Up for Grabs: The Gains and Prospects of First- and Second-Generation Young Adults
By Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix
Youth and young adults from immigrant families represent one in four people in the United States between the ages of 16-26 and account for half of the growth of the young adult population between 1995 and 2010. This report profiles the nation’s 11.3 million first- and second-generation young adults, finding substantial generational progress in terms of high school graduation, college enrollment, and ability to earn family-sustaining wages. Second-generation Hispanic women are faring particularly well, with college enrollment rates equal to those of third-generation non-Hispanic white women. However, they are not graduating from college at the same rate or on the same timeline because of family, work, or economic reasons. The report sketches how postsecondary education, workforce development, and language training programs could better meet the needs of this population, which will assume a greater role as the US workforce ages.
Read Report | Watch Video | Listen to Podcast | View Powerpoints

The Economic Integration of Immigrants in the United States: Long- and Short-Term Perspectives
By Aaron Terrazas
The United States has provided excellent economic opportunities for generations of immigrants, who are set to play an increasingly significant role in the US economy in coming decades as more baby boomers retire. Because many immigrants are concentrated in low-wage or low-skill jobs, the 2007-09 economic crisis accentuated their vulnerabilities in the labor market, with a risk that the crisis could prove to be a turning point in their future upward socioeconomic mobility. While historically, in the absence of government integration policies, the workplace has played a key role in immigration integration, it remains unclear if this approach will continue to ensure strong economic integration moving forward.
Download Report

Labor Standards Enforcement and Low-Wage Immigrants: Creating an Effective Enforcement System
By Donald M. Kerwin with Kristen McCabe
This report analyzes the labor standards enforcement record of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations and argues that enforcement of labor laws should become a higher priority, particularly amid high rates of unemployment and underemployment. The report, which also examines states’ activity, concludes that labor standards enforcement should become a pillar of immigration policymaking and asks whether enforcement could play a role in reducing unauthorized employment and illegal immigration. It details the elements necessary for an effective labor standards enforcement system and proposes a way forward.
Download Report | Press Release | View Powerpoint | Listen to Podcast

Migration and the Great Recession: The Transatlantic Experience
Edited by Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Madeleine Sumption, and Aaron Terrazas
This edited volume addresses the impact of the economic crisis in seven major immigrant-receiving countries: the United States, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The Great Recession marked a sudden and dramatic interruption in international migration trends, bringing the growth of foreign-born populations to a virtual standstill in Europe and North America and pushing many policymakers to reevaluate their approach towards immigration. The crisis has had a disproportionate impact on immigrant workers, especially young immigrants and members of disadvantaged minority groups — impacts which, in some countries, show little sign of receding. Meanwhile, stringent deficit-reduction plans, especially in some of the worst affected European Member States, have created an inhospitable environment for addressing these impacts through investments in immigrant integration.
Purchase a Copy | Press Release

Eight Policies to Boost the Economic Contribution of Employment-Based Immigration
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Madeleine Sumption
Immigration can be a powerful tool for supporting a country’s economic growth and prosperity, but its success in accomplishing that objective depends on well-designed and carefully implemented immigration policies that deliberately and strategically facilitate immigration’s economic contribution. This policy memo, drawing on experiences from Asia, Europe, North America, and the Pacific region, presents eight strategies to create effective and efficient economic-stream immigration systems.
Download Memo

Rethinking Points Systems and Employer-Selected Immigration
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Madeleine Sumption
Advanced industrialized economies typically have used one of two competing models for selecting economic-stream immigrants: Points-based or employer-led selection. Increasingly, however, they are creating hybrid selection systems, implement the best ideas from each model. The result: Selection systems that have much of the flexibility of points systems while also prioritizing employer demand.
Download Report

Policies to Curb Unauthorized Employment
By Madeleine Sumption
Illegal immigration is driven in large measure by illegal employment. Lower wages aren’t the only reasons why employers turn to unauthorized workers: Illegal hiring can also allow them to evade costly regulations and taxes and to have greater flexibility in working hours and employment length. This memo outlines the three major lines of attack policymakers can use to craft a coherent strategy to reduce illegal employment: Employer sanctions, realistic legal channels to admit needed workers, and domestic labor market reforms.
Download Report

The Role of Immigration in Fostering Competitiveness in the United States
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Madeleine Sumption
Immigration is an indispensable piece of any strategy to boost economic growth and prosperity. The United States has a natural advantage in attracting the world’s most talented workers. But employment-based immigration makes up too small a proportion of overall US permanent immigration, and US policy is inflexible in the face of changing circumstances, including the growth of other skill-focused immigration programs across the developed world. This report examines effective strategies to ensure that immigration policy facilitates US economic growth, innovation, and competitiveness.
Download Report | European Competitiveness Report

Filling Labor Shortages through Immigration: An Overview of Shortage Lists and their Implications
By Madeleine Sumption
This article for MPI’s online journal, the Migration Information Source, provides an overview of i mmigration policies designed to alleviate perceived shortages of labor, discussing how wealthy countries in the last decade have frequently attempted to fine-tune immigration flows by maintaining lists of critical occupations into which immigration should be facilitated.
Read Article

Immigration Policy and Less-Skilled Workers in the United States
By Harry J. Holzer
While broad consensus exists regarding the benefits of highly skilled immigration, the economic role of low-skilled immigrants remains in dispute. In this assessment of the research literature, the author makes an economics-based case for significant reform of the US immigration system. Among his suggestions for a more economically beneficial immigration system: Providing legal pathways for low-skilled workers, allowing less-skilled workers on employment-based visas to switch employers more easily and gain a path to citizenship, and setting employer visa fees at a level sufficient to offset some of the costs that low-skilled immigration imposes.
Download Report | Press Release

Migration and Immigrants Two Years after the Financial Collapse: Where Do We Stand?
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Madeleine Sumption, and Aaron Terrazas with Carola Burkert, Stephen Loyal, and Ruth Ferrero-Turrión
Immigrants, particularly men and youth, have been disproportionately hit by the global economic crisis that began in fall 2008 and now confront a reality of dwindling budgets for public services and immigrant integration programs, this report for BBC World Service reveals. The report, which has a particular focus on five North Atlantic countries -- Germany, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom and United States – finds that the unemployment gap between immigrant and native workers has widened in many places. It offers analysis of a number of trends, including the fact that some immigrant-destination countries that historically have been countries of emigration, such as Ireland, Greece, and Portugal, may be reverting to earlier trends.
Download Report | Press Release

Still an Hourglass? Immigrant Workers in Middle-Skilled Jobs
By Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Serena Yi-Ying Lin
It has been conventional wisdom that the immigrant workforce is shaped like an hourglass — wide at the top and the bottom but narrow in the middle. In reality, immigrants are more evenly dispersed across the skills spectrum than has been widely recognized. Using an innovative new method of analysis, the authors found that the fastest growth in immigrant employment since 2000 has occurred in middle-skilled jobs. The study, which examines employment in the US workforce and in four key sectors (IT, health care, construction, and hospitality), finds that employment growth for immigrants far outpaced native growth rates between 1990 and 2006 in the total economy and the four industries surveyed.
Report in Brief | Full Report | Press Release | Watch Video

The Impact of Immigrants in Recession and Economic Expansion
By Giovanni Peri
There is broad consensus among economists that immigration has a small but positive impact on the average income of Americans over the long term. But far less analysis has been done on the impact of immigrants on the labor market in the shorter term, particularly when viewed through the lens of the recession and its lingering labor market effects. This report finds that immigration unambiguously improves employment, productivity and income but that it also involves some short-term adjustments. These adjustments are more difficult during downturns, further underscoring the need for an immigration system that is more responsive to the economic cycle.
Download Report | Press Release | Listen/Download Event Audio

The UK's New Europeans: Progress and Challenges Five Years After Accession
The enlargement of the European Union has fundamentally changed migration patterns to the United Kingdom. An estimated 1.5 million workers have come to the United Kingdom from new EU Member States since May 2004, accounting for about half of all labor migration during that period. Though employment rates for these new European citizens are high, areas of concern remain because their wages are low and the workers, often despite significant education, are concentrated in unskilled labor sectors. This report, commissioned by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, also concludes that the influx of workers may be having a slight negative impact on the wages of the lowest-paid British workers.
Download Report

The Economics and Policy of Illegal Immigration in the United States
By Gordon H. Hanson
Illegal immigration's overall impact on the US economy is negligible, despite clear benefits for employers and unauthorized immigrants and slightly depressed wages for low-skilled native workers, according to this report by University of California, San Diego Professor of Economics Gordon Hanson for MPI's Labor Markets Initiative. The largest economic gains from illegal immigration flow to unauthorized workers, who see very substantial income hikes after migrating, Hanson says, suggesting that policy changes could increase the positive contribution that low-skilled workers make to the US economy by converting illegal flows to legal ones.
Download Report | Press Release

Tied to the Business Cycle: How Immigrants Fare in Good and Bad Economic Times
By Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny
Immigrants surpassed native-born workers in several key labor market outcomes from the mid-1990s through 2007, recording higher employment and lower jobless rates — but the trend was reversed with the onset of the current recession. The report, which analyzes employment and unemployment patterns over the past 15 years and two recessions, shows that immigrant economic outcomes began deteriorating before the current recession officially began in December 2007, tracing immigrants' declining fortunes largely to the housing bust which began in spring 2006.
Download Report | Press Release

Aligning Temporary Immigration Visas with US Labor Market Needs: The Case for Provisional Visas
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Doris Meissner, Marc R. Rosenblum, and Madeleine Sumption
Reform of a rigid employment-based visa system that is out of sync with the needs of employers, the US economy, US society, and immigrants alike must be part of effective comprehensive immigration reform legislation. In this report, MPI recommends creation of a new stream of visas known as provisional visas, which would bridge temporary and permanent admissions to the United States for work purposes in a predictable and transparent way. The authors make the case that the concept hits the sweet spot in balancing the two main goals of labor market immigration policy: It supports economic growth and competitiveness while protecting the wages and interests of US workers; and it facilitates the social and economic integration of immigrants.
Download Report | Press Release

Harnessing the Advantages of Immigration for a 21st-Century Economy
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Doris Meissner, Marc R. Rosenblum, and Madeleine Sumption
The US immigration system neither meets labor market needs efficiently nor minds the interests of US workers with particular success, and has yet to devise a way that uses immigration to promote US economic growth and competitiveness well. This paper proposes an institutional solution to address this systemic failure: Creating a permanent and independent body, situated within the executive branch, that is charged with recommending adjustments to immigration laws to the president and Congress: the Standing Commission on Labor Markets, Economic Competitiveness, and Immigration. The bipartisan panel would provide timely, evidence-based, and impartial analysis and recommendations to the president and Congress regarding employment-based immigration.
Download Report | Press Release

Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Aaron Terrazas
As the nation sinks into a recession that may be the worst since the Great Depression, the economic crisis raises fundamental questions about future immigration flows to and from the United States and how current and prospective immigrants will fare. This report, a research product of MPI's new Labor Markets Initiative, examines how the number of immigrants has changed since the recession began; how legal and illegal immigration flows may change; and how immigrants fare in the labor market during downturns.
Download Report | Press Release | Listen to the Briefing