Silberstein Lecture: Immigration Policy and the U.S. Economy

Panelists discuss the impact of recent refugee and immigration policy developments on the U.S. economy.

The Silberstein Family Annual Lecture on Refugee and Migration Policy was established in 2019 through a generous gift from Alan M. Silberstein and the Silberstein family. The lecture provides CFR with an annual forum to explore emerging challenges in refugee and migration policy in the United States and around the world.

CUNNINGHAM: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations lecture. This is the Silberstein Family Annual Lecture on Refugee and Migration Policy, and an extraordinarily timely conversation it is.

For this year’s lecture, we’re honored to have Steve Camarota on the right who is the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, whose byline is “low immigration, but pro-immigrant.” I thought that was an interesting way to present it.

With Andrea Flores to my right, who has worked on immigration reform efforts for many years at the White House, in the Senate, and now in the private world. She is the founder of America’s Promise and a CFR term member.

And joining us online—and here to shed actual facts, data, and light—is Pia Orrenius, who is vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Texas, where she focuses on immigration law and the—on immigration and its economic impacts.

I’m Nelson Cunningham, former State Department senior advisor on economic affairs, former White House advisor on Latin America, and in between spent thirty years founding and running McLarty Associates dealing with may international issues on behalf of our clients. I’ll be presiding over today’s discussion.

This endowed annual lecture was established in 2019 with a generous—a generous gift from Alan and Carol Silberstein and the Silberstein family. The lecture provides CFR with an annual forum to explore emerging challenges in refugee and migration policy in the United States and elsewhere. We’re delighted to have Alan and Carol Silberstein here today. We just had lunch. I urge you to find them after we’re done and hear why they’re interested in this issue; it’s fascinating.

We’ll spend the first thirty minutes in conversation between us and with Pia online, and then we’ll have—reserve thirty minutes for you here in the room and as many as 300 of you who may be online to ask questions of the panelists.

Let me start. We’ve all seen this issue has been in the press for months now, for years. But I pulled some of the quotes that we’ve seen, some of them in very recent days, from Stephen Miller, who’s the president’s top advisor on immigration issues, and from the president himself just to help set the table here for us.

Stephen Miller: “Employers want low-skill foreign workers because they’re less expensive than domestic workers. If the government stops letting them in, wages for working-class Americans would go up.”

Stephen Miller again: “It has cost taxpayers enormously, because roughly half of immigrant head of households in the United States receive some type of welfare benefit.”

He goes on, in a later speech: “As much as $300 billion a year may be lost as a result of our current immigration system in terms of folks drawing more public benefits than they’re paying in.”

To sum it up, he says: “The schools just suddenly fail. Violent crime just happens. The deficit just suddenly skyrockets. These are a result of social policy choices that we made through immigration.”

And he’s obviously channeling his boss, President Trump, who has said, quote, “The massive influx of illegal aliens is a direct assault on the American worker. It drives down wages, it drives up the cost of housing, and it destroys the dreams of our own citizens.”

Another quote: “This is an invasion that is costing our country billions and billions of dollars. We’re being treated like a third-world country while we pay for the people who are coming in to destroy us.”

All right. Let’s try to add some thoughtful policy discussion around those political assertions.

I’m going to turn first to Steve Camarota. I’m fascinated, Steve, by the “low-immigration, pro-immigrant” tagline of your organization. Give us your perspective.

CAMAROTA: Well, it is great to be here. Thank you for the Council on Foreign Relations for having me. I’m delighted.

Well, look, immigration, like any public policy, tends to create both winners and losers. And in the public discourse prior to Trump in particular, the winners have generally had their say. The winners include both the immigrants, employers, and often consumers. But there are very real losers from immigration, and they tend to be low-wage, less-educated American workers; and they also tend to be taxpayers in high-immigration areas.

Now, I suspect there will be a lot of debate on this, but there is good evidence that immigration reduces wages and reduces labor market outcomes in general for some American workers, particularly the less educated. I’ll just say this: If you want to see a nice summary of that, in the fifth chapter of the 2017 National Academy of Sciences study—I could even tell you which table to look at, 5.2—it goes through and lists all these studies that find negative wage effects.

Now, the other point I would make is if immigration had no effect on wages employers wouldn’t advocate for it. One of the things they’re hoping is to hold down wages, and we saw that when inflation was higher. People were like, hey, let’s bring in immigrants, reduce wages, and contain inflation. And of course, it’s—the place immigration where has the biggest effect is on the bottom end, where immigrants tend to be concentrated.

Now, you’ll hear or somebody will say, look, natives and immigrants don’t compete. We know those numbers. Two-thirds of construction laborers and two-thirds of everything from, you know, janitors to home health-care aides are U.S.-born. There really are, outside of agriculture, no jobs that aren’t majority-immigrant—majority-U.S.-born. So there is a lot of competition there, and it matters.

The other big thing that’s gone on in the labor market that I write a lot about is the decline in work among non-college-educated U.S.-born men. Back in 1960, only 7 percent of men twenty to sixty-four who didn’t have a college degree were not in the labor market, which means they don’t show up as unemployed. They’re neither working, nor are they looking. They’re totally out of the labor market. That was about 7 percent. By 2000, after a steady increase, it was about 16 percent. Today, it’s over 21 percent. So it’s tripled in the last sixty years. And I’m going to argue that one of the reasons we let that happen is we had the immigrant labor.

Now, those men out of the labor force have lots of problems. It is not my contention the only thing is immigration. But I will argue that we’re just dramatically unlikely to address this social problem as long as we let lots of immigrants in, and it is linked to horrendous social dysfunction and problems. Everything from opioid addiction, to suicide, to obesity, crime, all increase significantly as men drop out of the labor force. It’s a pretty high consensus.

So my position would be a more moderate pace in immigration would make sense for the country, and robust immigration enforcement, and a legal system that primarily puts the emphasis on skills, because the fiscal drain that we mentioned at the outset, the reason primarily that 54 percent of immigrant households access one or more welfare programs is not that they’re lazy. It’s not that they all came to get welfare. It’s not that they don’t work. It’s that a very large fraction have modest levels of education and they struggle, and so turn to the taxpayers. So a more selective system, a lower number, and robust enforcement is where I think we should go.

I don’t want to cut immigrants off from welfare. That’s not what I think we should be doing. We should try to integrate them in our society and from the outset treat them like the future Americans that they are. But you have to be selective to make that system work.

CUNNINGHAM: Thank you.

So I see two stands here, it seems to me. One is, do immigrants have an economic impact on the overall economy, positive or negative? And, second, what is the fiscal impact on government of having many recent immigrants? And I want to go into both of those separately. But, Andrea, why don’t you give us your perspective on these issues?

FLORES: Absolutely. So thank you for having me and thank you to the Silbersteins for funding this really important conversation.

So I do believe that there are winners and losers in policy, but the winner when it comes to immigration is our country, is the United States of America. We have one of the most prosperous countries, especially in our recovery from the global pandemic. Jerome Powell of the Federal Reserve said but for an increase in migration we would not have recovered at the same rate. And it’s really easy in these conversations to think of immigrants both as sort of dollars and cents, workers or not workers, but we really forget that when you’re looking at the foreign-born population—which has been fairly steady at 14 percent of the population; it has grown after the Biden administration, and I’ll get to that—that that has been a core part of our economy.

Now, where I have agreement with Steven especially is that our system is not serving the U.S. economy because our system has made it far easier for immigrants to come through systems like the asylum system, where someone’s going to be in limbo status, and not have their case resolved for many years, and live in a very fragile, temporary state, perhaps requiring more support for communities and receiving cities, right? When you—when you have not modernized the immigration system, which has not happened since 1990, Congress has designed an immigration for an economy we no longer have. It predates the launch of the internet. It certainly predates the launch of AI. The fact that we have not looked at our visa system and actually tried to craft to meet the needs of American communities.

So I actually want to just bring us a little beyond immigrants as workers or immigrants as simply economic generators, because we’ve always had a foreign-born population. We have not necessarily done right by them. And what I mean by that is the United States has the largest undocumented population in the world. I think that’s a major policy problem and one that we have not seen anyone since President Reagan try to fix. So if we’re serious about if there are minimal impacts on American workers—and there are impacts on American workers; that’s why you see labor unions, what do they advocate for? They advocate for immigration reform and they advocate for legalization of the undocumented population, right? So people who are looking at what is good for the American worker, what is good for our future, and what is good for the country, they’re generally pro-immigration reform but they support pathways, visas, legal avenues that plug immigrants into where they’re needed.

And we need to stop this practice that administrations—consecutive administrations all the way since, really—I would say since President Obama most of our new immigration—not most of it, but a large proportion has come across the border, right? And that has caused distrust in the immigration system, that it creates chaos. I’m from a border community. Border communities are frustrated that that is where many people enter. And it’s become a replacement for other visa systems and legal avenues.

So I would just like to start by the assumption that immigrants are good. They make America stronger and richer, and we are fortunate as a nation and as an economy that is aging that they still want to come here. So that is where I’d like to start.

CUNNINGHAM: Ah, good. Thank you.

Pia from the Dallas Fed, facts, figures, light, truth? (Laughter.)

ORRENIUS: Well, thank you, Nelson. And thanks for having me.

I would have to say, I mean, I agree with most of what Steven and Andrea have talked about. Certainly, we are an incredibly successful economy, and much of that is due to immigration. I mean, during our—throughout our history we have been a high-immigration nation and we’ve been a highly successful nation, created a lot of wealth, and tremendous pace of growth. And I think that over time we’ve begun to rely on immigration, really, for this pace of growth, and so we’re kind of used to high levels of immigration, high levels of investment, and lots of creation of economic output.

Immigration is important not just for the size of the economy, but also for productivity growth, which is what raises living standards. So I think we have to remember that immigrants contribute not only to the extensive growth, but also to the intensive growth. And how do they do that? Really, through greater efficiencies both in the labor market and also through a higher pace of innovation. So I think that, you know, on the size of the pie, if you will, you know, the data show that consistently immigrants make up about half of job growth in the United States in a typical year. And I think during the Biden years, when we basically—(laughs)—had a lot more immigration, it was maybe 90 percent of job growth was accounted for by immigrants. So they really juice the labor market.

But perhaps equally or more importantly is that also, through particularly higher skilled immigration, we bring in a lot of immigrants that contribute to research and development and innovation. And this is really what raises productivity growth, what makes certain sectors of our economy incredibly successful—whether you’re looking at information technology and AI, or medical research and pharmaceutical drugs, and so forth. I mean, so much of this is due to the welcoming—really, the visa system that we have around bringing high-skilled—high-skilled immigrants.

So I think now we’re really at the crux. You know, we’re in a very difficult situation, in the sense that we’ve gone from really high levels of immigration and we’re transitioning very quickly to very low rates of immigration this year. Some experts, demographers, are saying we may see net negative immigration this year as a result of lower inflows, certainly, maybe some also increased outflows. But mostly fewer people coming in. And so I think it’s going to be a real test of the U.S. economy to adjust to much lower rates of immigration.

CUNNINGHAM: Pia, in recent months we’ve seen job creation drop in the U.S., as far as we can see. Is that partly influenced by what you’ve just pointed to?

ORRENIUS: Yes, I think absolutely it is. So we’ve gone—let’s just compare job creation on average last year, so 2024, an average of about 168,000 jobs created per month. And now this year we’re averaging about 55,000 jobs created per month. So we’re at a third of the job creation that we saw last year. Is this entirely less immigration and less labor supply? No. There probably is some decline in labor demand, in the sense that we’ve seen the unemployment rate go up slightly, but certainly labor supply and the reduction in immigration, and then the inflow of immigrants, you know, is a big part of the story.

CUNNINGHAM: Mmm hmm. So all three of you have talked quite a bit about the impact on the economy overall of immigration. Let me start with you, Pia, and focus on the fiscal costs. Do immigrants pay for themselves? Do they work at jobs, they pay taxes, whether they want to or not, from payroll taxes, and sales taxes, and so on. Do they take back billions of dollars more than they put in, as some would have it? Or are they a net positive fiscally for both the federal government and state governments? We’ll start with you, Pia.

ORRENIUS: Sure. So, on the fiscal impact, immigration as a whole has a net positive fiscal impact. And that is a finding not just from the National Academies, as Steven was pointing out, but also from, you know, conservative think tanks, liberal think tanks. They really all agree that, as a whole, immigration has a net positive fiscal impact. So that’s good news.

Now, if you look at what immigrants are accounting for that positive net fiscal impact, it’s obviously more the high-skilled immigrants that come in with high incomes that are contributing fiscally much more than low-skilled or low-wage, low-income immigrants. And that’s just the same for U.S. born families. So U.S.-headed households similarly. Low income—we have a system that redistributes income towards low-income families away from high-income families. And that’s the same whether you’re U.S. born or foreign born. So what we see is that, while on net immigrants have a net positive impact, certainly low-educated, low-income immigrant households are a net drain.

The interesting thing is, if you look at the federal level—so if you look—as you pointed out, Nelson, compare the federal to the state and local level. So at the federal level, even a low-skilled, low-income immigrant family is a net positive. But where they’re a net drain is at the state and local level. And it’s really most pronounced at the local level. And that’s because of the cost of schooling. So because most of our low-educated immigrants, or many of them, are, you know, undocumented, they don’t qualify for a lot of the safety net programs, but they do have larger families. And, you know, it’s very expensive to pay for schooling. K-12 runs, you know, between 15(,000 dollars) and $20,000 a year per kid. So it’s hard for a low-income family to pay enough in taxes to make up for that expense.

But I want to point out that whether that’s a—that is a net expense in terms—in the sense that we have to be paying for it right now. But that’s also an investment that pays off over time. So it returns more than—more than that in terms of future success, higher wages of that immigrant, that immigrant’s child, and descendants. So it’s something that pays itself back.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

Steve, President Trump is fond of quoting a Homeland Security Committee report from 2023 that says immigrants cost $451 billion to the U.S. government. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with—Pia paints a somewhat different story.

CAMAROTA: Yeah, I think this is probably the area where Pia and I disagree the most. The National Academy’s estimates—they ran six different scenarios. And at the present time—when they did the analysis, the present net fiscal of impact was negative in all six. And that’s very clear. As I said at the outset, 54 percent of immigrant households use at least one major welfare program. The largest estimate was the one that was cited before at $299 billion net drain. However, they also ran six scenarios into the future out many decades. And they showed three of them were negative in the end and three of them were positive. So it was a split. And it depends on what assumptions you make about the social mobility of immigrants, what government spending is going to be, what government taxes are going to be.

So the more speculative part was they are, we’re not sure. But the stuff we could actually measure now was clearly negative. That does not mean, however, that all immigrants were clearly negative. The highly educated make a lot of money, pay a lot in taxes, don’t use so much in services. And one of the ways in which I estimate 59 percent of illegal immigrant households use one or more welfare programs—and, again, it’s not because they’re lazy and don’t work. They mostly have a worker. It’s that they have U.S.-born children. And so a lot of what happens—and you have to decide how you feel about this—immigrants come to America, work, have a child, and struggle to support that child, and so turn to the taxpayer.

That doesn’t make them villains. It’s not a moral defect or failing on their part. But it’s the reality of what happens in our modern economy with a well-developed welfare state. As I said, right now, as best we can tell, the immigrants are overall a fiscal drain. But they might be a benefit in the future depending on how we tax ourselves, how we spend, and how the immigrants themselves do. And so that could be positive. I don’t disagree that it’s possibly positive. But it’s possibly negative, too.

On the bigger—

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, go ahead.

ORRENIUS: No, sorry. I just want to—I mean, the low-income immigrants, yes, are a net drain. But, I mean, you’re saying overall. I mean, the Cato study, all the studies, have shown that, on net, immigrants as a whole are a net positive in the long run, right? I mean, you’re referring to the low-income, low-skill, low-education immigrants.

CAMAROTA: If you say what will the overall fiscal impact of, say, new immigrants today over the next hundred years—that’s what the National Academy of Science did. And, depending on assumptions, they got three negative, three positive. Cato, yeah, they’re very in favor of lots of immigration. They made assumptions about what taxes would be out over a century. They made assumptions about the social mobility of immigrants over the next century. And you can come to a positive number.

But when we look at what we can actually measure right now based on actual tax payments and actual use of services, it looks to be negative. That’s my point. That doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. And we would expect, at the very least, immigrants to do better over time. All of our data shows they do. But are those assumptions going to play out? I don’t know. We didn’t know that you were going to get, you know, Obamacare. We didn’t know that Trump was going to cut taxes the way he did. So it’s an open question of what the future holds. That’s what I would say. So it’s possible. But the current fiscal impact is negative.

That doesn’t mean immigration doesn’t make the U.S. economy, which is a different issue, larger. Remember, immigrants are about 18 percent of workers. And that means the U.S. economy is, you know, 1 (trillion dollars) to $2 trillion larger than it would otherwise be. And it certainly gins up numbers, like how many jobs get created each month. But if all those jobs are, a vast majority, going to the immigrants, it’s not a measure of whether the existing population of the native born benefit. A bigger economy is not necessarily a richer economy. That’s the question. If all that mattered was the size of the economy, then we would say that Bangladesh is, you know, richer than New Zealand, because, hey, its economy is bigger. But it’s per capita that matters. And it’s not at all clear that immigration increases per capita.

CUNNINGHAM: Steve—

FLORES: Maybe I can jump in. Can I jump in?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, no, absolutely, Andrea, I want to come to you. You’ve dealt with immigration reform issues at the White House, in the Senate. How does that give you a perspective on these numbers they should assign on the size and quality of the impact of immigrants?

FLORES: Absolutely. I mean, I think just to remind the audience, there has not been a president who has ever thought that mass deportation and reducing the size of the foreign-born population is a net good for this country, right? Ever since we did restrictionism, which we did in the 1920s—you significantly cut the number of immigrants coming in. However, what happened? Well, low-skilled immigrants—low-skilled immigrants, like my own family, came from Mexico in the 1920s because they cut off immigration from Eastern Europe, from Asia. My family—and it’s a good question about investment, right? They worked the mines. They worked the textile industry. And now I’m sitting here as a CFR term member. How do you define investment for the country?

And so what is interesting about the last fifteen years, in which I’ve worked with both parties, is I’ve never heard as a solution to remove, reduce, eliminate the foreign-born population. And something I think we should all remember is that it’s really easy to focus on immigrants to avoid talking about really important domestic problems where I agree, Steven, what is happening with men? What is happening with men in my community, in the Latino community and the Black community? There is no conversation in which reducing immigration right now is building support for more investment in those communities. And so it’s very simple and easy to say, if we remove immigrants that’s a net good and domestic outcomes grow for native-born Americans.

But I think the reason also why you don’t see either party going fully—even Donald Trump. President Trump, he employed undocumented labor. He’s employed undocumented labor throughout his business career. He has a realism that I think actually oftentimes contradicts his own staff in terms of they’re full restrictionists, I would argue he’s not full restrictionist. And I think he understands that, unless you’re brought here through slavery or you’re indigenous, most Americans have some connection and nostalgia to their own family, like my own story, that our family was a good investment and that our immigration system did mean that we can contribute. It’s been our strength.

And I pose this to the audience, and I pose this to every restrictionist. We know what could happen in our future if we continue to have presidents pursue mass deportation and blocking legal immigration. And it’s Japan. And they are desperate for immigration. They are trying to restart it. They are trying to recruit. Their population is aging. It’s South Korea. I am terrified of a future for, you know, my family and others if our population shrinks that way. And we know what happens. We have closed schools, closed hospitals. When you reduce immigration—we are already in population decline. It is a solution. And so I think this moment, though, is important for the country to, once again, be reminded that when you block legal immigration it is not good for the country.

But I go back to what I say. We have not been ethical or right in either party in legalizing the undocumented population. And as long as you have such a large undocumented population, I understand why Americans don’t trust the system, why they may have suspicion about the system. But when you look at our—what’s one of the key industries, the dairy industry, right? Fifty-one percent of their workforce is undocumented. I want to see Congress talk about that and legalize them, right? That’s where immigration reform needs to go. Not eliminating people who are part of our communities, because we talk about them only as if they’re illegal but they are professors in our universities, they’re children in our schools, they are restaurant owners, or scientists. I just—we can’t reduce immigrants into, like I said, dollars and cents in this way. And to me, I will continue to argue every part of our history shows they’re a gain.

CUNNINGHAM: We’re to come in just a couple of minutes to the audience, both in the room and online. Before we get there, let me ask each of you to spend one minute addressing the costs of deportation, right? We have this population now. If we deport them, what is the economic cost of those deportations? Both the actual cost of deportation and then the impact on our economy of jobs being lost and people being pulled out. Steve, let’s start with you. Just one minute quickly, and then we’ll turn to the audience.

CAMAROTA: Right. So if you’re just seeing it dollars and cents—and I do agree that we don’t necessarily want to think of especially of people who have been here a long time just in that term. But as far as I can tell, if we look at the fiscal costs of illegal immigrants over their lifetime, it depends on how you calculate it, but it’s pretty big—60(,000), 70(,000), 80,000 (dollars) in a lifetime. The cost of a removal can be as low as 5(,000 dollars) but as much as 15,000 (dollars).

So if you just said dollars and cents, but that’s not really—two things. One is, we’re not going to deport everyone. And, second, as far as we can tell, the 1.6 million decline, if the data is to be believed, in the size of the illegal population since President Trump took office seems to be mostly an increase in outmigration, self-deportation, because the administration hasn’t removed that many people. So that’s the key. If you want to reduce the illegal population you have a robust policy and many more people will leave, many fewer will come. Is it a good deal fiscally? Yes. Is that the only thing to think about? No.

CUNNINGHAM: OK.

Andrea.

FLORES: OK. So, I mean, the cost—

CUNNINGHAM: One minute.

FLORES: One minute. Mass deportations are expensive. And I think we all have to ask ourselves what we’re getting, as Americans, for them, right? So if you’re allocating $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security to remove longtime immigrants in communities, which are proportionally the people who are being targeted right now. It is not the recent arrivals you saw largely come under the Biden administration. It’s people who are—kids are in school, business owners, employees who American employers have already trained. So it’s very—I would agree that—well, actually, I think there have been a lot of people deported in a different way than Obama and Biden. Democrats were actually quite good at doing targeted deportations of people who were threats to public safety, national security, and border security. This administration is doing at-large arrests targeting regardless of using any of their discretion. And those social impacts are going to cost more.

And I’ll just use Charlotte as one example. When you have raids happen in Charlotte you had 40,000 children not show up for school. OK, that is not a community that we think of as a large immigrant community, but that has a huge social impact, economic impact, on top of my tax dollars going $170 billion.

CUNNINGHAM: Right.

OK, Pia, one minute, and then we’ll go to the audience.

ORRENIUS: Yeah. We actually have research on this. And, you know, there are several economists that have looked at communities, what happened after, for example, when President Obama deported record numbers of immigrants through Secure Communities, they studied the impact on those cities and towns as immigrants were deported and left. And so they actually found that employment, instead of rising—and this idea that natives come in and take the jobs that immigrants were doing, that did not happen. In fact, employment fell. And so I think you have to—you know, it didn’t—it didn’t result in a better economy. It resulted in a worse economy.

And I think you have to think about for every worker you deport, most of these immigrants are workers, you’re also deporting a consumer. You may even be, you know, deporting somebody who also owes—you know, has a mortgage or, you know, is making payments on other financial loans. But so basically when you deport a worker you’re deporting a consumer, you’re really affecting both the supply of labor and aggregate demand. Even though I know Andrea doesn’t like me reducing—(laughs)—immigrants into these little, you know, economic units. But, yeah, we haven’t seen from the research any benefits to the community.

CUNNINGHAM: Thanks, Pia.

We’ll turn now to the audience. If you have a question, raise your hand. Somebody will approach you with a microphone. State who you are, what your affiliation is, and then actually ask a question. And direct it to one of the three participants. If you don’t, I’ll figure out who might answer it. But we’ll start with—first with the woman here in the—with the marvelous hat in the front row.

Q: Thank you so much.

I’m an immigrant. The question—

CUNNINGHAM: Your name?

Q: Oh, my name is Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome. I’m a professor of political science at Brooklyn College.

And I’ve been looking at immigration since the 1990s, because I’m an immigrant. And I wanted to really understand immigration politics. I am a bit frustrated. And the dollars and cents are very important, but what is the thinking about how human capital building has future payoffs for an economy that desires to be competitive in this world?

CUNNINGHAM: Do you have a direct path to one of the members?

Q: Well, you know, I think everybody—anybody that wants to answer it would be—I’d be contented. Thank you.

CUNNINGHAM: Good. Steve, you want to—you want to take a stab at that?

CAMAROTA: Well, if you want to increase your productivity, and you want to use immigration, and you want—you want to foster capital formation, then you want a very selective policy, right? Not this policy. As many of you may know, or not, the vast majority of immigrants come into the United States due to family relations. We actually run a lottery where we pull your name out of a hat if you want to come. And we also have humanitarian. Only a small fraction of immigrants are selected based on their skills. So if you want to use immigration to sort of up the skills in the United States, you’d have to be very selective. And we don’t do that. So that’s one thing. If we want to let all the people who earn Ph.D.s in the United States in STEM fields, that’s, like, 6(,000) or 7,000 people. If you want to let all them stay, most of them stay anyway, a bunch want to go home. You could do that. They’re relatively small in number.

The big issue is, do you want the situation where people can bring in their adult children, their siblings, and their sibling’s children, and their sibling’s spouse? Should they be able to bring in their parents? So it’s all of that. And I would say that’s the big question. Is that a sound system, given the situation? And I just want to say one thing. Pia’s own colleagues at the St. Louis Fed recently put out a study showing that as the immigrant population seems to be declining, a lot of the jobs are going to the native born, which I’m very pleased to hear. So there is some evidence of that. I think we’ll have to wait and see. The data is incomplete. But I think that’s the hoped-for outcome—higher wages and drawing more people into the labor force.

CUNNINGHAM: Pia, did you want to address that?

ORRENIUS: OK, yeah, if I could. I think, you know, Steve is referring to this idea that the household survey, which is showing increasing rate—increasing levels of employment among native born as immigration, you know, is reduced, or their supposed immigrant population is falling. We actually—there’s a number of reasons why we don’t believe that that data is correct, and because it doesn’t measure the change—it basically—it’s complicated. I’m not going to go into it. But demographers have refuted this. And so we don’t believe—there’s really no evidence of large outflows of immigrants. There’s no evidence of large volumes of self-deportation. And there’s really no evidence that native born are taking the jobs that immigrants are leaving. First of all, the immigrants are not leaving. And the native born are not taking those jobs, because native born unemployment has gone up, Steve. It hasn’t gone down this year.

CAMAROTA: Labor force participation has improved. And the increase in the unemployment rate is only within the statistical margin of error. So that hasn’t seen a—(inaudible). But she’s right; the data is complicated. It has to do with how it’s weighted. And I’ve written a lot about this. But as I read the St. Louis Fed, they were trying to take that stuff into account and it looks like the natives did benefit. So we’ll see.

CUNNINGHAM: Good.

Liz, there are more questions in the room. Did you—do you have somebody online? Yes, we’ll turn now to online. Can you remind them how to—

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Krishen Sud.

Q: Yes. Hi. I’m a member of CFR, Krishen Sud.

Question for Pia. Look, I think we are having somewhat of a wrong debate. The issue is not whether immigration is good or immigration is bad. The issue is, can a society have 15, 20 million immigrants come in a short period of time and be assimilated in the local areas? Like, are there enough schools—

CUNNINGHAM: Well, that’s actually not—that’s actually much broader than the narrow topic that we’re addressing here today. But go ahead with your question.

Q: Yeah. OK, so I’ll cut through the question. So the question is, you know, what has been the impact on local schools, local housing in areas where there’s a large inflow of immigrants? And has there been any study that suggests that, you know, a society like the U.S. can take in maybe 2 million immigrants a year, but not 6 million immigrants a year? Or anything in that effect to get—you know, for them to assimilate properly?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Well, let’s stick with the economic impacts. Pia, did you want to address that?

ORRENIUS: Sure. I mean, I don’t know where the 15 to 20 million comes from. I mean, usually we take in, I don’t know, 1 to 2 million a year. So but we know that in areas—yes. I think it’s absolutely—I agree that it’s important that kind of immigration be, you know, predictable, steady flow. Whatever the flow is, that it’s, you know, not too disruptive, not too large, not too small. I think whenever you have these large periods of record immigration, that we just had in the last three years under the Biden administration, I think you get a backlash. And there’s a reason for that, because it does disrupt communities and it does put pressure on schools and housing. We saw that in New York. We saw it in Chicago. It creates a lot of resentment in those communities when these large inflows that are unexpected and are difficult to accommodate. You know, that was not a good situation.

So I don’t think that’s what you’re gunning for. I think what you’re going for is really—and frankly, what Steve was saying, you know, a predictable, selective flow, something balanced, something that obviously communities can contend with, plan around, you know, so they can provide the services that need to be provided. Because as you pointed out in your question, it’s very important that we have the school and educational systems and sort of the cultural amenities, whatever it is, so that people can assimilate and, you know, integrate into U.S. society.

CAMAROTA: Can I say one thing real quick? OK, so the data from January of last year, one year ago, showed the foreign born hit an all-time record of 15.8 percent. That blew past the records of 1890 and 1910. So the question you have to ask, if you want to keep immigration high, if you want to expand legal immigration, then you are basically arguing that you want to take America to a place it’s never been before as a country. And I think at the very least there should be a high degree of consensus about doing that. And I don’t think we have that consensus.

FLORES: Yeah, and no one’s arguing that increase. So I would just say that.

CUNNINGHAM: By the way, I would argue that the wonderful thing about America is that we’re always going someplace we’ve never been before. (Laughter.) And my family’s been here since 1620. So—

CAMAROTA: Then make the case to the public, though. That’s the thing. Get a consensus, and then you can do it.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Let’s go back to the room. Yes, in the back there.

Q: Thank you. Mark Hetfield with HIAS, the refugee resettlement agency.

I did want—no one’s really talked about refugees and their fiscal impact. So I wanted to ask about two studies that were done on that. But first, I want to say I know that you framed this in terms of economic impact and used quotes from Stephen Miller and Donald Trump. But when you look at what’s happened to the refugee program it’s about a lot more than the economy. The only refugees we’re resettling right now are White Afrikaners from South Africa.

That being said, there was a study that Trump commissioned in 2017, with the executive order on the refugee and Muslim ban, trying to demonstrate that refugees and asylees are a drain on the American economy. What they found was that over a ten-year period refugees and asylees contributed $63 billion more in taxes at the state, local, and federal level than they took in services. That study was repeated by the Biden administration, which found that over a fifteen-year period it was a net $124 billion gain to the economy. So I just wanted to ask, while we don’t bring refugees and asylees here for economic purposes, for the panelists to comment on that study.

CUNNINGHAM: Good.

CAMAROTA: I know it well. It was leaked because they didn’t like it, and it wasn’t quite finished. Here’s the story with that. If you count the refugees and asylees who came in in the ’70s, ’80s, and the first part of the ’90s, that was a very—much more skilled population, primarily from Eastern Europe, some from Cuba, and that sort of thing. They were a net fiscal benefit. But what we show in our analysis is over the last twenty-five, thirty years that the skill level of refugees based on the refugee survey, where they actually asked people how much education they have, declined dramatically. If you look at that population that we were taking in prior to this cutoff, it’s almost certainly a net fiscal drain. But if you bunch them all together and put that group that no longer comes, you can get it to come out positive.

FLORES: But can I just say something? I mean, this is where the data is—you know, it’s—if we are a country that accepts that we would like to continue to be a place that has a refugee program and asylum, we are not going to look at that type of data as a net drain because the benefit to the country is that we are a place of refuge, and we have communities who want to sponsor, host, support refugees. Look at even under Biden, right? You had a major—I think people forget, we had the largest forced displacement crisis our Western Hemisphere has ever recorded. It wasn’t just that there were a lot of people at the border. It was that every country in the Western Hemisphere was dealing with unprecedented numbers.

And so when I go here, were we going to stop them and ask. do you have a certain education level? That’s not how refugee or asylum policy works, right? The premise is, is that if you’re fleeing what we have decided are the grounds of persecution, we as a country made that policy choice. But I do believe that that system needs reform. And I think the less we can have people come across the border in an uncontrolled way, then that’s a better thing for the country. But I would—I would push back on this idea of trying to reduce refugees, because we’re accepting them for a different purpose overall. And it is to be a place of refuge.

CAMAROTA: Can I just say, I agree with that. Refugees are supposed to be admitted for humanitarian reasons. The fact that they may create large fiscal costs is not, to my mind, the best argument to not take them. That’s not the reason we take them. On the other hand, if that fiscal cost exists, then you should be especially selective with all the other immigrants so that you can avoid fiscal costs with them.

CUNNINGHAM: Great.

Other questions? Yes, here in the second table.

Q: I’m Alexandra Starr with International Crisis Group.

I actually want to ask you about the industries that are going to be most impacted by the administration’s current policies. I’ve been in South Florida for most of the last few months. And was very surprised to learn that immigrants, and in particular immigrants on TPS, actually comprise a majority of the workforce in our airport, in Fort Lauderdale, for example. It hadn’t occurred to me that that would be a place that would have such high numbers. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of these industries that might not be as visible, but we may end up feeling as a broader community the impact of losing those workers.

CUNNINGHAM: Great. Would one of you like to address that?

CAMAROTA: Well, we know what those industries are, right? They’re building, cleaning, and maintenance. They’re construction, especially construction labor. They’re groundskeeping and cleaning occupations, those kinds of things, where wages tend to be low. So my hope is wages are going to go up, make them more desirable. I think that would be great. If the poor get a raise in America, I’m all in favor of it.

FLORES: I’m also in favor of the poor getting a raise, but we’re looking at the health-care industry. We’re looking at nursing. We’re looking at home health aides. There’s a major vitamin manufacturing company in Miami. They hired a number of TPS and people who came in on parole. They’re having to fire all of these workers. We saw large businesses, corporations like Disney, but we also see small construction companies in states like Texas. It’s very dispersed. But when we’re looking at the affordability crisis for Americans right now, we’re looking at every industry where Americans actually rely on immigrant labor to keep things affordable. And I think we’re coming into a conflict policy-wise where if policymakers want to promise affordability and they don’t pair immigration reform with it, they’re not going to be able to meet that goal because immigration is a part of why Americans can get cheaper produce. But we have to stabilize.

And I’ll just say, and this is a very key economic point about our history, we have always had, since chattel slavery, an exploited, foreign-born, non-citizen working class in America. We have never had an economy where we have not had millions of foreign-born, non-citizen people working for our economy keeping prices low for Americans. I’m all for the experiment of legalizing them, but that will be a big change that we have to build consensus for. And that consensus right now does not exist. And instead, we’re going in an opposite direction of simply trying to reduce and push people out of legal status, because that’s something that—mass deportation gets talked about a lot, but we’ve not had a president before taking legal status away from people. And so that manufacturing plant I just mentioned, there are people who came in legally—not even getting TPS. Because you can only get TPS after you’re here. They came in legally. And they’re firing workers who used the legal immigration system. That is an unprecedented experiment that I think we will regret.

CAMAROTA: What is their immigration status? You’re talking about the CHNV program? Those people all had parole. Parole was supposed to be temporary. And we can end it. So you’re saying they use the legal—they’re not coming in with green cards. They’re not guest workers. They—

FLORES: They’re coming in through parole, which is an authority that every president since the ’50s has used for certain populations, whether it’s Venezuelans or whether it was the Vietnamese refugees. It is the full discretion of the president to use the parole authority. And so the question that he did is how is he telling those American businesses, who hired CHNV employees, what they’re—why are they losing their workers and firing people who they were told by the federal government could legally work for them?

CAMAROTA: Well, if it’s the discretion of the president, then he wants to end it. He thinks it was unwise, and he wants to end it.

FLORES: And a great place for Congress to step in.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Elsewhere in the room. Yes, sir. The middle table. And then we’ll go over here to the back left. Yeah.

Q: Good afternoon. My name is Cameron Thomas-Shah. I’m a term member as well.

Specifically for Steven and Pia, could you comment about recommended policies for domestic upskilling or reskilling in the event of a replacement? I think it’s very important to consider the next day policy if the—if we’re talking about restrictionist policies. And then, you know, to Andrea, if you could comment at all on—you know, something that I think is often missing from our policy conversations is the rhetoric or the messaging—policy messaging. How you evaluate current policy messaging around illegal immigration, irregular migration coming out of the U.S. government. Thank you.

FLORES: I mean—

CAMAROTA: Well, I don’t like—I don’t like it, the messaging.

FLORES: Oh.

CAMAROTA: It’s not what I would say. I don’t like the way they talk about them. So if that’s what you’re asking me.

FLORES: Oh. I could just say, it’s bad on both sides. I think we are very bad. I think Democrats have been horrific at selling a vision of immigration that Americans can understand, that they understand why immigrants are here, that they understand that we had a Venezuelan refugee crisis that surpassed the size of the Syrian refugee crisis. You did not hear that from the last administration. I worked for the last administration. We have not had a vision. I worked for Democrats for ten years.

I would say that Donald Trump has a very clear vision, right? Less immigration is good for the country. Less immigration makes housing more affordable. Until you have—but I don’t think that that is an honest vision for the public, which is why you see opposition to his policies even from some of his own stakeholders.

So I think both parties need to get honest with the public about the fact that our system is not really working for anyone. I think actually now everyone’s a loser in our current immigration system because it’s so outdated. So both sides need new messaging and a new sell to Americans, I would argue.

CUNNINGHAM: Pia, the first part of the question was about skilling and reskilling.

ORRENIUS: Yeah. Yeah, I appreciated that question. I think—yeah. I think that’s really important. But I also think that, you know, the thing we were talking about earlier is that there’s not a lot of just available labor sitting on the sidelines waiting to come in. So there’s really a two-step process. First, how do you get, you know, more Americans into the labor force and increase the labor force participation rate, which has, you know, actually been declining over time because of aging? So that’s going to be a difficult problem.

And then once you get them into the labor force, yes, obviously upskilling and reskilling, those are important mechanisms for addressing any type of disruption in the labor market—certainly not just immigration, but international trade, for example. I mean, I think when Steven was talking earlier about the malaise among the blue collar men in America, higher mortality and all the other problems that they’re dealing with, I think some of that also has to do with the China shock, as it’s known, and the depletion of some of those manufacturing jobs in many, you know, small towns across America. So I think absolutely upskilling and reskilling, whether it has to do with community colleges and other incentives that we can create both locally and federally, I think those are very important.

The other problem I wanted to point out, though, was—so, in terms of what we’re talking about, whether we think that immigrants will leave en masse and we can kind of shuttle these jobs to natives, which, again, I have my doubts about, but I want to warn against one thing. Which is right now the unauthorized population is actually growing not shrinking, because so many people are losing status. And again, we don’t have any information that they’re leaving the country. As that happens, and we have a lot of enforcement against this community, I think what happens is they go underground. They’re going into the shadows.

And that’s actually bad for the labor market, in the sense that that will put downward pressure on wages, not upward pressure on wages, if immigrants can’t, you know, freely choose jobs, move between employers, or if they’re going to be exploited. You know, this chilling effect is actually—you know, can have some really unintended consequences. And I think that, you know, that’s why what Andrea is saying, which talks about immigration reform, I think that, you know, the combination of a tough enforcement, low inflow, and a large unauthorized immigration population is really—is really creating the conditions—perfect conditions for, like, addressing it with some really good immigration reform.

CUNNINGHAM: Gentleman here at the back—at the table, at the rear. Thank you.

Q: Thank you very much. My name is Federico Sequeda. I’m a term member with the Council as well. Thank you to all the panelists and to CFR for putting together a really vibrant discussion.

A question for Steven. You know, we’ve been talking a lot about the low-wage immigration. I’m curious your views on the H-1B program, given that the skills tend to be higher of that population. And do you think that that program should be kept as is and/or expanded, given that? Thank you.

CAMAROTA: Well, I’ve written a lot of criticisms about it. But it should not create a fiscal drain for the United States. When we look at that program, there are a lot of issues with it, right? The person is tied to the employer. So it makes them more difficult—they can’t change jobs that easily. That’s why employers love it. I’m inclined to be concerned that we’re now to the point where 29 percent of all STEM workers in the United States are foreign born, and a significant fraction are guest workers. I want to try to get those good jobs to Americans. And again, if we have a pipeline problem—there’s a huge debate. A whole lot of people have written on this. It doesn’t look like we have a shortage of STEM workers, especially when you look at wages across all of these occupations.

But if we want to get more Americans into computer programming, or engineering, and so forth, I think the way to do it is to have less immigration. And there are so many problems with the H-1B program that I think either massive reform or just getting rid of it. But I’m skeptical of it. But it doesn’t—but the good news is it shouldn’t create a fiscal drain. And the natives who are harmed, who get crowded out or get lower wages, are relatively high-paying, high-educated people. So at least you don’t have that problem, which is what you have at the bottom end. So I guess that’s my thinking. So that’s what I think. I mean, we’ve written a lot about it, but there’s a lot more to be said.

CUNNINGHAM: Pia or Andrea, you want to address that, H-1Bs?

FLORES: Nah, we can get a few more questions.

ORRENIUS: Yeah, I do want to—yeah. I mean, the literature in economics has, you know, really shown tremendous economic benefits from the H-1B program on the whole. And in many ways. I mean, just in terms of increasing investment, increasing the durability of the firms that are able to hire H-1B workers, increasing productivity growth, boosting growth in, you know, cities where H-1Bs, you know, are hired, and so forth. So there’s just a—there’s so many papers that show in the benefits of the H-1B program. And show that—

CUNNINGHAM: OK—

CAMAROTA: Well, we disagree on this point. So let’s be clear. I think the literature has a number of studies showing the H-1B simply crowds out the native born and reduces productivity. It does not create more—(inaudible). Doran and his colleagues did a really great one looking at companies that won the lottery for the H-1B and didn’t, and found that the companies that didn’t win hired a lot of Americans. And it just looks like a one-for-one displacement going on.

ORRENIUS: Whereas—

CUNNINGHAM: OK. We’re almost out of time. Do we have another question over here? Oh, right there, sir. Yeah, thank you.

Q: Hi. Steve Bunnell. I’m a former general counsel of DHS.

My experience in government was that there was widespread dissatisfaction on sort of both ends of both ends of the political spectrum with the immigration system. We’ve seen that today. I was also struck when I would talk to counterparts in Canada, which, you know, from our perspective I used to look like, wow, I wish our system worked the way theirs. You talk to them, they’re—like, they’re dissatisfied with their system. And my question for the group is, maybe this is sort of a big-picture kind of closing question, is there some other country in the world that gets immigration right? It seems to be a—it seems to be an issue that’s really hard for all countries. And not just, does it look good from our perspective, does it look good from inside the country? Thank you.

CUNNINGHAM: That’s a great question. One minute to each of you. (Laughter.) Andrea, do you want to start?

FLORES: OK, I’ll start. So I think there are elements of different immigration systems I respect. I think Canada is interesting in that they’re willing to try new things, and they try it faster than we do. Which is, we don’t update anything ever. And so I know that we’ve taken some models that I think are smart from them, like sponsorship of refugees. And I think that could grow.

I think Brazil is a very interesting comparison, because they are also a multiracial democracy. We have not really talked about race or demographics. That’s a huge piece of this. But Brazil is doing a far better job. You do not hear the same anti-Venezuelan backlash that you hear in Chile, and in Peru, and in Colombia, because they matched Venezuelan new arrivals with communities who had labor needs and who offered to host them. And then I also think that you look at asylum reforms, some in Europe are interesting. So I think you have to cobble together. But you hit on something. It’s about who we are as a country. And if we are divided on every other issue, why would this be simple to solve, because it’s about the future of who gets to be American.

CUNNINGHAM: Steve.

CAMAROTA: Well, I certainly agree with that last point. Look, I agree with people like Fareed Zakaria, who says, look around all of the Western world the record levels of immigration—and really, it’s numbers, numbers, and numbers—is driving—is roiling the politics and driving, essentially, the rise of conservative or right-of-center populism. That’s true in Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, everywhere. And in the United States.

CUNNINGHAM: So who gets it right?

CAMAROTA: So what I would say is almost all the countries of Western Europe have massive dissatisfactions with the level of immigration. That’s the big thing. It’s not just something you can tinker with about who comes in. It’s also the numbers. And we’re at record numbers. So I guess my final point is, you know, none of these countries, including us, are not going to have their politics roiled. They’re going to see a lot of right-wing populism as long as immigration stays at record levels. So if you like right-wing populism, keep immigration high. That would be my advice.

FLORES: Unless you’re Brazil. (Laughs.)

CUNNINGHAM: Pia, does anybody get it right?

ORRENIUS: I mean, we do often mention Canada, but I think that, you know, what—the nice thing about Canada is, as Andrea was pointing out, you know, when they make a—them they keep changing stuff. So when they make a mistake, they fix it, you know? So that’s the really nice thing. I think at the end of the day, that’s what—that’s what you can wish for, is a system that’s actually adaptive, that uses the evidence, that makes changes, that looks at economic and other priorities, you know, and just makes the changes that need to be made. And so I think to that extent Canada is kind of a role model, although, you know, again, they’ve made their mistakes. But they’ve also corrected them.

But Steven’s also right, because what happens is when you have—when you have—you know, these large surges in immigration get these backlashes. And, I mean, look at the U.K. I mean, they ended up with Brexit. I mean, it was—you know, we just have to be careful, you know, and slow and steady, predictable system that works, that’s reliable, and helps people assimilate, and so forth. I mean, I think that we can do this. You know, and the nice thing about immigration reform is it’s actually free. (Laughs.) It, like, doesn’t cost anything. People want to come here. Just set the rules, you know, and it’s go. And it doesn’t cost anything.

CUNNINGHAM: Good. Great question to end on. Great answers. Want to thank the three panelists. And I really want to thank the Silberstein family for making this conversation possible, and for coming down from the New York area today to be here. Talk to them. Fascinating people. Thank you all for coming. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.