Congressional silence hurts immigrants

Immigration is an important issue for federal and state candidates. People fear the drug violence along our border and the apparent ease with which terrorists can enter the United States. Those concerns are understandable. Another concern is not: the claim that immigrants (whether legal or illegal) steal jobs from Americans.

The argument has a superficial appeal: If more people are looking for jobs, there must be more unemployment, all things being equal. Similarly, if I spit into the ocean, the ocean level rises, all other things being equal. However, all other things are not equal.

Our $14 trillion economy is constantly changing. Lately, it has been growing slower than usual, yet, even now, immigrant workers not only take jobs, they also create jobs. They need goods and services just like the rest of us. Tax policy that punishes productivity, not immigration, should be the real worry.

Obviously, we benefit from skilled immigrants. Immigrants from Russia, Taiwan and India created Google, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems. They created tens of thousands of jobs and changed the face of technology.

But less-skilled immigrants are important too, as various econometric studies demonstrate. Consider the 2009 study of Giovanni Peri, a UC Davis economics professor (and a skilled immigrant from Italy). He could find "no evidence" that immigrants crowded-out native employment. In the short run, he found no significant effects. However, in the long run, "a net inflow of immigrants equal to 1 percent of employment increases income per worker by 0.6 percent to 0.9 percent."

One reason is that immigrants create demand for goods and services. Another is that immigrants usually dovetail rather than compete with native employment. For example, in a 2005 study, Peri found that more than half (54 percent) of tailors in the U.S. are foreign-born, while crane operators are 99 percent natives; ditto for plaster-stucco masons (44 percent immigrant) versus sewer-pipe cleaners (more than 99 percent native). Immigrants tend to complement rather than substitute for native labor.

Some people look to the states to stop the flow of immigrants. Recently, a federal judge invalidated an Arizona law that authorized state police to ask arrestees their immigrant statuses. However, in DeCana v. Bica (1976), the Supreme Court upheld a California law that prohibited an employer from knowingly employing an illegal immigrant. Later, in Muehler v. Mena (2005), the court ruled that there was no constitutional violation when state police officers, while executing a search warrant, questioned Mena about her immigration status. Police do not need any "independent reasonable suspicion" to do that. More recently, Rhode Island state police started checking the immigration status of people stopped for traffic violations. They reported all illegal immigrants to federal authorities for deportation. The federal appellate court rejected arguments that the state action was unconstitutional in Estrada v. Rhode Island (Feb. 2010).

We are a litigious democracy, so we will have such lawsuits. However, there is a simpler way: Congress can turn its attention to enacting legislation to deal with these issues directly instead of relying on lower courts (and eventually the Supreme Court) to interpret the sounds of Congressional silence .