Gordon Hanson's Research Cited in Bloomberg
How to Be a Patriot: Hire an Illegal Immigrant
07/07/2011
Charles Kenny,
Bloomberg Businessweek
For a country of immigrants, the U.S. remains vexed about how to deal with the fact that people from elsewhere still want to come here. Two successive Presidents have now been stymied in their attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The latest foray is the DREAM Act, a narrow but important piece of the immigration reform puzzle that would, at a minimum, give the children of undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. The bill failed in the Senate last December, despite the Obama Administration’s support. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reintroduced the act in May, but the prospects for passing any meaningful legislation before the 2012 election are slim.
In the meantime, the millions of illegal immigrants already here must continue to live and work in the shadows, one false move away from arrest and deportation. Indeed, legislation in states such as Alabama and Georgia is moving toward treating not just illegal immigrants, but also those who employ them, as criminals. And yet if forced to do without illegal labor, vast sectors of the U.S. economy, from agriculture to construction, would founder—not to mention the putting greens infested by crab grass and the children who would run riot without care. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports legalizing undocumented workers who are “already contributing to our economy,” provided they don’t otherwise run afoul of the law.
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Gordon Hanson is director of the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies and professor of economics at UC San Diego, where he holds faculty positions in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. Prior to joining UCSD in 2001, he was on the economics faculty at the University of Michigan (1998-2001) and at the University of Texas (1992-1998).
