Spurring an Economic Recovery: Citizenship for Certain Illegal Immigrants

A second group of naturalizable illegal immigrants are spouses and children of legal residents who came to the United States illegally with an illegal immigrant spouse who later obtained legal residence. Currently, there are at least one to two million illegal immigrant spouses and children of legal residents in this country. The legal spouse often obtained legal status through asylum or through a special employment based program. His or her spouse and children may have visited and overstayed their visitor visas or have entered the country illegally. Many have already applied for their legal residency but the wait for a visa number and thus residency in these categories (spouse of resident and illegal immigrant minor or major children of legal resident) can be over ten years for residents from some countries. These are intact families with a working spouse. Naturalizing the illegal immigrant spouse and children will allow these families to increase their household income, spend more, move to a home rather than renting, and contribute to aggregate demand in the economy.

Third, we need to offer legal status to workers who have come to the U.S. legally, but whose job change or other circumstance terminated their legal residency status. Some workers come to the United States on H1-B visas that require that they work for a specific employer or work in a specific industry for some period of time. They cannot change employers without jeopardizing their visa, but some do leave their job or are terminated from employment for economic reasons. These individuals were given legal work permission, but because of some unforeseen event have lost the permission to work legally in the United States. Often these individuals are skilled and productive workers.

Additionally, Congress should offer thousands more H1-B visas for skilled workers to work in the United States. The United States exports jobs to other countries not because those jobs can be performed less expensively overseas, but because the skills are overseas. Allowing U.S. companies to bring in skilled workers would increase total economic demand and consumption in the United States and bolster the U.S. economy.

What about the concern about labor unions that the new workers would take their jobs in a slow economy. Studies on immigration have shown that the net result of immigration for the economy is a greater number of total jobs for all citizens over time. At any one point in time, more workers for the same number of jobs would increase competition for that static number of jobs. However, over any meaningful period – one year, two years, five years, ten years, etc. – immigration has shown to generate jobs rather than increase competition for them. Furthermore, many jobs are sent overseas because of the U.S. immigration policies; those jobs could be bought back to the U.S.

Several million illegal immigrants who are already in the United States working in the shadow economy could be converted to home buyers, auto purchasers, and bank borrowers without great fanfare or controversy. Doing so would stimulate consumer spending and promote a recovery in slowing U.S. economy.