Leveraging the Benefits That Immigration Can Bring

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CHAPTERS 

[00:06:26]: Four policy levers for maximizing immigration's economic benefits 

[00:09:03]: Why 30 million immigrants lack the credentials to prosper in today's economy 

[00:11:26]: Two million college-educated immigrants in unskilled jobs—what it costs the U.S. 

[00:13:47]: How pandemic policy showed surprising awareness of immigrant families' needs 

[00:19:58]: Career advice for emerging immigration scholars 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:03.07] 

Welcome to the World of Migration. The podcast that the Migration Policy Institute has launched as part of its 20th anniversary to showcase some of the top thinkers on migration policy who were central to MPI's creation. We're asking our experts to reflect on how trends in policy have changed over the past two decades and to offer some thoughts for today's emerging migration scholars. My name is Julia Gelatt. I'm a Senior Policy Analyst with MPI's U.S. Immigration Policy Program and I'm delighted to speak today with Michael Fix who has been foundational to MPI's existence in a number of roles. Michael came to MPI from the Urban Institute where he was the Director of Immigration Studies. In his time at MPI, he co-founded its national center on Immigrant Integration Policy and later assumed positions as Senior Vice President, Director of Studies and CEO before becoming President. Today Michael is a Senior Fellow and is doing some really field leading work on the fuller integration of immigrants into the labor market. Michael leads MPI's work on ways to clear long-standing barriers to the recognition of immigrants' academic and professional credentials as well as to find ways to boost educational enrollment and attainment for immigrants and their children.

[00:01:20.11] 

It's an important area of research not just to improve the lives and livelihoods of of immigrant-led families, but for the broader society as we all benefit when people are able to fully utilize their skills. This makes him the perfect person to tackle our subject today, leveraging the benefits that immigration can bring. Michael, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

[00:01:43.22] 

I'm delighted. Julia, thank you for hosting it so well.

[00:01:49.14] 

Of course. So to launch into the questions, one question that often surfaces in immigration policy debates is whether immigration is a net positive for the U.S. or a net negative. Sometimes this is debated openly and sometimes these are just assumptions that are implicit in the way that people talk about immigration or the recommendations that they make. Based on your years of studying this issue, where do you come out on the positives and negatives of immigration and what research and data lead you to your conclusions?

[00:02:19.08] 

Well Julia, that's a a tough question, but let me tell you where I come out when I think about the positives and the negatives of immigration is on balance, I would have to say I come out on the positive side and here's why. I think the case here for immigration is supported by a number of recent, if you will, macro trends. Let's start with the demographics population decline. We've had the second slowest growth rate over the past decade in American history. We don't just have a smaller population in the United States, we have an older population and one that's going to create labor force needs at all skill levels. Pew and other researchers have tell us that immigrants will be the source of virtually all new growth in the Labor Market through 2030. And while it may be transitory, it hasn't been very transitory. The U.S. now has more unfilled jobs than at any point in the Labor Department's history of documenting them. This is true before COVID and it's certainly true now. And it's a challenge that's only deepened with the great what they call the great resignation. And they point to the fact all these things point to the fact that I think on balance, this is an MPI mantra, if you will, that managed immigration has been and will be a plus for developed industrialized economies like the United States, especially those that are facing population decline.

[00:03:44.04] 

If you will permit me, I'll go a little bit further and discuss some of the evidence for the fact that immigration is a net positive. And let me start here with a couple of reports from the National Academy of Sciences that Julia, you and I are fond of because we were each involved in these two reports which came out in 2016. One on immigrant integration in American society provides evidence, I think, that immigrants are continuing to integrate successfully in the United States and to make contributions to the economy and to the culture. This study, which was led by the chair of the Sociology Department at Harvard, Mary Waters, found that immigrants from all sending regions make significant here's the key generational progress in terms of education, in terms of wages, in terms of their occupational status, whether they're in a lower middle-skilled job. All this despite the fact that, you know, the United States has never had much of a target immigrant integration program, unlike some European countries. Now some groups progress faster than others, but all gamed. And you know, this brings me back to the point that the test of the nation's immigration policy is the integration and it's the mobility of immigrants and very importantly, the children of immigrants.

[00:05:01.19] 

Now, there was a second National Academy of Science, a companion study that was led by the economist Francine Blau and that you wrote for Julia. And it found that immigrants generate a net fiscal surplus over time, a long time, but they did generate a net fiscal surplus. So I was just going to ask you, does that sound like that's an about correct assessment and summary of those two studies?

[00:05:27.05] 

Yes, that sounds right on point to me. What the Economic Impacts panel found was right, that immigration is a net fiscal benefit over the long term although there are some costs at the state and local level for educating the children of immigrants, and that overall immigration has a positive impact on the economic growth of the United States and that the negative impact on U.S. workers are pretty small in terms of employment, employment and wages, and tend to affect the least educated U.S. Workers and especially previous cohorts of immigrants. So there are winners and losers in immigration, but most Americans are winners and overall the country as a whole benefits from immigration. So this really, I guess, brings us to that question of management that you mentioned. There are a lot of positives to immigration. There can be on the margins some downsides. What can policymakers do to maximize those benefits and to minimize the downsides of immigration?

[00:06:26.12] 

You know, this is, again, a second large oceanic question, and it's one that a number of our colleagues are going to be addressing and have already addressed as part of this distinguished podcast series. So what I'd like to do, if you don't mind, Julia, is cut the question sort of down to size and focus on some of the work that MPI and I've been doing in the area of integration policy and specifically on the issue of the development of talent and human capital in the United States. And by doing this, I'm obviously distinguishing our immigration policies from our immigrant integration policies. And here, of course, as you know so well, one distinguishing feature of the Migration Policy Institute has been that it works on both sides of the of this street. We work on both immigration and integration policies. It's very much bred to our bone as an institution, and it's reflected in the creation of our national center on Immigrant Integration Policy, which has been up and running since 2007, and then a host of the projects that we've been involved in, including the International Program's Immigration Futures Group. Now, when it comes to the development of talent, I see the set of policies that may best leverage immigration.

[00:07:45.01] 

I see it falling into four baskets. The first basket is attracting talent. How do we get the best and the brightest? This is in many ways the business of the Rethinking Initiative that's being led by Doris Meisner. The second basket, in terms of developing talent and human capital, is developing human talent through education and training, developing existing the immigrants who are already here, talent and mobility through education and training at the pre K high school, college and as you'll hear, credential acquisition level. A third basket of policies goes to the recognition of human talent. And here what we're trying to do is to avoid the underemployment or underutilization or brain waste that inevitably comes with immigration. We do it by recognizing newcomers, experiences and educations in a more considered way than is often the case. And fourth, there's retaining human talent. There's two thrusts to this. There's programs to protect the immigrants who are here, who are contributing to the economy, our DACA recipients, for example. And it also enables the best and the brightest to stay our international students. Let me focus on two of these. Let me first talk a little bit about developing human capital.

[00:09:03.16] 

And here I don't want to talk so much about secondary education. I don't want to talk so much about about college acquisition. What I want to focus on here is immigrants acquisition of non degree credentials, that is to say certificates, licenses, badges and the like. These are credentials that can be quickly, remotely and inexpensively obtained. They're the subject of a data tool and a commentary that we posted November 3rd on our website. And I would say that the value of these short term credentials, as you know so well from your work, owes to the fact that almost two thirds of all good new jobs are going to require some kind, some kind of high quality post secondary credential, but one that is short of a college degree. We've been working with the Lumina foundation, which is a goal of seeing that 60% of all U.S. adults hold a post secondary credential. And Jeanne Batalova and I have found that there are 100 million U.S. residents with no post secondary credentials who may not, who are going to have a hard time prospering in this economy. But of that 100 million, 30 million are immigrants or the adult children of immigrants.

[00:10:13.17] 

And this very simple fact has eluded policymakers in this area for a long time. Now there's a couple of policy responses that I would suggest that really needn't be targeted exclusively to immigrants. And one is to make Pell Grants, Pell Grants, which are very much immigrants still at the center of the Reconciliation act that usually go to paying college tuitions of low-income students, making these Pell Grants more fully available for these kinds of short term credentials that I've been talking about. And if you do that, if you do that, if you make them available, what you've got to do also is you've got to make sure that the institutions that grant these credentials are accountable for whether their immigrant enrollees finish, whether the immigrant enrollees get jobs or whether they get jobs that pay decent wages. Because studies have found that immigrants and minorities are most to enroll in programs that have very low returns on investment, where they rack up debt and they don't get much to show for it. Let me turn now to this question of recognizing human talent. And here I want to invoke our founder, Demetrios Papademetriou, who has told me through the years that immigration is a great waster of human talent.

[00:11:26.01] 

To me, this underutilization embodies the worst of all policy worlds. What we see is brain drain in the sending country and brain waste in the receiving country. What we found is that there are 2 million immigrants in the United States who have college degrees, four year college degrees, who are working in lousy unskilled jobs, or who are unemployed. It's expensive. We see $30 billion in foregone earnings as a result, we see 10 billion in foregone taxes. And as COVID descended about a year ago, we decided to turn our attention to immigrants with degrees, four year degrees in medicine and health. And what we found was 270,000. Over a million of them were underemployed and therefore aren't very much on the sidelines and not in the fight against COVID. So what we say is that this brain waste, which is by no means limited to immigrants, represents an important under recognized face of inequality in the United States. This is a finding that's recently been picked up by the Federal Reserve as well. So here again let me turn to some pretty nitty gritty policy responses. At one level, as a friend of ours, David Kalik has said, the solutions here are tantalizingly easy.

[00:12:37.01] 

Some of the investments that should be made are in well paid internships like New York Presbyterian Hospital is just introduced, paying underemployed immigrant healthcare professionals a significant amount of money to work in it, to work in medicine, to work in administration. This is all being directed by a charismatic human resource director at the hospital who I think is going to bring other hospitals into this game. The inclusion of under skilled immigrants in apprenticeship programs and the access to funding for them, teaching and testing of, in this case occupational rather than academic English and then providing gap filling instructions. So would-be workers don't have to waste a lot of time repeating education, just take the courses that they may have missed in their home countries. Those are some of the policies that I'm focusing on at the moment compared

[00:13:32.05] 

to when you started at MPI almost 20 years ago. Do you think that policymakers at the national and local level have a better understanding today of how to leverage the value of immigration and mitigate the downsides?

[00:13:47.06] 

In a few ways, I think they do. I'm not sure if globally, but in A few ways that I want to, that I'll talk about, I think they do. One area that we've been working, that I've been working on and MPI has been working on for many years is the issue of the well being of immigrant families. And here I think there is a better understanding at the policy level of the fact that many immigrants live in mixed-status families. Many of them are low income and a lot of the members, especially citizen children, have quite. The members of the family have quite different claims on the state specifically on health programs, on welfare programs and on education benefits. Do the policymakers get it? I would say they're beginning to get it. You see it most recently in the stimulus program that responded to the pandemic programs that initially barred all family members were in a families where there was any unauthorized immigrant from stimulus checks. I mean, you've done, you've worked on this yourself. You made many of these discoveries. These policies were I think later softened to extend benefits to children and other family members who were legally present, even despite the fact that there may be an unauthorized member of the household.

[00:14:56.06] 

If you ask me, I think the policy responses to the pandemic at all government levels, this is coming from our research for the Robert Wood Johnson foundation have also shown at times some surprising awareness of the needs and the fears of the undocumented all other immigrants in terms of outreach, this is in terms of inclusion from benefits like we just talked about and as well as access to testing and to vaccines. Take for example, I think the rather striking New York State creation of a $2.1 billion fund for immigrants who were excluded from the federal unemployment insurance program. Or take for example the mostly philanthropic driven program that was quite similar in Houston, Texas. And I think it's also striking, you know, having worked on this intensively, what a broad recognition there's been in the policy community of the exclusionary public charge rules that bar immigrants access to public benefits and the fact that they have such wide potential chilling effects. And I think this is reflected in the fact that the regulation promulgated by the Department of Homeland Security received more than 260,000 comments, many of them from state and local governments. I thought that showed a wide awareness.

[00:16:13.16] 

And then finally a topic that I explored several years ago and that our National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy has worked on intensively, which is the insertion and the retention of accountability standards for English language learners in elementary and secondary education. This was jump started in 1990 by the Carnegie Commission on Title 1, that our senior fellow, Delia Pompa, was a member of and that our non resident fellow, Kenji Hakuta, was a member of. And it's been carried through to carry through the No Child Left Behind Act, the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

[00:16:50.16] 

You've described some evolution in policies towards immigrants and some improvements in many ways. Does that lead you to be more hopeful or are you less hopeful than in the past that policymakers are doing the right thing on immigration?

[00:17:06.20] 

Well, both in some sense. I'm less hopeful, it's obvious. But it's hard to look at the absence of any meaningful federal immigration legislation since 1990, when I was doing immigration policy, and to think forward about the worrying prospects for reform over the next few years. I'm not sure what this morning, yesterday's election in Virginia will mean. And these and my predictions are obviously subject to change depending on the Senate parliamentarian and reconciliation and whether immigration provisions will find their way into reconciliation, reconciliation, which I think is still up in the air. So on balance, I'm a little less hopeful in terms of federal legislation. I have hope, you know, in terms of new proposed asylum rules that MPI's Doris Meisner can claim some substantial credit for and that are likely, I think, to make adjudication faster, likely to make it sure, likely to make it more predictable and I think to make the process more supportive and less adversarial. I have some hope also about the fact that over half of immigrants in the United States are now citizens. It was only a few years ago when only a third were citizens. And I also have hope over the fact that 76 members of Congress are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.

[00:18:27.02] 

These are new voices and powerful voices in this conversation. And I have finally some hope because there were many dogs that have barked over the last four or five years, but that didn't bite during the Trump years. birthright citizenship was not eliminated. It's a key building block of successful immigrant integration. To my mind, that my research has examined. The rollback of public charge that we showed MPI showed was keeping immigrant families away from the kind of health and nutrition benefits that are critical to child development. I thought was important. But watch out, it's back before the Supreme Court. We'll see the retention of diversity visas, which help build, I think, a skilled workforce and promote, as they say, diversity within the country and the society and have promoted new and important highly educated flows from, say, Africa, I think are critical. And I was struck by the grave resistance of Census Bureau workers to being asked to test the legal status of people on the census. So in each of those, I, I find some, some substantial hope.

[00:19:37.08] 

Well, that is a great note to bring us to my last question, which is what advice do you have for emerging migration scholars? And I'll note that I was really lucky to meet you, Michael, when I was just starting off in this field and I learned so much from working with you. So I'm glad that our listeners will also get to hear some of your pearls of wisdom for those just starting their careers.

[00:19:58.19] 

Well, yes, just so the listener knows, Julia worked with us after leaving Carleton College and then she left us to get a PhD from Princeton in Sociology and Demography. And then she worked at the Urban Institute. And we're lucky, so lucky to have her at MPI as a Senior Policy associate. Here's the most helpful advice I can give you, which is apply for MPI's internship program that you, Julia, are running so ably at MPI. Our internship program has been fantastic in terms of staffing, in terms of our own staff and our own abilities and capacity at MPI. But we've also been able to place people throughout the field. Our diaspora is wide and it is growing. I think if I could reference you again, I think if I'm talking, you know, in terms of emerging migration scholars, I think the path you took where you developed really strong quantitative skills in economics and in statistics, while alongside your deepening knowledge of the intricacies of immigration, is really the key to being a strong scholar in an increasingly quantitative immigration studies. I think again turning my gaze back to the Migration Policy Institute, the careers that they've had that are so deeply rooted in non-governmental organizations and in government have really been critical to the success of the institution.

[00:21:22.00] 

Doris Meisner was the former commissioner of the Immigration Service. Demetrios Papademetriou was head of International Relations at the Department of Labor. Margie McHugh was the former director of the New York Immigration Coalition. And on and on and on. And this knowledge, this worldly knowledge is so important in the world of think tanks, but is often overlooked. And then I also think, you know, looking at the field today, I think it's just critical to sidestep some of the politicization and the field. And I think researchers need to be like the famous economist and immigration expert David Card, who just won the Nobel Prize. And what he told me once was when he began to study the labor market effects of increasing the minimum wage, which he found were not large, he had totally no idea where the research was going to go. He was totally agnostic as to where it would end up. And I think more research that starts and ends from those premises is critical. And then my final point is to maxim to go there, that's to say to go into the field. And here I'm thinking about and really understand what's going on on the ground.

[00:22:28.22] 

And here I think about our President Andrew Seele's work on Central and South America that has positioned MPI so strongly on these massive changes in the hemispheric migration, its vast consequences. And it's really the result of his willingness to get on the ground and to meet with people across Central America and South America. Those are my tips.

[00:22:50.24] 

Those are excellent tips for those starting out. So much wisdom there. That's all we have time for today, but thank you Michael, very much for coming on the podcast. This has been such a great conversation. Michael Fix is a Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, where he leads its work on global talent. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the World of Migration, MPI's 20th anniversary podcast. For more on MPI's first 20 years, please visit migrationpolicy.org/about/20th. You can find all the episodes for the World of Migration and other MPI podcasts online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts or you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for World of Migration and please give us a review while you're there. The episode was produced by Michelle Mittelstadt and Yoseph Hamid and made possible through the assistance of Lisa Dixon. Our music is a song called Geographer by Bright Idea. My name is Julia Gelatt. Thanks again for listening.