Post by Jessica Dolcimascolo. Colgate Class of 2022.

Source: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021, April 19). “Revisiting Immigration in the United States.” Cosponsored with the Hauser Policy Impact Fund and the Russell Sage Foundation.

The webinar included a panel discussion on the current issues of the U.S. immigration system and future policies to enact to solve these problems, based on two seminal reports. The webinar began with a summary of the takeaways from the reports including, that immigration as a whole leads to small impacts on native wages and employment, high skilled immigrants specifically had a positive effect on native wages, immigrants reduce the cost of many amenities, and also immigrants contribute to economic growth. Fiscally in the long run, the net effects of immigration are positive because of the future generations of immigrants, and these benefits are seen at the federal level. On the other hand, state and local effects vary, but overall are negative, and these costs are mainly attributed to the education of immigrants’ children. These educational costs, however, can be seen as an investment for the future. Lastly, these reports found integration to be really crucial to the economy but also raises concerns because of the 11 million undocumented immigrants, racial disparities in integration, and low naturalization rates. These issues were the root of the panel discussion. 

An overall takeaway from the panel was that the temporary fixes to the immigration system, including different kinds of visas and temporary protected status are all piecemeal approaches when the root of the system is still what was designed in 1965. Therefore, the issues with undocumented immigrants can’t be fixed until the legal system is fixed, and this fix would come from a complete reform into a new 21st century system. With this being said, a multitude of topics were discussed including the situation at the border currently, in which instead of a mass labor migration which was the trend at the border in the 2000’s, the mass is now humanitarian based with families trying to flee poverty, corruption and violence. It’s crucial to understand this change in demographic in order to make proper policies to combat the issues at hand, and as the panelists mentioned a more sociological and humanitarian approach rather than economic is of more importance to solve the border crisis. Furthermore, other topics were discussed including how the U.S. needs to establish a normalized way for regularizing people’s legal status, the purpose of H-2A and H-2B programs needs to be explained to people in the U.S., and lastly, what I found was the most talked about topic was how we under invest in language programs, education, and don’t encourage integration. To expand on this, previously we have allowed a laissez faire approach when it came to integration. All the panelists agreed however, that this is very flawed seeing how racial and ethnic groups are often disproportionately left behind. Additionally, immigrant integration is crucial to the economy along with the wellbeing of the immigrants and their future generations and therefore should be a priority. However, there are high costs locally, specifically from integration because immigrant children get access to public education which creates opposition. The panel gave good insight on a way to combat this, which would be to make better use of our revenue sharing policies, by making it so it’s tailored to the number of foreign born in a population rather than just the population. This would take into account the extra integration those local areas are doing and would reduce a lot of the economic opposition to immigration, along with putting a focus on integration which is a necessity moving forward.