Immigration reform and how it affects our economy

Introduction

What can explain this long-term trend of increasing illegal immigration? Large wage differentials encourage illegal immigration (given limits on legal immigration) while enforcement of immigration law discourages it. These factors alone, however, cannot explain its long-term rise. One explanation is that migration is encouraged by the spread of social networks. When migrants from Mexico arrive in the United States, they are able to find friends and family from Mexico who welcome them, help them find jobs and housing, and otherwise facilitate their adaptation to the United States. Illegal immigration is thereby self-sustaining. It tends to grow over time because it spreads and deepens the social networks that facilitate it. (It is also worth noting that this growth of illegal immigration explains the increasing intensity of the controversy over it, a point we return to below.)

Applications and Empirical Evidence

Econometric discrete choice modeling, a type of multiple regressions, is a common technique used by economists to quantify determinants of migration for various populations of study, and econometric selection models have been used to study the effects of migration on economic outcomes. Some of these applications will be discussed here (Dodson, 47).

Intranational Migration

Literature on the determinants of intranational migration suggests that life cycle considerations (e.g., age, education, family structure) and distance are key predictors of internal migrant flows (Greenwood, 1997). A complication to the unitary model of migration is that family units often migrate together, and therefore migration decision making may occur at the family level as opposed to the individual. Specifically, families may maximize family welfare as opposed to individual welfare with some family members suffering losses as the result of migration and others realizing offsetting gains.

In addition, locational attributes and amenities (dis-amenities), both environmental and those that are the result of public policy and market conditions, have been shown to attract (repel) internal migrants. Significant effort in economics literature has been made to examine the possibility of welfare migration or migration in response to differences in public aid availability and generosity across locations. McKinnish (2005, 2007), for example, in her examination of internal migration between U.S. counties, finds that having a county neighbor with lower welfare benefits increases welfare expenditures in border counties relative to interior counties. Welfare migration may occur among both those native to a country and new to it (Dávila, 459).

The Immigration Debate in the United States

Intranational migration is rarely controversial. In contrast, international migration often arouses heated controversies and inflammatory rhetoric. That may seem odd in the context of the United States since we like to think of ourselves as a “nation of immigrants.” Why are there such passionate arguments about people who seem to like our country so much that they want to move here?

It is worth taking a moment to address this question since it puts the more technical issues in a larger, interpretive framework. The most direct answer concerns the sheer number of people who come to the United States each year. Since 2000, an average of ...