CHANG

THE REAL ECONOMIC IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION

on research by HOWARD F. CHANG Earle Hepburn Professor of Law

“Studies of the effects of immigration in U.S. labor markets have shown little evidence of any significant effects on native wages or employment, even for the least skilled native workers.”

In an article published in a recent issue of the UC Davis Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Howard Chang marshals economic theory and empirical evidence to show the wisdom of liberalizing United States immigration laws rather than imposing the severe restrictions endorsed by the Trump Administration. In “The Economics of Immigration Reform,” Chang evaluates both the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (“RAISE”) Act proposed by Congressional Republicans in 2017 and a comprehensive bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate in 2013.

HOWARD CHANG

Chang, the Earle Hepburn Professor of Law, is an expert on immigration policy, international trade, and environmental protection. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association, and his interests include a broad range of topics in the economic analysis of law.

“If enacted, the RAISE Act would slash legal immigration drastically, cutting immigration in half within a decade,” Chang explains. The Act would achieve that aim by removing options for family members of U.S. citizens and permanent residents to apply for immigration visas, capping refugee admissions, reducing the number of green cards granted, and ending the visa diversity lottery.

Because advocates of the RAISE Act “discount the interests of prospective immigrants when… weigh[ing] the costs and benefits of immigration reform,” Chang’s analysis within the article focuses “narrowly on the effects of our current flow of immigrants on the economic welfare of natives, that is, those born in the United States.” He begins by reviewing existing empirical evidence on the question of whether immigrants confer a fiscal benefit on natives or impose a fiscal burden. Chang examines two studies: a 1997 study conducted by the National Research Council (“NRC”), which took “into account the contributions made to tax revenues and the costs imposed on the public treasury not only by… immigrants themselves but also by their descendants,” and a 2017 update of the NRC’s findings by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which “account[ed] for changes in circumstances over the intervening two decades” and “generate[d] a range of estimates of the total fiscal impact of immigration in the United States.”

Chang notes the NRC’s observation that “a larger population helps to bear the costs of so-called public goods — those that provide services to all in the population at a cost that does not rise with the size of the population.” As a result, “more immigrants would allow natives to consume a larger stream of benefits from pure public goods while maintaining the same cost per capita for those goods,” he writes. Chang also examines the data on the national debt, finding that on balance, “the estimated economic and fiscal impacts of immigration militate in favor of higher levels of immigration, not lower levels.”

Importantly, Chang writes, “the studies conducted by the NRC and the National Academies found that age at the time of admission is an important factor determining the total fiscal impact of an immigrant. In general, the younger the immigrant at the time of arrival, the more years the immigrant can spend working in the United States, the more tax revenues the immigrant will contribute to public coffers prior to retirement, and the more positive the immigrant’s total fiscal impact.” Thus, restrictive immigration policies that create longer backlogs of prospective immigrants waiting for visas not only harm those migrants but also natives. “Long waiting periods mean that immigrants enter later in life, limiting the years during which they can contribute to our economic welfare by providing labor as workers and by paying taxes to the public treasury.”

As Chang explains, the RAISE Act purports to “exclude categories of immigrants likely to impose a fiscal burden,” and in particular would “cut family-sponsored immigration by eliminating visas for siblings and adult children of U.S. citizens.” In doing so, however, the RAISE Act would exclude many immigrants who would have a positive fiscal impact on natives.

Supporters of the RAISE Act also contend that it would “protect native workers from foreign competition and thereby raise their wages.” However, “[s]tudies of the effects of immigration in U.S. labor markets have shown little evidence of any significant effects on native wages or employment, even for the least skilled native workers,” Chang writes. “To the extent economists do find any evidence of a negative impact, it seems largely confined to natives with less than a high-school education.” Thus, the effect of immigration restrictions would be to confer benefits on a subset of native workers by inflicting a larger cost on other natives, effecting a wealth transfer that could instead be achieved with less harmful effects through the tax system.

In any event, Chang notes, “the flow of unauthorized immigrants into the United States has slowed to a trickle during the past decade,” meaning that the “the RAISE Act, President Trump’s proposed ‘border wall,’ and other costly and draconian proposals to increase border security are misguided reactions to a perceived unskilled influx that largely no longer exists.”

In contrast, “[t]he comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in 2013 would have liberalized our immigration laws in various respects” by taking steps to address the backlogs in the current immigration system, expanding access to visas, and legalizing many unauthorized immigrants already present in the United States.

Ultimately, he concludes, “economic analysis militates in favor of liberalizing our immigration restrictions… instead of imposing the drastic new restrictions proposed in the RAISE Act.”