Limiting legal immigration is not the answer to America’s economic troubles — it never has been
President Donald Trump sparked chaos and confusion two months ago when, in a late-night tweet, he announced his plan to “temporarily suspend immigration into the United States” amid growing coronavirus concerns, which he called “the Invisible Enemy.”
His executive order, he explained, would stem primarily from “the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens.”
As has been characteristic of President Trump’s administration, the tweet — ominous to large swaths of people who fall under the broad umbrella of “immigrant” — was sent out and then officials were left scrambling to put together a viable executive order to reflect the president’s promises within legal and practical bounds.
In the meantime, President Trump had succeeded in inciting panic among the many immigrants within the country who saw the tweet and were left with questions that even senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies couldn’t immediately answer.
Despite widespread fears, the executive action, announced days later, was more narrow in scope than his tweet suggested, specifically targeting legal immigrants by placing a 60-day freeze on green-cards for those applying from outside of the U.S.
Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s press secretary, emphasized that the move was not necessarily founded on the fear of immigration as a threat to public health. Rather, it was intended to assuage the toll that battling the Covid-19 pandemic has taken on the U.S. economy — a toll that has left nearly 30 million unemployed, a level not seen since the Great Depression.
“As President Trump has said, decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers,” she said in a statement. “At a time when Americans are looking to get back to work, action is necessary.”
It is a sentiment that a majority of 65% of Americans support, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. Even young people 18 to 29 years old, typically more in favor of immigration, were part of the majority that supported the temporary halt. Michael Hanmer, a professor of government and politics at the university and co-director of the survey, commented that it was a way “for people to deal with the reality that so many scientific and policy questions have yet to be answered,” by taking refuge in “concrete solutions.”
However, evidence for limiting immigration as a useful economic measure remains contested.
On the one hand, as cited in the president’s press statement, some economists have argued that not every American necessarily benefits from the influx of immigrants.
“Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip,” George Borjas, professor of economics and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, once wrote. His research has been embraced by the Center for Immigration Studies, a contentious think tank that favors strict immigration restrictions.
The 2017 study, widely heralded at the time by restrictionist advocates who felt the debate was settled and discussed vigorously by several major media outlets, has been cited by former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, and, of course, the president himself, as definitive proof of the economic harms immigrants bring to the country.
Far from settled, however, the debate was joined by many economists who quickly opposed this popular view with evidence of their own.
Michael Clemens, an immigration expert, economist, and director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy at the Center for Global Development, published an article for Vox detailing how other researchers, analyzing the same data and using the same analytical tools as Borjas, arrived at wildly different conclusions from him, primarily because “there’s too much noise in the data to conclude native workers were hurt.”
Clemens further explains how Borjas used a questionably small subsample that selectively omitted entire groups of people, leaving just 2% of the data from the original sample to analyze, that, when adjusted for in other studies, showed “no clear evidence that wages fell (or that unemployment rose) among the least-skilled workers in Miami, even after a sudden refugee wave sharply raised the size of that workforce.”
Despite the conflicting evidence, President Trump has continued to use Borjas’ reasoning to make good on his campaign promises to limit immigration, most recently using the public health threat of the coronavirus crisis as a defense for his policies halting visa processing, postponing citizenship ceremonies, pausing the refugee program, and immediately turning back those who cross the border.
The dispute over whether immigrants hurt or help the economy, however, is far from new, and Trump is far from the first leader to turn to immigration as a “concrete solution” offering a salve to a population desperate for economic relief.
During the Great Depression, for example, state and local leaders mobilized to repatriate around 500,000 Mexican workers, in an effort to contract the labor market with hopes of boosting jobs and wages for American citizens.
Another 2017 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, however, found that the employment effects were veritably negligible.
Although politicians had based their policies on the argument that Americans would be quick to take those jobs vacated by the repatriated Mexicans, the researchers explained, their analysis found that “cities with larger repatriation intensity, driven by a larger initial Mexican community, performed similarly or worse in terms of native employment and wages, relative to cities which were similar in most labor market characteristics but which experienced small repatriation intensity.”
Thirty years later, President Kennedy also attempted to attenuate domestic worker concerns over employment by deliberately engineering labor market scarcity. In a concerted effort to boost wages, particularly in the agricultural sector, the president began what Lyndon B. Johnson then executed: expelling half a million Mexican laborers enrolled in the seasonal Bracero program, a bilateral agreement that allowed millions of Mexican men to work on U.S. farms through short-term agricultural contracts until it was disbanded in 1964.
According to a Dartmouth College study by Clemens et al., the move — once again — proved futile as a way to boost wages for domestic workers.
“Farm wages did rise in the states that had relied most heavily on bracero labor, and rose more quickly after exclusion than they had before it. But remarkably, those wage trends are indistinguishable from the wage trends in states that had relied little on braceros, and also from those in states completely unaffected by the exclusion. If anything, wages grew faster in the unexposed states, closing the gap slightly with the most exposed states.”
While the scope of the current executive action by the president will not impact green-card applicants and work visa-holders living in the U.S., the country’s tech sector is particularly concerned that their employment pool will be hard-hit.
According to Pew Research Center, more than one million immigrants arrive in the U.S. annually, although recent years have produced increasingly lower numbers. Out of these immigrants, Mexican, Chinese, and Indian nationals make up the majority of the migrant workforce — providing a vital supply of talent for many Silicon Valley tech companies.
According to immigration experts, the current ban will likely not have immediate effects on this supply, but many fear that the uncertainty it has engendered will hinder companies’ recruiting efforts in the long-term and international job applicants’ desire to seek job prospects in the U.S. at all.
Luis Von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, a language-learning service, and a Guatemalan native, tweeted, “I came to the US and instead of taking American jobs, I helped create jobs and billions of dollars in value. Using the virus to stop the Green Card process will hurt companies like @duolingo. We’ll have to open offices and move jobs outside the US because of this.”
At a time when the U.S. economy is expected to contract as much as 30% in the second quarter, the last thing one of the top five sectors contributing the most to the American economy needs is a limited pool of talent.
Given the soaring costs of visa processing fees, foreign-born tech workers are often necessarily sponsored by large companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google through a temporary work visa, with the promise of a pathway to permanent residency in the future. In 2016, for example, Google’s employees secured more than 2,500 H-1B visas, specialty professional visas, for their foreign-born workers and Apple secured around 2,000, with 60% of their applicants holding master’s degrees.
However, President Trump’s recent announcement of another executive order temporarily suspending highly-skilled work visas for H1-B holders outside of the U.S. promises to crack down even further on the already arduous process of obtaining one of those coveted visas.
Alejandro, a senior software engineer working in the iCloud division at Apple, is no stranger to this agonizing uncertainty.
A Mexican citizen who grew up in Europe and then moved to the United States during his high school years, he has spent a decade battling with the American immigration system in order to be able to stay in the country.
While studying computer science in the honors program at the University of Texas at Austin, a semester away from graduating summa cum laude and with a job offer from Apple already lined up post-graduation, Alejandro was suddenly notified by his family that their permanent residency application, filed three years prior, had been denied due to a clerical error. They were to all leave the country or be branded illegal.
Alejandro flew to Mexico City and was forced to apply for an emergency student visa, or F-1, in order to be able to graduate on time. Although he was able to secure it and receive his diploma, Alejandro quickly realized he couldn’t file for an OPT, a year-long work authorization offered to students on the F-1 visa, because he was six months short of fulfilling the year applicants are required to be in the U.S. with an F-1 in order to be eligible.
After extensive back-and-forth between Apple’s immigration lawyers, Alejandro’s prospective boss, and himself, the company decided to sponsor him under a TN visa, a non-immigrant NAFTA professional visa that allows high-skilled Mexican and Canadian nationals in limited areas of expertise to work in the U.S. At the same time, he was instructed to apply for the H-1B visa, an annual selection process congressionally mandated to be capped at 65,000 available visas, with 20,000 more available for applicants with master’s degrees or higher. Should applications greatly exceed the available spots, a visa lottery kicks in where the chances of selection range anywhere from 21–38%.
After three consecutive years of applying with no luck, Alejandro, who had by now risen in the ranks at Apple, could no longer fit the narrow professional requirements of the TN visa, which is intended for lower-level employees. In another move that has cost Apple a hefty price, the only solution — besides letting Alejandro go — was to relocate him to the company’s headquarters in Paris, France.
“The plan was to send me there for one, maybe two years, and then bring me back with an L-1 visa for intra-company transferees, circumventing the entire lottery process,” he explained.
Although initially wary of the move, Alejandro was granted French permanent residency after only three months in the country, and he managed to pick up enough French to be able to comfortably converse in about the same amount of time, making his relocation a lot smoother than expected.
That is, until the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Forced to hole up all alone in his one-bedroom apartment, in a country that enacted some of the strictest lockdown measures, Alejandro admits that it has not been easy.
“I’ve been quarantining at home for several months now and, even though my work has helped to keep me busy and distracted, I’ve had a lot of refrigerator issues that have left me with rotten food on many days,” he said. “If it weren’t for my daily calls with my family, who knows where my sanity would be.”
Recently, however, Alejandro was given some good news. After four years of failed attempts, his 2020 H-1B application was finally selected through the visa lottery — a hopeful sign that he will soon be able to return to his office in Apple’s San Francisco campus.
“But just because it’s been selected,” he pointed out warily, “doesn’t necessarily mean it’s been or will be processed.”
Citing Trump’s April tweet imposing expanded restrictions on legal immigration, Alejandro fears that the administration will continue to use the public health crisis as a guise under which to enact increasingly harsh policies that will curtail his, and his colleagues’, futures.
Indeed, it was reported that four U.S. senators sent a letter to President Trump urging for the explicit suspension of all new guest worker visas, including the H-1B, for at least the next two months.
“Given the extreme lack of available jobs for American job-seekers as portions of our economy begin to reopen, it defies common sense to admit additional foreign guest workers to compete for such limited employment,” they wrote.
The letter was signed by senators Tom Cotton (R-ARK), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and John Hawley (R-MO).
Given initiatives such as the one led by these senators, Alejandro has actively tried to avoid getting his hopes up, as he believes there’s a high chance something will come up to deter him once again from being able to stay in the United States.
“I’m just tired, I’m so tired of fighting a system that clearly wants nothing to do with me, when all I want is to contribute, to work on things I’m passionate about,” he said.
“Things that, more often than not, help many Americans,” he added.
