Immigrants Deserve Better

By Peter Ward

It is astonishing to see how badly the Republicans continue to stumble on the issue of immigration. As an example, all of the GOPers vying for the party’s presidential nod oppose any form of immigration reform that provides a path to citizenship. That’s bad enough. But it got even worse when the supposedly “reasonable” Paul Ryan was recently elected Speaker of the House of Representatives and less than 24 hours later announced that he would prevent the chamber from taking up any immigration legislation.

Republicans base their backward opinions on immigration on tired old arguments. You know what they are: Immigrants cause crime. They don’t pay taxes. They won’t learn English. They’re a drain on social services. They steal Americans’ jobs.

But a recently issued study shows that these arguments are not only tired and old, they are dead wrong.

Immigrants do not cause crime. Instead, the study found that immigrant men aged 18 to 39 were jailed at one quarter the rate of non-immigrant men in the U.S. The report even found that areas in the U.S. with higher densities of immigrants have substantially lower levels of violence and crime than communities with lower densities of immigrants.

The study had other results that show how dumb the Republicans’ stance on immigration is. It revealed that today’s immigrants are learning English faster that the waves of European immigrants that entered the U.S. in the 1900s. While it’s true that 85 percent of the immigrants in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home, a surprisingly large percentage of them speak English proficiently outside the home. And, in a somewhat surprising finding, the study revealed that many immigrants already knew English when they arrived in the U.S. The study further found that half of all immigrants in the U.S. already speak English well and only 10 percent of them don’t speak any English at all. These figures are a far cry from the Republicans’ claim that immigrants don’t learn English.

The study also found that immigrants are not the drain on medical and social services that so many conservatives claim they are. In fact, the opposite is true. The study showed that foreign-born adults and children are generally healthier than Americans in general. Immigrants are less likely to die from heart disease or cancer, and they have fewer chronic illnesses like asthma, heart disease and diabetes than the rest of the population in the U.S.

That’s not all. The study found salient facts regarding immigrants and education. For starters, almost one quarter of all immigrants have a college degree. And second generations in immigrant families achieve the same academic success as the general population in the U.S.

There are many other interesting facts to be found in the study, which was conducted by the well-regarded National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine NASEM. The study can be found at the organization’s website: www.nationalacademies.org

It should also be noted that there is no evidence that a disproportionate percentage of immigrants fail to pay taxes as opposed to the general population in the U.S. But there is plenty of evidence showing that undocumented workers’ payroll taxes are bolstering Social Security, even though many will never themselves collect retirement benefits from the program. There is also abundant proof that immigrants contribute mightily to the U.S. economy, keeping national unemployment figures relatively low, helping small businesses prosper, keeping food prices reasonable and having many other beneficial impacts on the entire U.S. population.

How much do immigrants contribute to the economy? Well, according to New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office, immigrants account for a third of all economic activity just here in the city! Stringer’s office reports that there are 3.1 million immigrants in New York—37 percent of the city’s population and 43 percent of its workforce—and they generate $237 billion in economic activity.

While today’s Republicans ignore facts like these and like those contained in the NASEM report, it will soon become more difficult for them to ignore the fact that there are 41 million immigrants and 37 million U.S.-born children of immigrants in the U.S. today. That’s one fourth of the total U.S. population, and it’s an awful lot of people to be swept under the carpet by the political party that is fond of describing itself as a big tent welcome to all.