What Does the Future Hold for Undocumented Families Living in the United States?
Q: You researched millions of immigrant families both in the past and today to uncover the real facts about immigration and economic prosperity. What did you find?
One of our findings is that children of immigrants – no matter what country their parents came from – have moved into the middle class at remarkable rates. This is true for children of immigrants born 100 years ago and for those born around 1980, around the time President Reagan, with bipartisan support, passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. That legislation gave amnesty to most undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. before January 1, 1982. This pattern of upward mobility holds for the children of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Nigeria, and many other countries of origin.
These facts speak to the promise of immigration not only for immigrants themselves, but for the country as a whole. Even if some immigrants have low earnings and require federal assistance, their children’s high earnings and contributions more than pay for the “debts” of their parents.
Q: What can you say about the future of undocumented children?
Because of the Reagan-era amnesty, the Gen X children of modern immigrants whom we studied were mostly raised by parents with legal status and likely had legal status themselves. Take this away, and we’re worried what we’ll find when we study more recent children of immigrants, like the Dreamers – a group of undocumented immigrants who arrived themselves as children, and are so-named for the stalled DREAM Act in Congress.
It will take another ten years for the Dreamers to be old enough for us to compare them with groups that came before. But while we don’t yet have the data, we do know the outsized barriers they will face. Without a green card or citizenship, working outside of the cash economy will be difficult. As a result, many do not see the point in finishing high school. For those that do, applying to college or funding their education without access to the lending system has been an enormous challenge.
Q: What could we do to help the Dreamers achieve upward mobility?
Passing the DREAM Act or otherwise legislating permanent residency for the Dreamers is a critical – and reasonable – next step. As it stands, DACA is an executive action and not a piece of legislation, so those who benefit from it will always be vulnerable to the whims of our next chief executive.
Given the historical evidence, there’s a strong case to be made that providing legal status to immigrants who came to the U.S. as children is not only the right thing to do, but the economically sound one. The Dreamers have a lot to give to our economy. By continuing to block their path, Congress has made an economically short-sighted – and costly – mistake.
Q: In September, President Biden granted temporary legal status to 472,000 Venezuelan migrants who are already in the U.S. What will this action mean for the economic prospects of these immigrants, and what more can be done?
In our work, we find that refugees have historically assimilated both culturally and economically as rapidly – if not more quickly – than other immigrants from the same countries and backgrounds, despite the fact that refugees can often arrive from harrowing situations. Their success has depended on having access to the labor market.
Until President Biden’s recent action, asylum seekers from Venezuela and from other countries were admitted on a temporary basis without authorization to work while they waited for their cases to be heard. Granting the legal status necessary to access the labor market is a crucial step to help asylum seekers find their footing. Not only do such legal decisions help prevent migrants from needing to rely on government resources, but they also help grant them the dignity to care for themselves and their families.
This post was adapted from a December 2022 Miami Herald op-ed. Read the full article here.
Forbes, Best Business Books of 2022
Behavioral Scientist, Notable Books of 2022
The facts, not the fiction, of America’s immigration experience
Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, new evidence is provided about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories, and draw counterintuitive conclusions, including:
- Upward Mobility: Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents – a pattern that has held for more than a century.
- Rapid Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest.
- Improved Economy: Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.
- Helps U.S. Born: Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born—the people politicians are trying to protect.