by the Immigration Council (AILA)
A new report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), entitled Immigrant Legalization:
Assessing the Labor Market Effects, yields both some enlightening and some potentially misleading results about the likely impact of a legalization program. Because the PPIC report focuses on legal status acquired under current immigration law, it does not refl ect the long-term benefi ts and gains that follow from a comprehensive immigration reform package which includes legalization.
While the PPIC report dovetails with other reports when it concludes that legalization would not have a negative impact on native workers’ wages and employment, their fi ndings on the wages and mobility of the newly legalized differ from other academic studies on how immigrants fare after legalization. This difference can be attributed to the fact that PPIC looks at legalization only, and how the newly legalized are doing just 4-13 months after becoming legalized. Almost all other previous studies haven take a longer term view of their success.
PPIC relies upon data from the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), a sample of foreign-born individuals who acquired legal permanent resident (LPR) status between May and November 2003. It is important to keep in mind that the NIS is not representative of the unauthorized-immigrant population as a whole. As opposed to the individuals captured in the NIS, most unauthorized immigrants do not have a means of acquiring legal status. Moreover, individuals in the NIS were interviewed 4-13 months after acquiring LPR status. Despite these limitations in the NIS data, the PPIC report uses it to conclude that immigrants who receive legal status do not experience significant upward mobility in their occupation or wages. Unfortunately, 4-13 months is far too short a time to witness the sort of upward socioeconomic mobility that legalization would facilitate. For instance, a report on beneficiaries of legalization under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) revealed pronounced upward mobility in terms of education, wages, homeownership, and occupation between 1990 and 2006:
* In 1990, only 30 percent of IRCA immigrants 16-24 years old had a high- school diploma or better. By 2006 (when that group was 31-41 years old), the share had increased to 58 percent.
* The real wages of IRCA immigrants in all age groups increased between 1990 and 2006.
* While 34 percent of IRCA immigrants age 35-44 years owned homes in 1990, 68 percent owned homes in 2006.
* The share of younger IRCA immigrants employed in managerial-level positions rose substantially, from 9 percent in 1990 to 17 percent in 2006. To view the full report please visit http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=869
