Chapter 16 Immigration Policy

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Chapter 16Immigration Policy

• By long established custom whoever speaks of
  immigration must refer to it as a problem. It
  was a problem to the first English pioneers in
  the New World scattered up and down the Atlantic
  coast. Whenever a vessel anchored in the James
  River and a few score weary and emaciated
  gentlemen, worn out by three months upon the
  Atlantic, stumbled up the bank, the veterans who
  had survived natures rigorous seasoning looked
  at one another in despair and asked Who is to
  feed them? Who is to teach them to fight Indians,
  or grow tobacco, or clear the marshy lands and
  build a home in the malaria-infested swamps?
  These immigrants certainly are a problem.
• (Marcus Lee Hansen, 1938)

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The Goals of This Chapter

• Summarize the various push, pull, stay, and
  stay-away factors that determine immigration, and
  introduce the role of immigration policy.
• Use the history of U.S. policies toward
  immigrants as a case study of immigration policy.
• Describe immigration policy in other countries
  and compare it to that of the U.S.
• Analyze illegal immigration, its likely causes,
  and its consequences.
• Introduce students to the bureaucratic world of
  immigration regulation by examining how people go
  about getting immigrant visas in the U.S. and
  other countries.

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Push, Pull, Stay, and Stay Away Factors

• The incentives that influence immigration fall
  into four categories
• 1. Negative incentives that push people to leave
  a country
• 2. Positive incentives that pull people to
  immigrate to another country
• 3. Positive incentives that cause people to stay
  at home
• 4. Negative incentives that cause people to stay
  away from a foreign country.

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Push Factors

• Famine Discrimination
• Poverty High taxes
• Low wages Religious persecution
• Unemployment Civil war
• Crowding Forced military service
• violence and crime Social immobility

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Stay factors

• Family ties Property
• Friendships Employment
• Social status Familiarity
• Cultural familiarity Certainty
• Political privileges

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Pull factors

• Higher wages Law and order
• Employment Peace
• Property rights Religious freedom
• Personal freedom Educational opportunity
• Economic freedom Social mobility
• Civil rights Lower taxes

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Stay away factors

• Language barriers Low wages
• Cultural barriers Lack of political rights
• Discrimination Uncertainty
• Low social status War
• Unemployment Crime
• Unfamiliarity

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A nations immigration policy consists of the
laws, regulations, and bureaucratic procedures
that address the following questions

• 1. Is immigration to be restricted?
• 2. If immigration is to be restricted, how many
  immigrants will be allowed to enter the country?
• 3. If the number of foreigners seeking to
  immigrate exceeds the number of immigrants to be
  allowed into the country, what criteria will be
  used to ration the scarce entry permits?
• 4. How many resources will be devoted to
  enforcing the immigration restrictions?
• 5. What methods will be used to enforce
  immigration restrictions?
• 6. How are immigrants to be treated compared to
  citizens of the country?

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U.S. Immigration Policy

• The Six Questions 1776-1875
• 1. Restrict No restriction
• 2. How much n.a.
• 3. Selection Criteria n.a.
• 4. Control Effort n.a.
• 5. Control Methods n.a.
• 6. Foreigners Rights Same as nationals

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U.S. Immigration Policy

• The Six Questions 1900
• 1. Restrict Restrict Chinese, criminals, and
  people in poor health
• 2. How much No restrictions on others
• 3. Selection Criteria Racial criteria,
  interview and inspection at entry
• 4. Control Effort Few resources applied
• 5. Control Methods Border inspections, permanent
  agency to enforce immigration laws
• 6. Foreigners Rights Reduced rights until
  citizenship was acquired

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U.S. Immigration Policy

• The Six Questions 1930
• 1. Restrictions Country-by-country quotas
• 2. How much Overall limit of 150,000
• 3. Selection Criteria Country quotas not to
  exceed 2 of total number of that national
  origin already in U.S.
• 4. Control Effort Stricter control of borders
• 5. Control Methods Ellis Island, Angel Island,
  other border controls
• 6. Foreigners Rights Reduced rights until
  citizenship was acquired

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U.S. Immigration Policy

• The Six Questions 2000
• 1. Restrictions Restrict but increase the
  total number of immigrant visas
• 2. How much Total visas issued approached 1
  million per year by 2000
• 3. Selection Criteria Variety of criteria,
  including family reunification, special
  skills, lottery, refugees, and investment.
• 4. Control Effort Greatly increased expenditures
  for border control, monitoring of aliens,
  and processing of visas.
• 5. Control Methods Border checks, required
  documentation, employer checks
• 6. Foreigners Rights Limited rights until
  citizenship

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Illegal Immigration

• Illegal Immigration is immigration that involves
  disregarding a countrys immigration laws,
  regulations, and procedures.
• Illegal immigration a result of the clash between
  policies and economic incentives.
• U.S. census data for 2000 suggests there may be
  close to 9 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.
• There may be about 5 million illegal immigrants
  living in Western European countries.
• Illegal immigration does not only occur in
  developed economies it occurs between all
  countries where there are substantial differences
  in economic opportunities.

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Illegal Immigration

• An interesting question is why authorities in
  destination countries often accept illegal
  immigration despite formal laws that call for
  strict punishment of illegal immigrants.
• Some economists have suggested that illegal
  immigration constitutes a form of market
  segmentation that lets employers capture the
  gains from increased labor while minimizing the
  negative consequences on native labor.
• Illegal immigrants are often concentrated in
  labor intensive industries that offer working
  conditions that native workers shun and wages far
  below what native workers earn in other sectors
  of the economy.
• Thus, illegal immigrants end up in certain
  low-paying segments of the labor market where
  they do not compete directly with native workers.

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Illegal Immigration

• Illegal immigration equal to the difference ab
  gives employers surplus gains of area G in the
  part of the illegal labor market where the wage
  is w2.
• Native workers continue to earn income equal to
  areas EF in the rest of the economy where the
  wage is w1.
• The economy thus gains G while native workers are
  unaffected.

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Illegal Immigration

• The demand-side effects of immigration may even
  cause illegal immigration to raise the welfare of
  native workers.
• If the labor demand curve shifts out, then native
  workers wage rises to w3 and employers and other
  factors earn the areas D and a larger G.
• Native labor income increases by the area J.
• These conclusions are very dependent on rigid
  market segmentation.

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Studies of public opinion on immigration suggest
that

• Low-skilled workers were more likely to support
  curbs on immigration than high-skilled workers.
• Opposition to immigration among low-skilled
  workers was weaker in high-immigrant regions of
  the U.S.
• The authors of the study attribute the weak
  opposition to immigration in the U.S. in the late
  twentieth century to the fact that most
  immigrants settled in states where there were
  already a lot of immigrants and the native
  population was increasingly high-skilled.
• That is, those likely to suffer most from the
  downward wage pressure from immigration are other
  immigrants, who are less inclined to demand curbs
  on immigration.

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Key U.S. Legislation on Immigration

• The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 - The first
  legislation explicitly limiting immigration, this
  law was blatantly racist since it specifically
  banned only Chinese immigrants.
• In 1891 legislation was passed creating the
  Office of Immigration, an agency that is today
  known as the Immigration and Naturalization
  Service (INS).
• An immigrant processing center was established on
  Ellis Island in New York harbor in 1892 to
  enforce new health and moral criteria established
  by law.
• In 1913 Congress reacted to the alleged
  deteriorating quality of immigrants and passed
  a law requiring that all immigrants be literate,
  which President Wilson vetoed.
• A literacy law was again passed in 1917, and
  Wilsons veto was overridden.

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Key U.S. Legislation on Immigration

• The 1921 Emergency Quota Act set strict limits on
  immigration for the first time.
• It was followed by the Japanese Exclusion Act of
  1924, which placed an outright ban on immigration
  from Japan.
• The Immigration Act of 1924 limited immigration
  from any particular country to 2 percent of the
  number of descendants of immigrants of that
  nationality residing in the United States back in
  1890.
• Supporters of this latter law felt that by going
  back to the 1890 census the traditional ethnic
  makeup of the United States would be preserved.
• In 1929, immigration law was amended to set an
  overall limit of 150,000 immigrants per year,
  divided among nationalities according to the
  ethnic makeup of the U.S. population as given by
  the 1920 census.

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Key U.S. Legislation on Immigration

• In 1965, when civil rights were a popular
  political issue, Congress passed the Immigration
  and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965.
• This Act abolished the national quota system in
  favor of a new set of criteria for the granting
  of permanent resident visas.
• The 1965 Act prescribed that 80 percent of the
  numerical limits were to be allocated to
  relatives of persons already living in the United
  States.
• The remaining were to be allocated to those with
  desirable skills and their family members.
• Spouses and children of U.S. citizens were no
  longer subject to numerical limits at all.

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Key U.S. Legislation on Immigration

• By the 1980s, illegal immigration in the U.S. was
  growing rapidly, which led to the Immigration
  Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA).
• This Act strengthened the Border Patrol and, for
  the first time, established penalties on
  employers who knowingly employ illegal aliens.
• Employers were required to check the
  identification of their employees to verify their
  legal status in the United States.
• IRCA also provided for a one-time amnesty for
  illegal immigrants by giving about 2.7 million
  illegal aliens living in the United States legal
  residence status.

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Key U.S. Legislation on Immigration

• Illegal immigration continued to grow despite the
  new measures.
• Increased border patrols have had little effect
  on the number of people entering the U.S.
  illegally.
• The requirement that employers verify citizenship
  may have done little more than induce a new
  industry producing all varieties of forged
  documents.
• Even though the amnesty was advertised as a
  one-time event, prospective immigrants could also
  have interpreted it as a signal that the status
  of illegal immigrants may again be legalized in
  the future.

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Key U.S. Legislation on Immigration

• The Immigration Act of 1990 addressed the
  concerns about the decline in the skill levels of
  U.S. immigrants by reducing residence visas for
  unskilled labor and increasing visas for
  priority workers.
• The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
  Responsibility Act of 1996 set up a telephone
  clearing house for employers to verify the
  immigrant status of employees and expanded the
  Border Patrol.
• the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
  Reconciliation Act barred non-citizens from some
  types public assistance.
• In 2000 Congress authorized an increase in H-1B
  visas, which are temporary work visas for
  foreigners with talents and skills that are in
  short supply in the U.S.

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Web Sites of Immigration Authorities

• Most immigrant destination countries now have
  web sites with information on the rules and
  regulations pertaining to immigration.
• The Canadian and U.S. sites are
• www.cic.gc.ca
• www.uscis.gov
• The Canadian site is especially interesting
  because the country actively recruits immigrants.