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Immigration has different impacts
By Michael Sanford
Many Americans are concerned about the social and economic
impacts of immigration. Large numbers of immigrants enter the
United States each year, and observers wonder how these persons
affect the availability of jobs, the cost of government services, and
whether their region or neighborhood is becoming overcrowded.
Immigration debates at the national level are often about whether
federal policies on admissions are adequate and appropriate. But
when people talk about immigration at the state and local level they
often are concerned about the impact of immigration on local
economies and governments. Indeed, while national studies
generally find that immigrants pay more in federal taxes than they use
in federally funded services, the opposite can be true at the local level,
where immigrants may be net users of services because they tend to
have children in relatively costly K-12 schools.
All of this raises the question of whether particular states and locales
are getting ˇ°too manyˇ± or ˇ°too fewˇ± immigrants. There are two ways to
consider this. There are states with large numbers of immigrants, and
a different set of states where immigration is a major factor in
population growth. States with large numbers of immigrants are the
so-called ˇ°gatewayˇ± states: California, New York, Texas, Florida,
Illinois, and New Jersey. Most people strongly associate these states
with immigration. States where immigration is a large portion of
population growth are a different set and include a large swath of
Midwestern states such as Nebraska, Kansas, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania that are not normally considered immigration focal
points. In these latter states, numbers of immigrants may be relatively
small, yet they may have a significant impact due to low growth rates
among the native population.
The issues associated with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants
are well known: school districts may be unprepared, police and fire
departments may need to learn to communicate with new
populations, and bilingualism may become prominent. But the issues
associated with the question of whether immigration forms a large or
small portion of population growth are less discussed. Consider the
economic role played by immigrants as workers. In the factories of
Chicago, which is losing native population, immigrants are more than
one out of four workers, and without their presence those factories
might need to move elsewhere to find needed workers. In Atlanta,
Georgia, a city to which natives are streaming from places like New
York and Philadelphia, the number of service sector jobs has
mushroomed in recent years, and immigrants are an important part of
the labor force that undergirds that expansion. In addition, states with
low native population growth but rapid immigrant growth may expect
greater cultural and linguistic changes than states where these social
changes are diluted because so many natives are moving in.
Immigrants moving into a region may or may not cause native-born
Americans to leave the area. In the end the question can be of the
chicken-or-the-egg type: are natives leaving an area because it is
undesirable, while immigrants are moving in because they have
different expectations? Or do immigrants ˇ°pushˇ± out the natives, who
flee in the face of competition from the newcomers? Researchers
debate whether this kind of push-and-pull mechanism explains why
natives have been leaving many metropolitan areas where there is
immigrant growth.
Immigration has different impacts in different states. Usually, however,
this has been interpreted to mean that places with high immigrant
numbers are heavily impacted by immigration, while areas with low
numbers are not. However, immigrant numbers should be taken in
the context of native population growth to better understand the
impact of immigration. A state may have high immigration, but if it has
high native population growth, some impacts of immigration are
diminished. This fact may not change the attitudes and opinions of
persons unhappy about immigration in booming areas of the south
and west like North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada. But the truth is
that their immigrant numbers do not translate into the same level of
impact as similar numbers in Michigan, Kansas, or New Jersey. In
these latter states, the foreign born are proving to be more valuable
than ever.
About the Author
For more information on Home Security please visit the Home Security resource center at http://www.immigration-help-guide.info
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