Legal Immigration Projections

The growing importance of immigration in the United States today prompted this examination of the adequacy of U.S. immigration data. This volume summarizes data needs in four areas: immigration trends, assimilation and impacts, labor force issues, and family and social networks. It includes recommendations on additional sources for the data needed for program and research purposes, and new questions and refinements of questions within existing data sources to improve the understanding of immigration and immigrant trends.

Relevant demographic, statistical information can inform policy decisions on immigration, but concerns continue to be expressed about an apparent lack of such information. There have been repeated indications that statistics that could inform key debates are lacking, misleading, or otherwise inadequate. This report studies policy-related needs for demographic, statistical information on immigration; reports on federal statistics that address those needs, includes what is known about the quality of those statistics; identifies data gaps; and suggests strategies for improving statistics. Charts and tables.

The recent level of illegal immigration to the United States has increased debates about the effect of these immigrants on the cost of public services, and states have begun to enact policies that limit the public services available to illegal immigrants. The central issues are how many illegal immigrants reside in particular local areas and states and their effect on public expenditures and revenues and the economy in general. The Local Fiscal Effects of Illegal Immigration workshop selected six studies for analysis. The six case studies focused on one specific aspect of the complex question of the demographic, economic, and social effects of immigration: the net public services costs of illegal immigrants to selected geographical regions.

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - Region: USA, grade: A (85%), Bishop's University Lennoxville (Bishop's University Lennoxville, Canada), course: Topics in U.S. Public Policy, language: English, abstract: The United States of America has always been a nation of immigrants. After the earlier settlement by Europeans, the next great wave of immigration started in 1840 and ended in 1924. Another wave of immigration can be dated from 1960 to the present. From the year 1970 to the year 2000, the U.S. has admitted more than 20 million people as legal permanent residents (LPRs). In the fiscal year of 2006, the U.S. admitted a total number of 1,266,264 LPRs. Immigration is controlled by a policy that aims at several purposes. Besides the economic goals of increasing U.S. productivity and the U.S. standard of living, it serves the important social goal of unifying families, the socio-cultural goal of promoting diversity in the U.S. population, the economic goal of increasing America’s prosperity, and the political goal of maintaining stable demographics. In short, the main focuses of legal immigration are the socio-cultural, economic, and political goals. According to Linda Chavez, author and chairperson of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C., debates about immigration have become “one of the most controversial public-policy debates in recent memory” . To weigh the benefits of legal immigration, it is essential to know its difficulties. In fact, the advantages of legal immigration not only counterbalance its problems, but also illustrate the need of legal immigrants for the U.S. in terms of socio-cultural, economic, and political factors. Nonetheless, legal immigration is only beneficial with a proper immigration policy. For this reason the proposal of a point system by George J. Borjas, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, seems to be the right step to guide a reform of American legal immigration policy. Socio-cultural, economic, and political benefits of legal immigrants First, immigrants are willing to adapt themselves to the American cultural principles and contribute social, economic, and political benefits. Instead of disrupting the societal coherence, or changing American culture, the majority of immigrants not only adapts to the American way of life, but enriches it through diversity. Chavez underlines that immigrants integrate themselves much better into American life than is commonly believed. One indicator, for instance, is the population’s high rate of Hispanic intermarriage, where one quarter of Hispanics marries outside their ethnic group. Wattenberg and Zinsmeister conclude as follows: