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In summer 2007, the western media was focused on a debate in the US Congress over immigration legislation. The bill in front of the Senate was aimed at securing borders and encouraging economic opportunity for immigrants. The bill was highly controversial because it allowed for eventual citizenship of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently living in the US. Because the proposed bill was lacking congressional support, it failed in debate before ever going to a vote.
There are more immigrants in this country then ever before and there is a growing controversy over how to handle the huge population of undocumented immigrants in the US. It is due to these factors that I felt that this topic deserved my attention and was relevant to the trans-national economic theory discussed in class. In this paper I hope to uncover the true impact that immigrants have on the United States economy.
In an article by the Population and Development Review, the authors outline the proper process for evaluating the long term fiscal costs and benefits of both legal and illegal immigration. The article stated that the only way to truly determine the impact of admitting new immigrants is not to look at current information about immigrant house holds in America, but to look forward to the future projections of government spending and tax revenue. One study that encompasses these important considerations is the 1997 Study of Immigration by the National Research Counsel (NRC). The NRC estimates the cost and benefits of immigration on a per capita basis, taking into account all the major factors that could determine future economic impact. These factors include the number of immigrants in the country, the immigrant’s descendents, the ratio of legal to illegal immigrants and most importantly, the skill level of the foreigners who are entering the country. This landmark study found that, in the long run, immigrants on average would contribute $80,000 to the...