Immigration is major point of contention in U.S. political discussions, especially immigration pertaining to the southern border. From what countries do immigrants come? Does U.S. law protect immigrants seeking asylum? How do immigrants affect the American labor market?
On Oct. 1, Hamed Aleaziz, a reporter on the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The New York Times, moderated the conversation “Immigration at the Ballot Box: Key Issue for 2024,” to address popular opinions surrounding immigration in U.S. political discourse.
“Immigration at the Ballot Box: Key Issue for 2024” was part of Carnegie Mellon’s Deeper Conversations series, a university-wide initiative that promotes civil discourse among students, faculty and staff. This fall’s series will center around democracy and the 2024 presidential election.
Dr. Filiz Garip, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, was first to speak and focused on the history of immigration at the southern border.
During World War II, there was an increase in labor demand in the U.S., leading the country to sign an agreement with Mexico in 1942. The agreement, known as the Bracero Program, allowed Mexicans to acquire a temporary legal work permit in the U.S. to work in agriculture. Workers in the program saved their money so they could bring it back with them upon the expiration of their work permit.
Garip explained that even after the program ended in 1964, Mexican workers would cross the border to seek work, particularly during harvest seasons, and would return back to Mexico. “People came in order to save some money,” said Garip. “The goal was to buy a house or a piece of land back in Mexico.”
However, not every worker who came seeking work would go back to their country of origin.
“In the 1980s we had about 5 million undocumented migrants living in the U.S. About half of them were from Mexico,” Garip said.
To address this issue, the U.S. passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1982, which, Garip said, “opened the path to legalization for undocumented migrants who met certain conditions … brought penalties to employers who were hiring undocumented workers … and increased funding available to border control.”
The law increased the number of border patrol agents and border security in the south.
“We had about 3,000 agents in the 1990s … 8,000 in the 2000s and now we have 20,000 border patrol agents,” Garip said. “Border walls also expanded from little fencing to 700 miles of barriers.”
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1982 increased the number of border patrol agents; however, Garip argued that “as we put more feet and barriers on the ground, we do not necessarily stop migration. We are pushing migrants into more dangerous terrain.” Organized crime controls crossing routes and demands large sums of money from individuals who want to immigrate to the U.S. “In the last 20 years, about 7,000 people died trying to cross the border.”
While past immigrants to the U.S. have mainly been individuals from Mexico seeking work in agriculture, now “it’s people from Venezuela leaving a devastated economy behind … people from Ecuador who are escaping rising gang violence, and many of these migrants are not trying to cross undetected,” Garip said.
After Garip, Aleaziz introduced Sabrineh Ardalan, clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program at Harvard Law School, who discussed laws regulating asylum seekers in the U.S.
“U.S. law explicitly includes a right to seek asylum, any person who arrives in this country may apply for asylum whether or not they arrive at a designated port of entry and regardless of their status,” Ardalan said. She explained that U.S. law takes into account that individuals seeking asylum are not always able to access the documents they need to enter a port of entry and that they may be compelled to cross the border to protect their lives.
So what makes an individual eligible to seek asylum? According to the U.S. government, an individual is eligible to seek asylum if they are in the U.S. and are able to demonstrate that they were being persecuted or fear persecution in their home country due to their race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.
A primary challenge for asylum seekers is proving they were being persecuted in the first place, Ardalan said. “Recent rule changes have created a system that creates many obstacles to accessing asylum in the U.S. that all but prevent people from ever having their day in court. These changes to the asylum system started under the Trump administration and have continued under the Biden administration.”
First launched on Oct. 28, 2020, the CBP One mobile app is an app aimed at helping asylum seekers set an appointment at a U.S. border entry point. The app has faced backlash from users. The app erroneously sends its users confirmation emails regarding their port of entry appointments only for them to find out those emails were sent by mistake, according to Rocio Melendez Dominguez, managing attorney for HIAS Mexico.
“Asylum seekers are consistently being deported back to harm in their home countries without ever having their claims to protection heard. These are well documented in reports by NGOs and others, showing how many people are being turned away who have well founded fears of return to their home countries,” Ardalan said.
A clear solution to this issue is for the U.S. “to recognize that asylum seekers and refugees contribute in so many ways to our communities, and needs to invest in an asylum adjudication system that is humane, that is fair and that is effective,” she said.
The final panelist was Dr. Brian K. Kovak, a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, who focused on the impact of immigration on the U.S. economy and labor market.
So what are people’s thoughts surrounding the effect immigration has on the U.S. labor market?
“Political debates in the U.S. … tend toward the extremes,” when discussing immigration and labor markets, Kovak said. “You often hear arguments that ‘immigrants are taking our jobs’ … [and] at the other extreme, many claim that immigrants do jobs that native born workers won’t do.”
Taking data from 2002, “there were 30 million foreign born employed people in the U.S. … there should be at least 30 million unemployed people in the U.S. … but all of these measures are false, far smaller than the 30 million,” Kovak said, arguing those numbers prove immigrant workers do not displace U.S.-born workers on a one to one ratio.
“Out of the 530 distinct occupations tracked by the Census Bureau, foreign born workers are a majority in only three of those 530 occupations: manicurists, agricultural graders and sorters, and taxi drivers. But even in those three occupations, there are many native born workers,” Kovak said, explaining that “there simply are not jobs that native born workers won’t do, there are just a few occupations in which immigrants are more concentrated.”
Immigrants have a small effect on the U.S. labor market, Kovak said, a market greatly affected by technological advancements, international trade and offshoring. While there is competition in the labor market, “immigrants also increase the demand for products and services made in the U.S., and this in turn expands the demand for workers, increasing the number of jobs in the economy.”
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