Econ 1101: Week 14

Second Platform Debate: Immigration

There is a debate on immigration policy in the discussion sections for week 14. (These are the sections meeting Dec 4, 5, 6, or 7.) Participation will be graded like the previous debate, and will be worth 10 points on Homework 11.

Let’s start with a few observations about the status quo. Currently, about one million people enter the United States each year as legal immigrants. Of these, only about 140,000 enter on the basis of skills of the immigrants, another 50,000 arrive through a “Diversity Immigrant Visa,” that uses a lottery to randomly pick people who apply from various countries, and the rest—the vast bulk of immigration—is based on family connections. This makes the U.S. very different from Canada, for example, which primarily bases immigration on skill. In addition to legal immigration, there is also illegal immigration. The total number of unauthorized immigrants currently residing in the United State is estimated to be around 11.3 million, down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 before the great recession. (See this Pew Study for details.)

You probably have heard of the DACA program, initiated by President Obama in 2012, and cancelled by President Trump. (New York Times article on the cancellation.) DACA stands for Deferred Action Childhood Arrival, and deals with people who care here illegally as children with their parents. For those individuals who have not committed any crimes, the DACA program allows them to register and received a quasi-legal status. (The threat of deportation is “deferred” and they can work legally.) The 800,000 currently in the program are often called “Dreamers.”

To get you ready for the debate, we lay out broad outlines of very different policy proposals. Plan on debating all three, and see if you can get a majority in for one of them. If you fail to get a majority for either, try tweaking the proposals get something passed. Here they are:

Policy 1: The Trump Plan

The broad outlines of the Trump plan can be summarized as follows:

· Create a deportation force to expel existing unauthorized immigrants.

· Build a wall and create additional barriers to prevent further unauthorized immigration.

· Reduce existing legal immigration, primarily by cutting back or entirely eliminating family-based immigration, and by eliminating the diversity lottery (a program that randomly accepts 50,000 people per year from a variety of different countries).

Policy 2: An Updated Version of the 2013 Gang of Eight Plan

In 2013, a bipartisan bill immigration reform bill passed the Senate by a large majority. It was called the “Gang of Eight” bill because the effort was led by four Republican senators and four Democratic senators. This New York Times article from 2013 has some details about the bill. The broad aspiration of the bill can be summarized as follows:

· Shift the balance of immigration away from family-based immigration towards employment-based. Get rid of the diversity lottery. The levels of overall immigration would remain the same, but the composition would change.

· Increase border security to prevent further unauthorized entry.

· Provide some kind of path to legality for existing unauthorized immigrants who haven’t committed crimes.

The bill did not pass in the House of Representatives, and never became law. The Republican senators voting for the bill were thought by many to be responding to the 2012 Presidential election results, where the Republican candidate Mitt Romney did very poorly with Hispanic voters. The bill was thought to be a way to broaden the base of Republican voters. Then Trump along with quite a different strategy.

Policy 3: What Democrats seem to be aiming for at the moment

A quick search of the web pages of Democratic leaders in the Senate and House failed to find detailed policy proposals for overhauling immigration. The main thing they are pushing now is to formalize the DACA program by passing a Dreamers Act. See for example, the statement on immigration reform by Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. In terms of bullet points, the policy can be summarized as:

· Pass Dreamers bill to make DACA the law of the land.

· Return to border enforcement policy as exercised by President Obama.

Make sure you read chapter 18 of the text before the debate and in particular, read the interview from the “In the News” section with Pia Orrenius (For more details about the arguments made by Pia Orrenius, click here for the background paper). There are plenty of very interesting articles on the topic of immigration and if you see something you would like to share with the class, you can do it at the “Special Forum for Discussion of Immigration,” at week 14 at Moodle. You can also comment there on articles that others post. We close with links to two places that provide additional information about immigration issues. The first is to the American Immigration Council, a group that is friendly towards immigration. The second is to the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that would like to see immigration curtailed: