The Immigration Debate Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (1998) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 1-12
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 1... ...
Many people have expressed concerns about the effects of immigration on the economic prospects of the native born, on the rate at which our population is growing, on fiscal balances at all levels of government, and on the ability of immigrants to integrate into the social fabric of the nation. Responding to these renewed concerns, Congress created the bipartisan U.S.
|
From page 2... ...
Because immigration touches sensitive issues and provokes strong emotional reactions, such dispassionate scientific research is all the more valuable. THE FISCAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION Nowhere did our panel find the existing literature more lacking than on the fiscal effects of immigration.
|
From page 3... ...
Compared with the native born, immigrant households are relatively heavy users of some government services, such as schools and income-conditioned transfer programs, and relatively light users of other government services, such as Social Security and Medicare. A corollary of this comprehensiveness requirement is that all sectors of government federal, state, and local should be included when analyzing fiscal impacts.
|
From page 4... ...
Clune's contribution "The Fiscal Impacts of Immigrants: A California Case Study." One reason why undertaking fiscal impact studies in two immigrant states turned out to be so fortuitous is that there exists a great deal of heterogeneity among the major immigrant states. Some dimensions of that heterogeneity is illustrated in Table 1-1, which highlights some key demographic and economic differences.
|
From page 5... ...
European households received relatively fewer state expenditures, whereas Asian and especially Latin-American immigrant households received state benefits well in excess of the foreign-born average. Michael Clune examines the federal, state, and local fiscal impacts of immigrant households in California for FY 1995.
|
From page 6... ...
The best way of thinking about these annual fiscal impact studies is that they measure the annual net transfer at that unit of government from native-born households to immigrant households so as to balance the books. For reasons explained below, they do not directly measure the net fiscal impact of adding another immigrant.
|
From page 7... ...
A1though the authors still favor the longitudinal formulation, they argue that, among the cross-sectional annual budget estimates, the concurrent descendants approach is probably the least biased among the cross-sectional alternatives. The basic bottom line of the concurrent descendant formulation is that immigrants are a net taxpayer benefit to native-born households.
|
From page 8... ...
The final question addressed by Trefler concerns the extent to which international trade has contributed to the declining incomes of less skilled workers in the United States. Immigration often receives the primary blame for rising wage inequality, but there are other plausible culprits.
|
From page 9... ...
Therefore, immigrant women are being compared with a moving target native-born American women whose own labor market position is steadily improving. Given the rapid rise in employment rates among native-born women, it is not surprising that the employment gap (compared with the native born)
|
From page 10... ...
One issue that has dominated the current immigration debate far more than its historical predecessors involves the fiscal effects of immigration. There are probably two reasons why that is so.
|
From page 11... ...
John Hagan and Alberto Palloni take up these issues in their chapter, "Immigration and Crime in the United States." They point out that the recent fourth wave of increased immigration coincided with a dramatic increase in violent crime rates, increasing public perceptions that immigration and crime are closely linked. But the biases inherent in immigration statistics and the strong selectivity of the process at all stages makes an inference of causation extremely problematic.
|
From page 12... ...
With that important caveat in mind, Frey and Liaw conclude that immigration did induce out-migration of native-born workers. For people with a high school education or less, Frey and Liaw estimate that California would lose 51 net internal migrants for every 100 similarly skilled international migrants who arrived during the last five years.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.