest Voter Research Institute.