President Trump is working with Congress to find a way to allow young adults covered by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order to be able to stay in America.
The President can’t win. He was attacked when he announced that he was phasing out DACA, and now is attacked for trying to find a legal way to keep the Dreamers, as they are known, in the United States.
It should be clear to everyone that deciding immigration policy through a series of executive orders causes immense problems for workers supposedly benefitting by the grant of legal status. Legal challenges to President Obama’s executive order are working their way through the courts, casting a cloud of doubt on individuals’ legal status.
Even if an executive order would have survived court challenges—an uncertain prospect--executive orders do not have the comprehensive and permanent power of a law. Future presidents could rescind executive orders and take punitive actions towards immigrants. Individuals protected by a law have permanent protection, even if a future Congress writes different laws; individuals protected by an executive order have little certainty beyond the next Inauguration Day.
President Trump’s solution—to allow DACA beneficiaries to apply for a two-year extension of their legal work status to give Congress time to change the law—ensures that these individuals have sufficient time to change their status, perhaps by applying for other visas.
With the unemployment rate at 4.4 percent and economic growth at 3 percent in the second quarter, America needs more legal workers. “Buy America” programs and tariffs, if implemented, will further increase the demand for American workers.
Economic growth and employment in America could be improved by bringing in additional workers from abroad. Employment is not a fixed pie to be divided, with more for some meaning less for others. Greater immigration would allow the economy to operate more efficiently, creating more jobs for native-born Americans as well as immigrants.
That is why President Trump should sign legislation facilitating the process of obtaining more high- and low-skill legal workers in the United States.
America is turning away qualified workers at a time when we are concerned about economic growth and international competitiveness. Getting a visa to come here and work should not be a bureaucratic nightmare. But it is.
Statistically, the average skills of native-born American workers are distributed in a bell-shaped curve. Many Americans have high school diplomas and some college education, but relatively few adults lack high school diplomas and even fewer have Ph.D.s in math and science. In contrast, immigrants’ skills are distributed in a U-shaped curve, with disproportionate shares of adults without high school diplomas who seek manual work and others with Ph.D.s in math and science.
According to a paper published in 2016 by Giovanni Peri and Kevin Shih of the University of California Davis, and Chad Sparber of Colgate University, more STEM immigrants would raise the wages of native workers. Increasing the share of foreign STEM workers as a portion of a city’s total employment by one percentage point would increase the wages of native, college-educated workers by 7-8 percentage points. Non-college-educated native workers would get a raise of 3-4 percentage points.
A percentage point increase in immigrant scientists and engineers raises the number of patents per capita by as much as 18 percent, concluded Rutgers University professor Jennifer Hunt and Princeton University professor Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle. Immigrants make the economy more efficient by reducing bottlenecks caused by labor shortages, both in the high-skill and low-skill areas, and expanding employment opportunities for native-born Americans.
Foreign-born workers are about 17 percent of the labor force, yet 23 percent of those who are foreign born and over 25 years old have not completed high school, compared to 5 percent of the native-born labor force. Fifty-eight percent of all engineering doctoral degrees, 53 percent of computer science doctoral degrees, and 41 percent of physics doctoral degrees were awarded to foreign-born students in 2013, the latest available data from the National Science Foundation. These students have a smaller share of high school diplomas and B.A.s, which is where native-born workers tend to be concentrated.
America’s goal should be an immigration policy that fosters economic growth. With our economy speeding up and unemployment declining, we should be giving more work visas to high- and low-skill workers who can help move our economy forward. An executive order is not the answer, not for would-be immigrants, not for employers, not for America. It is time for Congress to act.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth (@FurchtgottRoth) is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University.
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