Just the Facts

September 17^th is Citizenship Day—a day to recognize and celebrate all of the immigrants who have chosen to integrate fully and become U.S. citizens.  While some fear that demographic shifts threaten American identity, research and experience have shown that today’s immigrants integrate into American society just like generations of immigrants before them.  Citizenship Day is a time to celebrate the many immigrants who have taken a step toward full integration and participation in U.S. civic life. 

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Published On: Tue, Sep 16, 2008 | Download File

Anti-immigrant activists and politicians are fond of relying upon anecdotes to support their oft-repeated claim that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, are dangerous criminals.  This mythical claim is usually based on rhetorical sleight of hand in which individual stories of heinous crimes committed by immigrants are presented as “proof” that we must restrict immigration or “get tough” on the undocumented in order to save the lives of U.S. citizens.  While these kinds of arguments are emotionally powerful, they are intellectually dishonest.  There is no doubt that dangerous criminals must be punished, and that immigrants who are dangerous criminals should not be allowed to enter the United States or should be deported if they already are here.  But harsh immigration policies are not effective in fighting crime because—as numerous studies over the past 100 years have shown—immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are not associated with higher rates of crime.  This holds true for both legal immigrants and the undocumented, regardless of their country of origin or level of education.

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Published On: Wed, Sep 10, 2008 | Download File

A new 2008 National Survey of Latinos by the Pew Hispanic Center reveals disturbing new evidence that Latinos – U.S. citizens as well as legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants—are feeling the effects of the immigration debate gone ugly.  Regardless of immigration status, Latinos are feeling anxious and discriminated against amid sanctioned public immigrant-bashing and stepped-up immigration enforcement measures.

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Published On: Thu, Oct 09, 2008 | Download File

According to new estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States did not increase between 2007 and 2008, and may actually have fallen. These findings should come as no surprise given the current state of the economy.

Published On: Wed, Oct 01, 2008 | Download File

Over the past year and a half, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona has transformed his police department into an immigration-enforcement agency, gaining international publicity in the process.  Yet a growing number of elected officials, media outlets, and religious and civic leaders have criticized Sheriff Arpaio’s tactics and their impact on his community.  In addition, two independent reports by the East Valley Tribune and the Goldwater Institute describe a Sheriff’s department where crime-solving is down and racial profiling and budget expenditures are way up.

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Published On: Wed, Dec 17, 2008 | Download File

Expanding mandatory E-Verify as part of the stimulus package would threaten the jobs of thousands of U.S. citizens, decrease productivity, saddle U.S. businesses with additional costs, and hinder the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) ability to provide benefits to needy and deserving Americans – all at a time when we need to stimulate our economy.  The fact is: expanding E-Verify now would decelerate the Stimulus Package and slow America’s economic recovery.

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Published On: Thu, Feb 05, 2009 | Download File

Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a report detailing the disturbing links between three immigration restrictionist groups: the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), Numbers USA, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). These groups describe themselves as "advocates of lower immigration," yet the report depicts much darker motives underlying their work.  The SPLC report makes clear that they are in fact a full-throated anti-immigrant lobby and not interested in a balanced debate.

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Published On: Tue, Feb 03, 2009 | Download File

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), as well as the Heritage Foundation, have recently claimed that up to 300,000 construction jobs created by the economic stimulus bill could be filled by undocumented immigrants.  CIS arrives at this scary number by using a job-creation formula designed for highway expenditures in 2007, and then tacking on an estimate of the undocumented construction workforce from 2005—before the mass layoffs that have plagued the construction industry.  Beyond the use of fuzzy math, CIS also suggests that the federal government’s “E-Verify” employment-verification pilot program could prevent undocumented immigrants from securing these new jobs. Yet numerous reports—from the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General, and a Department of Homeland Security contractor, among others—indicate that rushing to implement E-Verify on a national scale would be a costly mistake that would ensnare U.S. citizens in database errors and wouldn’t actually stop undocumented immigrants from getting jobs. “Enforcement-only” attempts to stop undocumented immigration have failed repeatedly for more than 20 years.  Only a comprehensive approach to immigration reform that allows exploited undocumented immigrants to become legal workers will fix our broken immigration system in a way that benefits all workers.

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Published On: Mon, Mar 09, 2009 | Download File

And Arbitrary Caps on H-1B Visas Still Don’t Meet that Need

It might seem that persistently high unemployment rates over the past few years have rendered moot the debate over whether or not the United States really “needs” the highly skilled foreign workers who come here on H-1B temporary visas.  But the demand for H-1B workers still far outstrips the current cap of only 65,000 new H-1B visas that can be issued each year.  In fact, from fiscal year 1997 to 2011, employers exhausted this quota before the fiscal year was over (except from 2001 to 2003, when the ceiling was temporarily increased).  As a number of studies make clear, the presence in a company of highly skilled foreign workers whose abilities and talents complement those of native-born workers actually creates new employment opportunities for American workers.  Yet the arbitrary numerical limits placed on H-1Bs are incapable of responding to the changing demand for H-1B workers.  This is unfortunate, given that the international competitiveness of the U.S. economy will continue to depend heavily on the contributions of H-1B professionals and other high-skilled workers from abroad for many decades to come. Read more...

Published On: Wed, Mar 30, 2011 | Download File

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released various sets of data regarding the accuracy and error rates of the E-Verify employment-verification system.  Although the numbers change often depending on the time period, the number of employers using the system, and the number of queries to the system, DHS generally claims that E-Verify is highly accurate and efficient.  However, it is important to understand exactly what the DHS numbers mean in order to have a clear picture of how well E-Verify is performing.  Most importantly, E-Verify is not simply an immigration-enforcement tool. If it were to become a mandatory, nation-wide program, it would affect every single person who works in the United States, including U.S. citizens.  Even tiny error rates would mean big problems for large numbers of citizens and other legal workers.  Under mandatory E-Verify, 60 million new hires would have to be verified annually, and up to 3 million U.S. workers per year would have to navigate government bureaucracy to fix database errors. Read more...

Published On: Wed, Feb 11, 2009 | Download File