Immigration deal for ‘Dreamers’ stays out of reach
To Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., proimmigrant advocates are getting way too excited over the prospect of a deal in the lame duck Congress that would allow for the legalization of 2 million “Dreamers,” immigrants brought illegally into the country as minors by their parents.
“I don’t see any movement there,” he told a forum on the benefits of immigration hosted by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. “They think it’s weak on border security.”
Manchin’s take has constrained American policy for decades: Any attempt to ease the path for immigrants to come to the United States must be traded against a hefty investment in an impenetrable wall at the border. Otherwise, the American people won’t buy the deal.
And yet, as popular as this hypothetical trade-off is on Capitol Hill, whether it can survive a real-world encounter is less clear.
Americans aren’t troubled by immigration just because the border looks chaotic on TV and many immigrants come illegally. The proposition that voters will embrace immigration once they are assured it all comes through legal channels is absurd. The discomfort with the idea of an America with more immigrants will ease only when voters realize that America will be ultimately doomed without them.
A crowd of hopefuls thinks Americans are already there. They point to polling by Gallup suggesting that, once one overlooks some recent pullbacks, public opinion has been trending in a positive direction since the 1990s. But maybe we should not ignore those recent pullbacks. Below the surface of a nation content with its immigrant origin story lurks a lot of unease about the idea of adding foreigners to the crucible.
A 2021 survey by the Cato Institute suggests just how complicated America’s attitudes toward immigration are.
Cato finds that Americans are roughly split between wanting more, the same, and less immigration, but when respondents are informed that the legal immigrant population increases by about 1 million per year, the rate before the pandemic, the share wanting less almost doubles to 60%.
There is a lot of wrong information out there. For instance, Americans believe immigrants account for 40% of the population, roughly three times their actual share. About two-thirds of respondents who want less immigration say it reduces jobs and cuts wages for native workers, statements that are mostly wrong. (Immigration has no impact on the employment level and mostly positive effects on wages.)
Over half of Americans believe that half or more of immigrants get means-tested welfare assistance from the government, a preposterously high estimate. Immigrants’ access to government services other than public schools for their children is limited during their first five years in the country. Still, when pollsters offered a scenario in which immigrants could not use any government services, the share supporting more immigration doubles to 58%.
And though perhaps more information might help change these views, one obstacle seems impermeable to analytical arguments about the pros and cons of immigration: 58% of Americans fear immigrants are changing American culture.
More than half of Americans and 82% of those who would like to decrease immigration think that by 2043, when whites are expected to become a minority, there will be less social cohesion and more discrimination against whites. About one-half of Americans who would prefer less immigration worry that immigrants are replacing America’s ethnic background and changing the very idea of what the country is. Nearly 60% say that immigrants will become so numerous they will no longer feel at home in the United States.
Interestingly, 85% of people who believe the government has little or no control over who immigrates to the U.S. are more likely to prefer less immigration, which could underpin a trade-off similar to that suggested by Manchin. But people who prefer less immigration are more likely to think the border is out of control.
The polling suggests there aren’t enormous opportunities to ease the political constraints on immigration policy. Wendy Edelberg, who leads the Hamilton Project, and Tara Watson of Williams College suggest giving fiscal policy a shot to “more equitably share the overall fiscal and economic benefits of immigration.”
Immigrants’ fiscal cost stems mostly from educating and providing health care to their kids, which is usually borne by states and municipalities. But immigrants pay taxes largely to the feds. Edelberg and Watson propose a federal transfer to local areas proportional to their population of immigrants without a college degree. This might ease voters’ fear that immigrants will either push up their state and local taxes or exhaust the welfare pie. It would also reduce the incentives for Republican governors to pluck asylum seekers from Texas and fly them to Martha’s Vineyard.
“This could be used as a way to say ‘Look, governor, we recognize that there’s going to be some short-term cost to you, and so we are going to smooth it away and maybe also give you some other things,’ ” Watson said. “Maybe it’s part of a way of reconciling the political challenge.”
And yet, as noted by Kim Rueben from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, spreadsheets showing people that immigrants pay taxes are unlikely to change the politics. If anything is going to untangle the political knot, Reuben thinks, it’s putting Americans face-to-face with how much immigration they actually need.
They need lots. Net migration — which counts arrivals minus departures — has been declining since 2016. The Census Bureau projects that without more immigration the U.S. population will start shrinking in 2035. While less population might not amount to an obvious weakness, population matters in the world’s balance of power.
This less populous nation would also be pretty old. An analysis by researchers at the National Immigration Forum concluded that immigration should increase by 37% over 2020 levels — an additional 370,000 immigrants per year — to maintain the nation’s dependency ratio in the face of an aging population.
“I almost wonder if having the labor shortages and having people actually realize that they don’t have somebody to take care of their kids or their parents is something that might be more likely to change the national conversation,” Reuben said. Maybe that, plus a wall on Mexico’s southern border, will achieve a gain for the Dreamers.