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Other experts say legalization has benefits. Opening a path to citizenship for nearly 11 million people, of which seven to eight million are in the workforce, amounts to “an economic stimulus”, according to Giovanni Peri, professor of economics at the University of California to Davis.
Between 2005 and 2015, new immigrants represented nearly half of the growth in the working-age population, and over the next two decades, immigrants will be key to making up for an aging population that retires. Demographers say the rising educational attainment of Americans, coupled with a shortage of blue-collar workers, highlights the need for ever-growing immigrants to work in low-skilled jobs. About five million of them work in jobs designated as “essential” by the government.
Employers who rely on immigrants are among the biggest supporters of the Biden initiative. Over the years, meat packing plants, dairy farms and a host of other workplaces have been caught in immigration raids targeting unauthorized workers.
The Reagan-era amnesty in 1986 caused only a temporary drop in the number of undocumented immigrants, as it was not accompanied by a strong system for bringing in low-skilled workers legally. Employers were fined for knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants, but were not responsible for verifying documents submitted by job seekers, which spawned a huge industry of fake Social Security numbers.
“The principle is simple: if you do broad legalization, it does not freeze undocumented migration flows as long as the demand for labor persists,” said Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the ‘University of California at San. Diego. “You need to increase the number of legal entry possibilities for future migrants.”
The illegal influx started to increase again in the early 1990s.
“Migrants arriving after 1986 would have much preferred to come legally, not having to pay hundreds of dollars to buy false documents,” Cornelius said. “But there weren’t enough legal admission tickets available.”
Economic imperatives prevailed, pushing illegal immigration year after year.
A building boom in Sun Belt states like Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona has attracted hundreds of thousands of undocumented construction workers. And as the farm workers who had benefited from the amnesty grew older and left the fields, young undocumented workers arrived to replace them.
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