Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, grade: A (85%), Bishop's University Lennoxville (Bishop's University Lennoxville, Canada), course: Topics in U.S. Public Policy, 19 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The United States of America has always been a nation of immigrants. After the earlier settlement by Europeans, the next great wave of immigration started in 1840 and ended in 1924. Another wave of immigration can be dated from 1960 to the present. From the year 1970 to the year 2000, the U.S. has admitted more than 20 million people as legal permanent residents (LPRs). In the fiscal year of 2006, the U.S. admitted a total number of 1,266,264 LPRs. Immigration is controlled by a policy that aims at several purposes. Besides the economic goals of increasing U.S. productivity and the U.S. standard of living, it serves the important social goal of unifying families, the socio-cultural goal of promoting diversity in the U.S. population, the economic goal of increasing America's prosperity, and the political goal of maintaining stable demographics. In short, the main focuses of legal immigration are the socio-cultural, economic, and political goals. According to Linda Chavez, author and chairperson of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C., debates about immigration have become "one of the most controversial public-policy debates in recent memory" . To weigh the benefits of legal immigration, it is essential to know its difficulties. In fact, the advantages of legal immigration not only counterbalance its problems, but also illustrate the need of legal immigrants for the U.S. in terms of socio-cultural, economic, and political factors. Nonetheless, legal immigration is only beneficial with a proper immigration policy. For this reason the proposal of a point system by George J. Borjas, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, seems to be the right step to gui

Immigration policy is one of the most contentious issues facing the United States today. The bitter national debate over California's Proposition 187, the influx of Cuban refugees into Miami, and the continuous, often illegal, crossings over the Mexican border into Texas and California are just a few of the episodes that have created a furor on local, state, and federal levels.In this timely and informative book, David Heer invites readers to examine the data and the trends of immigration to the United States and, ultimately, make up their own minds about what our national immigration policy ought to be. He demonstrates how social science findings, together with a conscious recognition of our individual values, are necessary for the formation of a balanced policy for immigration.Some of the the nation's collective values that may be affected by U.S. immigration policy are the standard of living in this country, the preservation of existing American culture, ethnic and class conflict, and the power of the United States in international affairs. Heer examines the impact of these values on immigration policy and traces the history of U.S. immigration and immigration law and patterns of immigration to the United States. Finally, he offers proposals for change to existing immigration policy.

The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.

Few issues on the American political agenda are more complex or divisive than immigration. There is no shortage of problems with current policies and practices, from the difficulties and delays that confront many legal immigrants to the large number of illegal immigrants living in the country. Moreover, few issues touch as many areas of U.S. domestic life and foreign policy. Immigration is a matter of homeland security and international competitiveness, as well as a deeply human issue central to the lives of millions of individuals and families. It cuts to the heart of questions of citizenship and American identity and plays a large role in shaping both America's reality and its image in the world. Immigration's emergence as a foreign policy issue coincides with the increasing reach of globalization. Not only must countries today compete to attract and retain talented people from around the world, but the view of the United States as a place of unparalleled openness and opportunity is also crucial to the maintenance of American leadership. There is a consensus that current policy is not serving the United States well on any of these fronts. Yet agreement on reform has proved elusive. The goal of the Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy was to examine this complex issue and craft a nuanced strategy for reforming immigration policies and practices.

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education, and health care, to federal, state, and local government budgets. The changing patterns of immigration and the evolving consequences for American society, institutions, and the economy continue to fuel public policy debate that plays out at the national, state, and local levels. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration assesses the impact of dynamic immigration processes on economic and fiscal outcomes for the United States, a major destination of world population movements. This report will be a fundamental resource for policy makers and law makers at the federal, state, and local levels but extends to the general public, nongovernmental organizations, the business community, educational institutions, and the research community.

This book sheds light on one of the most controversial issues of the decade. It identifies the economic gains and losses from immigration--for the nation, states, and local areas--and provides a foundation for public discussion and policymaking. Three key questions are explored: What is the influence of immigration on the overall economy, especially national and regional labor markets? What are the overall effects of immigration on federal, state, and local government budgets? What effects will immigration have on the future size and makeup of the nation's population over the next 50 years? The New Americans examines what immigrants gain by coming to the United States and what they contribute to the country, the skills of immigrants and those of native-born Americans, the experiences of immigrant women and other groups, and much more. It offers examples of how to measure the impact of immigration on government revenues and expenditures--estimating one year's fiscal impact in California, New Jersey, and the United States and projecting the long-run fiscal effects on government revenues and expenditures. Also included is background information on immigration policies and practices and data on where immigrants come from, what they do in America, and how they will change the nation's social fabric in the decades to come.

Although America is unquestionably a nation of immigrants, its immigration policies have inspired more questions than consensus on who should be admitted and what the path to citizenship should be. In Americans in Waiting, Hiroshi Motomura looks to a forgotten part of our past to show how, for over 150 years, immigration was assumed to be a transition to citizenship, with immigrants essentially being treated as future citizens--Americans in waiting. Challenging current conceptions, the author deftly uncovers how this view, once so central to law and policy, has all but vanished. Motomura explains how America could create a more unified society by recovering this lost history and by giving immigrants more, but at the same time asking more of them. A timely, panoramic chronicle of immigration and citizenship in the United States, Americans in Waiting offers new ideas and a fresh perspective on current debates.

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President policies such as President Obama's decision to protect Dreamers from deportation and President Trump's proclamation banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth. In The President and Immigration Law, Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez chronicle the untold story of how, over the course of two centuries, the President became our immigration policymaker-in-chief. Diving deep into the history of American immigration policy from founding-era disputes over deporting sympathizers with France to contemporary debates about asylum-seekers at the Southern border they show how migration crises, real or imagined, have empowered presidents. Far more importantly, they also uncover how the Executive's ordinary power to decide when to enforce the law, and against whom, has become an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for making immigration policy. This pathbreaking account helps us understand how the United States ?has come to run an enormous shadow immigration system-one in which nearly half of all noncitizens in the country are living in violation of the law. It also provides a blueprint for reform, one that accepts rather than laments the role the President plays in shaping the national community, while also outlining strategies to curb the abuse of law enforcement authority in immigration and beyond.