Mediaboss Marketing

The Trump administration this week released a new set of orders that could greatly increase the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

The White House has tamped down suggestions that the guidance will lead to massive deportations, but immigrant communities have been greatly alarmed.

Here are 5 questions surrounding the immigration guidance from Trumps Department of Homeland Security.

What happens to the dreamers?

DHS says the rules dont touch Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which allows high-achieving immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as kids to remain and work without threat of deportation.

In a conference call with congressional officesTuesday, officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said DACA beneficiaries wont be pursued, per se, but if a DACA recipient happens to be in the vicinity of another apprehension, that DACA recipient may be apprehended, a Democratic aide saidThursday, relaying ICEs message.

Theres no priority if everyone is prioritized for removal, the aide said.

At least one such case has already occurred this month in Seattle, where Daniel Ramirez Medina, twice enrolled in DACA, was detained by ICE agents who had come to his home to arrest his father. Ramirez has since sued.

Stephen Legomsky, former chief counsel of at DHSs Citizenship and Immigration Services branch, said its anyones guess what the Trump administration will do with DACA.

DHS could end new enrollments but continue the program and renew existing work permits when they expire after two years.

Terminating the program and revoking unexpired work permits seems unlikely, Legomsky predicted, because of the legal steps that would be required.

With more than 700,000 current DACA-holders, that process would be extremely labor-intensive, said Legomsky, now a professor emeritus at Washington University School of Law.

But Trump is getting plenty of pressure from conservative hardliners to kill the program altogether. And his newly appointed attorney general, former-Sen. Jeff SessionsJeff SessionsDem 2020 hopefuls lead pack in opposing Trump Cabinet picks Five tough questions for Trump on immigration Issa: Sessions should recuse himself from any Russia probes MORE (R-Ala.), was among its fiercest critics.

Are deportations about to spike?

The new DHS rules, by empowering immigration officials to remove virtually anyone in the country illegally while encouraging the help of local law enforcers, create the potential for a massive spike in deportations. But theres disagreement about what the practical effect of those changes will be.

One restricting factor mentioned by all sides is that DHS simply doesnt have the funding to find, process and remove 11 million people.

Still, Democrats and other immigration reform advocates who howled when Obamas deportation numbers rose to a record-setting 435,000 in 2013 fear the figure will jump much higher under Trump.

Thats largely because the new rules broadly expand the definition of criminality meriting prioritization to include, not only those convicted of crimes, but also those charged or having committed acts which constitute a chargeable criminal offense. That could mean that anyone admitting after-the-fact to even minor crimes say, driving without a license could quickly become a target.

Democrats also think Trumps rhetoric suggests muscle could be placed behind the orders.

While former President George W. Bush also established rules dictating that those merely charged with a crime were prospective ICE targets, he didnt express an intent to deport 11 million people, the Democratic aide said.

The way the Trump administration operates, they want big numbers. They want to show big things, huge things.

Roy Beck, head of NumbersUSA, which advocates for a reduction in immigration, said that while Trump is pushing a very accelerated and assertive deportation effort, theres no indication the administration is interested in mass round-ups. He expects the focus to be on those who have already been through removal proceedings, but not yet deported, and those who have been convicted of crimes. Combined, Beck puts that number at around 2 million.

You could do mass deportations very easy. You just start going to the various day-labor cites in any city and you could just sweep up busloads, he said. But I do not believe thats going to be happening.

I think that well be lucky to see 500,000 people removed this year, Beck added. Its not that easy, when youre not doing mass roundups.

Will Congress fund ramped-up enforcement efforts?

Funding has constantly limited the scale of the governments enforcement efforts, and the trend will almost certainly persist under Trump.

Indeed, ICEs 2016 budget was $5.9 billion, of which $3.2 billion was dedicated to enforcement and removal operations figures that still stand as part of the current continuing resolution (CR).

Republicans last year proposed a slight uptick in 2017 spending for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to cover, among other things, 100 new enforcement priority officers. But that figure pales to the 10,000 new ICE officers Trump wants to hire subject to available resources, the DHS memo clarifies.

The CBPs overall budget of $11.3 billion comes nowhere near the funding needed to perform mass deportations. A 2015 analysis conducted by the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, estimated the cost to apprehend, detain, process and deport 11 million people would run between $400 billion and $600 billion.

Lawmakers could face pressure to give Trump the resources he needs to make good on his deportation promises, but they will also hear from fiscal hawks who want to rein in deficit spending under a unified GOP government.

Will Mexico cooperate?

Trumps bellicose approach has soured relations between the U.S. and Mexico which could cripple the administrations deportation strategy, which leans heavily on the cooperation of its southern neighbor.

A key part of Trumps plan involves returning migrants who cross the southern border, regardless of their nationality, back to Mexico to await hearings on their asylum claims. Such cases have spiked in recent years as violence and corruption in Central America have prodded thousands of migrants northward.

Legomsky said Mexico has no legal obligation to accept the return of the many deportees from elsewhere, and even deporting Mexicans puts a proof-of-origin burden on U.S. officials.

Since many arrive without identification, [Mexico] could legitimately refuse to accept many individuals whom the U.S. asserts but cant prove are Mexican nationals, he said.

The administration acknowledged in the ICE conference call that DHS does not now have the right to push deportees into Mexico, said the Democratic aide familiar with the conversation. And Mexican leaders have threatened to raise their concerns with the United Nations.

I want to say clearly and emphatically that the government of Mexico and the Mexican people do not have to accept provisions that one government unilaterally wants to impose on the other, Luis Videgaray, Mexicos Foreign Minister, saidWednesday.

AThursdaymeeting between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, DHS Secretary John Kelly and Mexican officials did not seem to thaw the ice.

Trump has vowed to use a renegotiation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to force Mexicos hand. But Legomsky warned that Mexico has similar leverage to retaliate, both by adopting punitive import taxes on U.S. goods and by scaling back law enforcement efforts that have stemmed the flow of drug and human trafficking to the U.S. border.

Given the anti-American sentiment that Trump has already whipped up in Mexico, and the additional anger that mass deportations would engender, any or all of those retaliatory measures are politically realistic, he said.

Will it backfire on Republicans?

A tough law-and-order approach to immigration was the ballast of Trumps successful presidential run, and the effort to make good on his campaign promise has energized the conservative base. The strategy is particularly appealing in the white, working class communities that have suffered disproportionately from globalization and flocked to Trumps vow to put Americans first.

But there are also risks for the Republicans who embrace a strict enforcement strategy, especially if its seen to dismantle families within a growing ethnic electorate. Democrats have won the Hispanic vote by an overwhelming margin in the last three presidential cycles, and Republican leaders have scrambled for ways to narrow the divide.

After Obamas resounding win in 2012, GOP leaders drafted an autopsy report which, in part, urged the party to emphasize a tone of tolerance and respect toward Hispanic communities. The study was done at the request of Reince Priebus, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee and now Trumps chief of staff.

Democrats are already pouncing on the new deportation rules as evidence that Republicans have rejected their own advice.

This is not about smart politics for the Republican Party, said the Democratic aide. This is about a small group of ideologues that are trying to ram through an agenda while the Republicans have the House and the Senate and the presidency.

Read this article:
Five tough questions for Trump on immigration - The Hill

Jersey Vargas, 13, was just starting a long night of homework Wednesday when I asked how school was going.

Everythings fine. Straight As, said the Panorama City seventh-grader, who attends a magnet school and wants to go to Harvard or Yale one day. But math is getting more difficult.

I hadnt spoken to Jersey since I met her three years ago, when shestopped by the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels to meet with L.A. Archbishop Jose Gomez. Not long after that, just 10 years old, she headed to Rome with immigration reform advocates and asked Pope Francis if he could help save her father and millions of others from deportation.

Today, Jerseys father construction worker Mario Vargas may still need a miracle to avoid being kicked out of the country. He was arrested in 2013 in Tennessee and locked up for driving under the influence. He was released on bond several months later, but his deportation was formally begun earlier this month in immigration court.

The family is on pins and needles, said L.A. attorney Alex Galvez, who is requesting that federal officials use prosecutorial discretion and spare Vargas, who has lived in the U.S. without authorization for 17 years. Galvez arguesthat Vargas is a working, law-abiding family man of good character, with the exception of the DUI conviction, and is the primary breadwinner for Jersey and her five brothers and sisters, who are U.S. citizens.

Its hard to predict what will happen as the case moves forward because the Trump administration has sent so many mixed signals. Trump has said hes going after bad dudes guilty of serious crimes, but new deportation guidelines make it appear that the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally could all get the boot.

I think Trump is absolutely right to go after hard-core criminals. But I wonder how many taxpayers want to invest in prosecuting and shipping Mario Vargas back to Mexico, or to begin rounding upand deporting millions more like him. If Trump is such a great businessman, why doesnt he produce a breakdown on the costs and benefits, including the impact on the economy, wages and the price of goods?

Mario Vargas and countless others came north because of the relentless U.S. demand for labor. If that bothersTrump, why is he so timid about the bad hombres in the construction, agriculture, hospitality and banking industries, all of whom rely on and profit from illegal immigration? His schtick, instead, is to bully poor people who fled corruptionand crime to find work and provide for their families.

I checked back with Archbishop Gomeztoo, and he said if he had the chance, he would offer a simple piece of advice to Trump.

Get to know these people.

I was celebrating Mass at Saint Helensin South Gate and I was thinking, This church is packed, said Gomez. A lot of these people may not have documents, but theyre wonderful people. They come to church. Theyre hard-working. They pay taxes. They have nice families. I mean, these are good people, and I thought, Mr. Trump needs to come to St. Helens in South Gate to see how wonderful these people are.

He should get to know thewhole city, Gomez said.

We have Mass in 42 languages in Los Angeles, he said. This is the United States of America.

If someone in the U.S. illegally commitsa really bad crime, Gomez said, hes not opposed to deportation. But for someone like Jerseys father, he said, deportation for a relatively minor offensewould betoo severe.

Honestly, for me, the penalty is not proportionate to what happened, he said.

As he interprets Trumps immigration policy, Gomez said, any person in this country whos undocumented is considered a criminal. For me, that doesnt respect those basic principles I talkabout the dignity of the human person, the unity of the family.

I hear from a lot of readers, I told Gomez, who disagree. They want stricter border enforcement. Illegal is illegal, they say, and those who crash the border shouldnt be allowed to stay here while others wait in line for legal entry.

If youre skilled, said Gomez, the wait is much shorter. If youre a laborer, youll stand in line forever, no matter how great the demand for your work.

What about the Ten Commandments? I asked. If youre here illegally, doesnt that mean you broke the 9th Commandment thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?In other words, thou shalt not lie. (Has Trump been to confession lately?)

First of all, no matter what, the Catholic Church is going to protect our brothers and sisters, Gomez said. And the 1st Commandment is to love God and love one another. If its a situation where someone lies were going to be there for them, just as Jesus was always taking care of sinners.

Gomezs vision of immigration reform would include secure borders, penalties and possibly community service requirements for those who came without authorization, and a system that allows for the regulatedmovement of people into and out of the country as dictated by labor needs.

People are so afraid. Theyre really nervous, Gomez said. Its so sad to see little kids, like Jersey and others, thinking, I dont want to go to school because when I come home, maybe my parents will be gone.

If Jerseys father is deported, either the family will follow, and our public investment in the kids will be wasted before they become taxpaying contributors. Or the kids will stay, without their breadwinner, and taxpayers could be on the hook.

To Donald Trump, I would tell him to please stop judging us, because its like judging a book by its cover, Jersey told me.

Outwardly, at least, she has an unbound sense of optimism, and shes not giving up on Trump becoming more understanding. Maybe, she said, hell build bridges and not walls.If so, He could go down as one of our greatest presidents.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Get more of Steve Lopez's work and follow him on Twitter @LATstevelopez

MORE FROM STEVE LOPEZ

Why this gay, disabled Texan went to the Women's March to tell Trump: 'Mock me to my face'

Donald Trump vs. Steve Lopez: The Twitter 'war' is on!

See the rest here:
Trump needs to stop terrifying immigrant families and consider the real cost of mass deportations - Los Angeles Times

|

Posted: Feb 25, 2017 12:01 AM

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) unveiled a bill titled, "the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act," on February 7th. This bill seeks to limit legal immigration to "637,960 in its first year and to 539,958 by its tenth year-a 50 percent reduction from the 1,051,031 immigrants who arrived in 2015." According to Senator Cotton's officialwebsite,the Act aims to achieve the reduction of legal immigration by doing the following:

Other than eliminating the visa lottery program, which I support wholeheartedly, the bill does nothing new to fundamentally change our legal immigration system (restricting the number of visas isn't a new approach). For example, it seeks to reform family-based immigration by maintaining some preference while eliminating other preferences. The question we should ask is: why does the government need to set preference categories at all?

The preference system was first installed through the immigration Act of 1952 and further enhanced by the Immigration Act of 1965,which gave preference to family-reunion for relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents (a.k.a.green card holders) in the order of unmarried children under 21 years of age, spouses, parents, children older than 21, siblings and extended family members. One obvious flaw of thishierarchyis that itfavors the old (parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents) and the young (children younger than 21 years of age) but discriminates against the most likely productive ones (people 21 years old or older, and siblings of U.S. citizens and permanent residents). Thus, thissystem gives preference to people who are more likely to become financial dependents rather than economic contributors. Empirical evidence shows that after we started admitting immigrants mainly on a family reunification basis in 1965, wealsoopened up the welfare system to immigrants.By keeping the preference for children younger than 21 while eliminating preference for siblings, the RAISE Act does nothing to fix this problem.

The right approach is to totally eliminate the preference hierarchy. U.S. citizens and green card holders should have the freedom to decide which family members they want to bring to the U.S. We should make it clear that the sponsors themselves have to be financially responsible for whomever they bring into our nation for at least 5 years (after 5 years, a green card holder can apply for U.S. citizenship) and restrict access to social welfare benefits to U.S. citizens only. As long as we "build a wall" around our welfare system, we as nation shouldn't dictate which family members that the U.S. citizen and green card holders want to bring.

The RAISE Act seeks to codify the number of refugees we bring in on annual basis to 50,000. Historically, the quota for refugees has been set by the U.S. president on annual basis and hasfluctuated from as low as 30,000 to as high as 200,000. It gives the executive authority and flexibility to react to refugee crises as the result of world events on a timely basis. If we codify the refugee quota in an immigration law, we will lose such flexibility. Therefore, I'd rather see the power of determining the annual quota of refugees remain with U.S. president.

Let's not forget that in addition to the refugee program, our current immigration system has a separate category for asylum-seekers.There is noquotaon the number of individuals who may be grantedpermanent residency throughasylum in a given year, and there is no clear definition of what constitutes persecution.Asylum seekers have been subjected to far less scrutiny than refugees.Consequently, this is a program thathas been riddled with fraud and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)has called for additional actions from the Department of Homelandto address the fraud risk in the asylum program specifically.Yet, the RAISE Act fails to address it. The right approach is tocombine refugees andasylum seekers into one humanitarian program under one quota that set by U.S. President on annual basis and is subjected to a uniform screening standard. This willallow immigration agents to focus on vetting security threats among applicants.

What I found the most troubling with the RAISE Act is that it assumes it will "help raise American workers' wages" by reducing legal immigration drastically. This is an old and beaten- path that we as a nation tried and failed. The last time the United States severely limited its legal immigration was through the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which capped legal immigration to 350,000 annually.In 1922, the U.S. received only 309,556 new immigrants, compared with 805,228 the prior year.other more influential causes that have had held American workers back, which have nothing to do with immigration.

For example, automation is a far bigger threat to American workers than immigration. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, recentlypointed outhow automation has already disrupted car-based transportation and he relayed concerns that autonomous technology will have severe impact on American workers--"Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12-15 percent of the workforce be unemployed." He said.

To truly help American workers to get employed and have better wages, Senator Cotton and Senator Perdue need to focus on issues such as education reform, which will help Americans equip themselves with knowledge and skills that employers desire. If the Senators want to eliminate something, let's eliminate ruinous and job-killing laws and regulations such as the minimum wage requirement and occupation licensing requirements.

While I believe the RAISE Act is a flawed bill, I do share bothSenator Cotton and Senator Perdue's concern for the legal immigration system. A good immigration reform bill should focus on simplification and emphasize skill-based immigration sowe will ensure a win-win situation for both our nation and the new immigrants. If they are willing to listen, there aregood ideasout there on how to fix our broken immigration system.

See original here:
The RAISE Act Takes a Flawed Approach on Immigration Reform - Townhall

This is no time for wide-eyed idealism. Many of our community's ideals are being challenged and we need to defend them with verifiable facts and unwavering commitment.

Those efforts must include everything from ensuring local immigrants have a clear path toward legal employment to protecting the hard won gains made by the LGBT community.

It requires paying close attention to state and federal lawmakers who are attempting to dismantle decades of progress in environmental regulation and financial reform and who would spend money on lawsuits to undo federal land protections while stripping funding from the arts.

So it is imperative to base our convictions on fact, not fiction.

Park City's support for local immigrants in the face of the recent Immigration Customs and Enforcement arrests is an example of the need for clear communication and unbiased analysis in these troubling times of upheaval in Washington, D.C. It is the same high wire we ask our local law enforcement officials to walk every day.

Several residents at Thursday's meeting about immigration enforcement concerns asked what they could do to protect their Latino friends and employees from potential deportation. Their questions were sincere and well founded, based on longtime relationships with loyal, if not quite legal, employees. But their well meaning efforts would be better spent pressuring legislators to enact meaningful immigration reform with rules that lower the barriers to legal residency.

Thursday's crowded meeting was an admirable display of compassion from a community that values diversity and equal rights. But in addition to making a strong statement opposing enforcement of harsh federal immigration rules, motivated residents should focus on specific initiatives within the system that would give immigrants the peace of mind and equal status they crave.

While we can and should ask our police officers and sheriff's deputies to differentiate between local and federal enforcement responsibilities, we cannot ask either to turn a blind eye to criminal activities. We can, however, demand that our state and U.S. elected representatives dial back their misguided anti-immigrant crusade and get to work on reinforcing the compassionate principles that turned America's melting pot into a strong and prosperous nation.

Here are some things you can do: -Become informed about immigrants' rights and actively ensure they are honored. This site will help: https://www.ilrc.org/conozca-sus-derechos Do not imperil immigrants by hiring them to work illegally. Instead, help them obtain the proper permits. -Call on your senators and representatives in Congress to oppose draconian immigration enforcement and instead support constructive reform: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

Here is the original post:
Park City, energized, need to push for compassionate immigration reform - The Park Record

People deported from the United States arrive on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight on Feb. 9 in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

John Moore/Getty Images.

Tax-cutting, government-shrinking, regulating-shredding immigration enthusiasts such as Alex Nowrasteh, a researcher at the Cato Institute, are all for opening Americas borders if immigrants and their families are denied access to safety-net benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP. Well, we absolutely shouldnt be paying welfare benefits, Nowrasteh said on a recent appearance on Fox News Tucker Carlson Tonight. I don't want to pay welfare benefits to anybody. And we definitely shouldnt be paying them to immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

Immigration advocates on the left, in contrast, believe that mass less-skilled immigration can benefit the country if taxpayers provide immigrants and their children with the government support they need to lead dignified lives. Thats why they champion causes like providing unauthorized immigrants with subsidized medical care and generous wage subsidies and expanding access to early education programs for the children of poor immigrants who start life at a serious disadvantage relative to their better-off peers. To the pro-immigration left, support for high immigration levels goes hand in hand with support for other egalitarian causes, like a cradle-to-grave welfare state and generous foreign aid.

For years, libertarian activists have provided much of the intellectual firepower for the pro-immigration cause. The pro-immigration left routinely parrots arguments originally made by libertarians who quite literally want to eliminate the welfare state, and many pro-immigration liberals in Congress have signed on to legislation that would go dangerously far in this direction. But ultimately, the pro-immigration right and the pro-immigration left have goals that are utterly incompatible. This is a strange sort of bipartisanship. Its as though immigration advocates on one side of the ideological divide believe that they can fleece advocates on the other: I think youre a useful idiot, and you feel the same way about me, so lets join forces! In the long run, though, one side or the other is going to be proven wrong. For the sake of our nation, I hope its the libertarians who lose this argument. As much as I might disagree with the liberals on the wisdom of increasing less-skilled immigration, they at least appreciate that zeroing out the safety net would be a humanitarian disaster for the millions of poor immigrant families who live among us.

The contradictions at the heart of the pro-immigration coalition are all very amusing until you realize the extent to which immigrants depend on the welfare state. As of 2010, the per-person median household income of immigrants was $13,961, about one-third lower than the $20,795 per-person median household income of natives. To a well-off person, this income gap might not sound like a yawning chasm. But it can mean the difference between being poor enough to qualify for food stamps or not.

In a comprehensive report on the economic and fiscal impact of immigration, the National Academy of Sciences found that 45.3 percent of immigrant-headed households with children relied on food assistance as compared to 30.6 percent of native-headed households with children. Taking food assistance away from these families wouldnt just mildly inconvenience them. One influential study by economists Hilary Hoynes of UCBerkeley, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University, and Douglas Almond of Columbia University found that access to food stamps has long-lasting effects on the well-being of children raised in low-income households, including significant reductions in obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetesserious chronic illnesses that can reduce earning potential and generate significant medical costs.

We already limit the extent to which legal immigrants can access the safety net. In his Fox News appearance, Nowrasteh correctly observed that legal immigrants are barred from accessing safety-net benefits for their first five years in the country. There are a number of exemptions from this five-year waiting period, however, and it doesnt apply at all to humanitarian immigrants, who represent about 15 percent of all legal immigrants.

But the waiting period is having an impact all the same. Arloc Sherman and Danilo Trisi of the left-of-center Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have observed that the five-year waiting period has contributed to a sharp rise in food insecurity and deep poverty rates for noncitizens and children living with noncitizen parents. Thats despite the fact that only about one-sixth of legal immigrants have been in the country for five years or less. If you believe that these programs really do help people, as Sherman and Trisi do, it stands to reason that if all legal immigrants were barred from access to safety-net benefits, the consequences would be far worse. So its worth noting that in a 2013 paper, Nowrasteh and Sophie Coleleading thinkers on the pro-immigration rightexplicitly call for doing just that, an approach they refer to as building a wall around the welfare state.

What would be the likely result of building a wall around the welfare state? For one thing, large numbers of noncitizens would naturalize. The sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren have observed that in the wake of the 1996 welfare reforms limits on noncitizens access to safety-net benefits, many immigrants embraced defensive naturalization to ensure they would continue to receive public assistancea perfectly sensible thing for poor immigrants to do. Nowrasteh and Cole acknowledge this likelihood, which is why they conclude on the following note: Instead of trying in vain to halt immigration, we should turn our energy toward reforming welfare, making it less accessible to all, eliminating it altogether, or lowering the benefit levels. Judging by Nowrastehs remarks on Fox News (I dont want to pay welfare benefits to anybody), eliminating safety-net benefits altogether is his preferred option.

How is it that liberals wound up making common cause with libertarians who want to shrink the welfare state until its small enough to drown in a bathtub? Theres a simple explanation. Comprehensive immigration reformincreasing immigration levels and granting unauthorized immigrants a path to citizenshipis the mother of all bipartisan causes. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both favored it, and a comprehensive immigration reform bill (the gang of eight bill) came extremely close to getting signed into law in 2013. While most of the great and the good in both parties see comprehensive immigration reform as the only sensible way forward, forging this bipartisan alliance hasnt always been easy. To get Republican lawmakers on board, they had to be convinced that the gang of eight bill wouldnt lead newly legalized immigrants to start accessing the safety net. Thats where the libertarians came in.

Among immigration wonks, there is an ongoing debate about how to think about the net fiscal impact of immigration. That is, when we sum up all the taxes that immigrants pay and then sum up the cost of the various benefits they receive, is the number were left with positive or negative? The aforementioned National Academy of Sciences report concluded that highly educated immigrants will on average pay much more in taxes than theyll receive in services while the least-educated immigrants tend to receive more in services than they pay in taxes. Much depends on the assumptions we make about how generous we will be going forward to the poorest of the poor.

As a general rule, restrictionists want to raise the average skill level of future immigration flows, to ensure that high-income immigrants greatly outnumber low-income immigrants. Pro-immigration liberals are less interested in improving the net fiscal impact of immigration because they understand that the whole point of income redistribution is to transfer resources from the rich to the poor, which by definition means making the net fiscal impact of low-income immigrants worse. The more you cut taxes on poor immigrants, the more you provide them with high-quality medical care and education regardless of their ability to pay, the more dollars youll wind up transferring to them on a net basis. That is the price thoughtful liberals are willing to pay to achieve what is essentially a humanitarian goal. Libertarians split the baby in a different way: They seek to improve the net fiscal impact of immigration by slashing the services available to low-income immigrants and by making the tax burden less progressive. Problem solved!

Which leads us back to comprehensive immigration reform. The gang of eight bill granted unauthorized immigrants who met certain requirements registered provisional immigrant status. Influenced by libertarian thinkers, the bills architects barred RPIs from accessing federal means-tested programs, including Medicaid and SNAP. RPI status would last for a decade, at which point RPIs could apply to become lawful permanent residents. Then theyd have to wait another several years to access safety-net benefits. Altogether, unauthorized immigrants legalized under the gang of eight bill would have had to wait 13 to 15 years before they could rely on programs designed to help poor people stay healthy.

If were going to have an amnesty of some kind, we need to face the fact that most unauthorized immigrants have low market incomes.

Wouldnt unauthorized immigrants be better off as RPIs, even if they were denied access to safety-net benefits, than if they were subject to deportation, as they are now? Its a fair point. If cutting a deal with people who want to dismantle the welfare state had been the only way for liberals to shield long-settled unauthorized immigrants from deportation, that might be a deal worth taking. But Im not sure thats the best deal on table.

Mark Krikorian, head of the staunchly restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, has argued for an immigration compromise that would couple an amnesty for long-established unauthorized immigrants with lower immigration levels. Even Donald Trump has hinted that he sees stepped-up enforcement as a prelude to some kind of amnesty. Liberals who want an immigration amnesty, then, have a choice of allies. They can join forces with libertarians who want to strip immigrants, and eventually everyone, of access to the safety net. Or they can work with restrictionists who are willing to accept an amnesty and to keep the safety net intact in exchange for a reduction in future less-skilled immigration.

If were going to have an amnesty of some kind, whether now or in the medium-term future, we need to face the fact that most unauthorized immigrants live in households with low market incomes. Thats not because unauthorized immigrants are lazynothing could be further from the truth. Rather, its because demand for less-skilled labor in general has been falling, and more than half of unauthorized immigrant adults have less than a high school education. In a 2013 profile of the unauthorized immigrant population, researchers at the Migration Policy Institute found that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants lived in households with incomes that would qualify them for some form of public assistance. Does it really make sense to deny these people food stampsespecially when theyre our neighbors and when many of them will likely become our fellow citizens?

I can understand and appreciate thoughtful liberals who want America to serve as a refuge for people in need, even if that means that we might have to make sacrifices to better their lives. My own belief is that we should invest the resources necessary to help todays low-income immigrants and their children become full participants in American society before admitting many more. What I cant abide are those who speak of welcoming desperately poor people into our country while calling for the destruction of the safety net. Thats a solution that will create more problems than it solves and cause irreparable harm to some of Americas most vulnerable people.

Original post:
An Immigration Marriage Made in Hell - Slate Magazine