Background
Who are the immigrants? According to Daniel Costa from the Economic Policy Institute in 2012, 13% of the total United States' population is made up of immigrants. However, only 46% of these immigrants are naturalized. Also, 11.7 million are unauthorized immigrants, and 46% of all immigrants are Hispanic or Latino.
The Economic Impact
Some may assume that immigrants in today’s time are negatively impacting the economy. However, this notion is false under several different conditions. First, according to Daniel Costa in 2012, immigrants economically contribute approximately 743 billion dollars to the U.S. economy. Some may also assume that unauthorized immigrants are stealing from the economy. This is also untrue because as stated later, unauthorized immigrants net a positive impact on the economy because they contribute to it without being able to attain benefits from it. For example, these immigrants still pay taxes such as sales tax but are not eligible for benefits like Social Security. On the other hand, large amounts of immigrants do slightly decrease native employment. But, studies have shown that overall, it does not affect the employment of citizens.
Some also argue that we should deport unauthorized immigrants in America. These immigrants, however, do have a large contribution to the U.S. labor force, as Gretchen Frazee describes in “4 Myths about How Immigrants Affect the U.S. Economy”.
In addition, undocumented immigrants pay approximately 11.6 billion dollars in taxes a year. This huge number would be lost if the deportation of undocumented immigrants was carried out.
Chart by the OECD from 2014 shows the percent of people in the labor force between native-born and foreign-born
Immigration is a controversial topic in the United States. But, how much do you really know about it?
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