Future Flow: Repairing our Broken Immigration System
(IPC Focusing on the Solution series, February 2, 2010)

• A 2007 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers concluded that immigration as a whole increases the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by roughly $37 billion each year because immigrants increase the size of the total labor force, complement the native-born workforce in terms of skills and education, and stimulate capital investment by adding workers to the labor pool.
• Immigrants do not compete with the majority of natives for the same jobs because they tend to have different levels of education and to work in different occupations. In fact, The roughly 90% of native-born workers with at least a high-school diploma experienced wage gains because of immigration between 1990 and 2004, ranging from 0.7% to 3.4% depending on their level of education, according to a 2006 study by Giovanni Peri, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California-Davis.
• Immigrant entrepreneurs are twice as likely as Americans to start business and immigrant inventors account for more than one quarter of all U.S. patents according the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, 2008.

• According to a 2010 study by UCLA professor Raul Hinojosa, comprehensive immigration reform that includes a legalization plan for the unauthorized would contribute a cumulative $1.5 trillion to the Gross Domestic Product over ten years, as more tax revenues are collected, wages increase for U.S.-born and legalized workers, and immigrant workers spend more in our economy.  The report also finds that wages for immigrant and native-born workers would rise in part because workers will have more bargaining power in the workplace.
• The libertarian Cato Institute also reported that “legalization of low-skilled immigrant workers would yield significant income gains for American workers and households.”

For press inquiries contact Wendy Sefsaf at wsefsaf@immcouncil.org or 202-507-7524.