Immigration experts disagree over whether President Trump’s pending executive order to limit legal immigration will help the economy.
Trump announced in a single post to Twitter late Monday his intention to bar foreigners from entering the country.
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s immigration and cross-border policy director, Theresa Cardinal Brown, argued that shutting down avenues for legal immigration is not a solution to the country’s economic issues.
“As for restarting and recovering the economy, it is unlikely that shutting down immigration at this time will have a positive impact,” Cardinal Brown wrote in a statement. “Many of those laid off may expect to go back to work when the needed quarantines are lifted. And whether or not others will be able to go back to work will depend in large part on whether the government can sufficiently support the small and medium-sized businesses that have been hardest hit by the shutdown. Those businesses employ a lot of Americans, including legal immigrants.”
“Our own research has shown that immigration can grow the GDP in normal times, and immigrants generally do not compete with native-born workers for jobs or lower wages for native-born workers,” Brown said. “If immigrants can grow the economy in normal times, they certainly can help in a recovery.”
The former Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, Tom Homan, believes the magnitude of the immigration cutback will not be “huge,” just enough to open up new jobs to unemployed people while blocking those from other parts of the world from moving to work in the United States.
“I’ve been talking about it for the last few weeks,” Homan told the Washington Examiner. “I think a lot of people have been talking about it,” he said. “Whether it’s [Trump’s] idea or not to implement this idea — it’s probably a big part his to implement this idea — I gotta give him credit for it.”
Homan argued the move would free up jobs to some of the more than 20 million newly unemployed people in America. Berardi insisted foreign-filled U.S. jobs exist because the U.S. workforce was unable to fill the jobs with Americans and stripping foreign worker programs “could have a chilling effect.”
“Everyone says these are jobs Americans don’t want,” said Homan. “First of all, I disagree with that. A lot of immigrants take high-paying jobs … I think the best bet is to stop immigration to leave those opportunities of employment open to Americans who are looking to go back to work.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services agency handles nearly 20 temporary visa programs, which last year saw more than 500,000 applications approved to work temporarily in the U.S.
Michael Clemens, the Center for Global Development’s director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy, is concerned that the implementation of such an order could prove hard to walk back when the economy stabilizes and comes with other unintended consequences.
“There is no economic evidence at all that a blanket ban on immigration will generate jobs in the United States,” Clemens wrote in a statement. “In fact, economic evidence shows the opposite. In the Great Depression, the United States banned and deported most immigrants from Mexico. Economist Giovanni Peri and co-authors have shown that this act made native unemployment worse in the Depression. This is because immigrants are the backbone of many industries that massively employ Americans. A few Americans took jobs opened up by the bast barriers. But more Americans lost their jobs when the businesses that depended on immigrants folded.”
Rosanna Berardi, a former immigration inspector on the southwest border who has practiced immigration law for more than two decades, said any new halt on immigration might mainly target immigrants who are already living here and could be forced to return home prematurely, or when visas expire.
Berardi predicted the Trump administration will cut the H-1B visa, which makes available 85,000 visas for foreigners who have been identified by U.S. employers as able to fill a job that the company has not filled with a U.S. citizen. The healthcare and information technology (IT) industries are among the most reliant H-1B users and use the program to find highly skilled workers unavailable here. So a reduction in the visas could potentially hurt the U.S. response to the coronavirus in the coming months.
Homan insisted the move is a “short-term fix” that the White House will reverse once the economy has improved and enough jobs exist for immigration to be restarted.
“I don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t think this is stopping immigration,” said Homan. “It’s not going to be something that lasts beyond the need. I don’t really think this is about immigration — I think it is about protecting Americans, protecting jobs, protecting health.”
