Mingdong Chen
Freshman
composition
Ms. Nargiza
Matyakubova
14 November 2013
Research Paper
First Draft
Immigrants are Creators of Economy, Not
Takers
There are approximately 35 million
foreign people reached America from 1820s to 1920s, and about 400,000
immigrants arrived in 1870s alone (the costs and benefits of immigration). Since
the Immigration Reform and Control Act were passed in 1986, the flow of
immigration to the United States has been gradually growing steadily. Those
people are included legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants or illegal
immigrants, nonimmigrants, and border crossers. Some immigrants come to escape
religious persecution; many others are poor and looking to improve their
economic situation; still others come to experience greater freedom in the
United States. Therefore, America of United States has always been considered a
nation of immigrants who comes from all over the world, the representation of
melting pot of cultures. More than one hundred years of making great efforts. Immigrants
have offered an obbligato contribution to American economy and made America the
economic engine of the world.
Immigrants create businesses. According
to the Small Business Administration, it is said that immigrants have high percentage
more likely to start a business in the United States than non-immigrants. In
other words, they create businesses at higher rates than do U.S. natives. This
contribution is most notable in the high-tech sector, where immigrants were main
founders in one-quarter of U.S. high-tech startups between 1995 and 2005.
Immigrants were key founders in over one-half of high-tech startups in Silicon
Valley during that time, so Immigrants’ entrepreneurial activities benefit all
Americans (Zavodny). They also take up 18 percent of all small business owners
in the United States. Another example is that the nearly 1.5 million immigrants’
business owners in the United States represent 12.5 percent of all business
owners. Immigrants build 12.2 percent of the total work force in the United States.
They own a large share of businesses in the lowest-and highest-skill sectors
and in several industries. What’s more, immigrant business ownership is
geographically concentrated in a few states. Nearly 30 percent of all business
owners in California are immigrants; one-fourth of New York business owners are
foreign-born, as are more than one-fifth of business owners in New Jersey,
Florida, and Hawaii (Robert the Great).
Immigrant-owned businesses provide
more jobs for Native American workers. According to the Fiscal policy
institute, immigrant-owned small businesses employed about 4.7 million people
in 2007. And those businesses created more than $776 billion annually (Furman and Gray). In 2000s, the
total business income generated by immigrants is $67 billion, 11.6 percent of
all business income in the Unites states. Immigrants contributed about
one-quarter of all business income in California, and about one-fifth of all business
income in New York, Florida, and New Jersey. These numerical findings prove
that immigrants make large and important contributions to business ownership,
formation, and income in the Unites States (Fairlie 70). According to the 2011 Current Population
Survey, 7.5 percent of the foreign-born
population is self-employed. Thus, we can expect that under S. 744, between
600,000 and 840,000 of the newly legalized immigrants would be self-employed
(Kugler and Oakford). According to the
2010 American
Community Survey, there were 900,000
small-business owners among current immigrants—close to 18 percent of all
incorporated business owners. Yet in the same year, immigrants accounted for
just 16
percent of the workforce. The
entrepreneurial nature of immigrants, however, is not being fully realized,
given that there are 8 million undocumented workers. To be sure, some of these
undocumented workers currently run their own business, but these businesses
likely exist in the underground economy. Thus, legalizing these undocumented
entrepreneurs will formalize their businesses and bring their employees above
ground, leading to better job opportunities (Kugler and Oakford). “Businesses
and communities are finding that immigrants, rather than a source of weakness,
are helping to stave off the chill of economic hard times” said Joel Kotkin.
Immigrants are engineers, scientists,
and innovators. According to the Census Bureau, even though immigrants present
16 percent of the resident population, but they hold a bachelor’s degree or
higher. More specific, they present 33 percent of engineers, 27 percent of mathematicians,
statisticians, and computer scientist, and 24 percent of physical scientists (Furman and Gray). Immigrants are
also prominent in advanced scientific research. Over one-third of U.S. Nobel
Prize winners in physiology or medicine between 1901 and 2012 were
foreign-born. If it were easier for foreign-born students and workers to obtain
provisional visas to stay and work in America, visas that could transition into
green cards later, America would have faster GDP growth and job creation (Furchtgott-Roth). U.S. businesses
founded by immigrants employed approximately 560,000 workers and generated $63
billion in sales during 2012, according to an October 2012 Kauffman Foundation
study. Immigrants have a higher propensity to start businesses than native-born
Americans. For example, 44 percent of high-tech Silicon Valley businesses had
at least one immigrant founder (Furchtgott-Roth).
Immigrants are mainly essentially
labor forces of American society. In between 1850s to 1880s, there were
approximately 200,000 Chinese immigrants came to America to help build the
nation’s first transcontinental railroad, so did the Irish immigrants. For decades, immigrants
and their families have played a vital role in the U.S. labor force and economy
at large, Foreign-born workers comprise about 16
percent of the workforce, and immigrants account for nearly one-half of U.S.
labor force growth since the mid-1990s, and their contribution of economy toward the society is about
45 percent of total (Zavodnv).
Since 1999, the difference between the labor force participation rates of the
two groups have been steadily increasing. In 2012, 67.5 percent of immigrants
participated in the labor force, compared to 63.2 percent of native-born
Americans. As Steven Jobs pointed out “You can't find that many in America to
hire... If you could educate these engineers, we could move more manufacturing
plants here.” And someone may consider offering visas to foreign engineers
denies opportunities to Native American engineers, however Jobs thought that “there
are not enough Americans with engineering degrees to satisfy the economy's
demand for engineers.”
Immigrants fill the jobs Native
American will not do. Immigrants usually fill jobs that American cannot fill, and
mostly at the high and low ends of the skill spectrum. Immigrants are presented
not only in high-skilled field fields such as medicine, physics and computer
science, but also in lower-skilled sectors such as hotels and restaurants,
domestic service, construction and light manufacturing (Griswold). Hispanic and Latino immigrants
comprised 42 percent of the American unskilled labor force (defined as those
without a high school diploma). [9] Low-skilled immigrants are disproportionately represented
in the service, construction, and agricultural sectors, with occupations such
as janitors, landscapers, tailors, plasterers, stucco masons, and farmworkers.
Government, education, health, and social services, are sectors that employ few
immigrants. Immigrants choose different jobs from native-born Americans.
Low-skill immigrants come to be fruit pickers, as well as janitors and
housekeepers, jobs native-born Americans typically do not choose as careers.
However, immigrants are not found as crossing guards and funeral service
workers, low-skill jobs preferred by Americans. Similarly, high-skilled
immigrants prefer occupations such as research scientists, dentists, and
computer hardware and software engineers. They generally do not choose to be
lawyers, judges, or education administrators. Table 1 shows the percent
distributions of foreign-born and native-born American workers by occupation (Furchtgott-Roth).
Immigrants increase neither the
competition of job for Native Americans nor push them out of work. First,
immigrants generally do not have a direct negative impact on the earnings of
native-born workers, as native-born workers and immigrant workers generally
complement each other rather than compete for the same job. Native-born workers
and immigrants tend to have different skill sets and therefore seek different types of
jobs. Thus, immigrants are not increasing the labor market competition for
native-born workers and therefore do not negatively affect American workers’
earnings. Between
1995 and 2004, the number of family households living below the poverty level
fell by half a million, from 8.1 million to 7.6 million. The number of
immigrant households in poverty did indeed rise-by 194,000-but that increase
was more than offset by a drop of 675,000 in native-born households living in
poverty. In other words, for every poor immigrant family we “imported” during
that time, more than three native-born families were “exported” from poverty
(Griswold).
Immigrants contribute the
innovation to economy to raise productivity. Sustained increases in productivity lead to faster economic
growth and rising living standards. Recent research provides compelling
evidence that high-skilled immigrants play an important role in
innovation. Highly educated immigrants earn patents at more than twice
the rate of highly educated natives. The difference has been linked to
immigrants’ overrepresentation in STEM fields and to the growing number of
immigrants entering on work-related and student visas. There is also evidence
of positive spillovers on natives, meaning that immigrants not only raise
innovation directly but also boost overall patent activity, perhaps by attracting
additional resources and boosting specialization. Immigrants’ innovative
activities benefit all Americans, natives and immigrants alike.
Low-skilled immigrants also
contribute a helping hand to economy. Low-skilled immigrants’ economic contributions
are less obvious than those of high-skilled immigrants, but low-skilled
immigrants contribute to the economy in several key ways. They fill dirty,
dangerous, and dull jobs that many U.S.-born workers are reluctant to take.
Low-skilled immigration reduces the prices of the goods and services these
workers produce, which benefits all Americans as consumers. In addition,
the availability of low-skilled immigrant workers as child care providers,
housecleaners, and gardeners has enabled American women to work more and
allowed them to pursue careers while having children. These benefits have
accrued primarily to highly educated women who are in a position to pay for
household help (Zavodny).
Immigrants
are a drain on government finances. It is true that low-skilled immigrants and
refugees tend to use welfare more than the typical “native “ household, but the
1996’s Welfare Reform Act made it much more difficult for newcomers to collect
welfare. As a result, immigrants’ use of welfare has declined in recent years
along with overall welfare rolls (Griswold).
Immigrants boost tax revenue, enlarge the taxpayer
base, and help to keep down the price of goods. The NAS study found that the
typical immigrant and his or her offspring will pay a net $80,000 more in taxes
during their lifetimes than they collect in government services. For immigrants
with college degrees, the net fiscal return is $198,000 (Griwold).
Immigrants also raise demand for
goods as well as the supply. During the long boom of the 1990s, and especially
in the second half of the decade, the national unemployment rate fell below 4
percent and real wages rose up and down the income scale during a time of
relatively high immigration (Griswold). The Immigration Policy Center estimates
that the purchasing power of Latinos and Asians, many of whom are immigrants,
alone will reach $1.5 trillion and $775 billion, respectively by 2015 (Furman
and Gray)
In
conclusion, immigrants play an important role in making great contributions to
American economy as workers, as consumers, and as
taxpayers. A growing economy attracts immigrants, and immigrants make the
economy grow in turn.
Working bibliography
Daniel Griswold. As
immigrants move in, Americans move up. July 21 2009 cato institute.
Daniel Griswold. Immigrants
have enriched American culture and enhanced our influence in the world. This article appeared in Insighton, February
18, 2002.
Madeline Zavodny. Immigration
and its contribution to our economic strength. Economic Committee, May 08
2013
Jason Furman, Danielle Gray. Ten Ways Immigrants Help Build and Strengthen Our Economy. The White
House Blog, July 12 2012.
Mary E. Williams. Immigration
opposing viewpoints. Greenhaven Press, 2004.
Executive Office of the President. The economic benefits of fixing our broken immigration system. July
2013
Will Somerville and Madeleine Sumption. Immigration and the labour market. Migration
Policy Institute
