Immigration to the United States is the movement of persons who are not native to the country for various reasons as employment, businesses, studies or settlements. Through immigration, the United States has experienced tremendous population growth and changes in the cultural perceptions. The United States citizens portray different sensitivities on Immigration as the purpose and the control of immigrants has sometimes been a worry to the nation at large. However, the contribution of immigration to the American economy cannot be understated. This study embarks to reveal various factual ways through which immigration has fundamentally boosted the American Government and Economy.
Demand and Consumption
Through an increase in population, Immigration results to increased demand and consumption level. Immigration results to population increase. Indeed, the United States registers more numbers of immigrants than any other country in the world. 2015 statistics indicate that out of the 244 million international immigrants, 47 million are based in the United States which accounts for approximately 19.1% and a 14.4% of the United States total population (Abrego & Menjívar, 2016). When such a portion of people are located in the various states in the United States, they increase the aggregate consumption index which leads to more production of goods and services (Peri, 2012). For instance, food and shelter are the most basic commodities availed to these immigrants not forgetting other services they will need as they stay. Additionally, immigrants are likely to settle in the local and urban setups which are much impacting for the local markets in the United States.
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Labor and Personnel Services
Immigration drives the economy through provision of labor and personnel services hence creating a vibrant market for the United States. When immigrants settle in various parts of the states, they end up looking for jobs to sustain their lifestyles. The Atlantic reports that immigrants make 17% of the United States workforce (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2018). Though low skilled labor characterizes most of the immigrants, some immigrants have professional qualifications that earn them prestigious working positions in the United States. Any form of labor is essential to steer the economy of the United States. Immigrants have skills that the economy lacks. Similarly, a report by the fiscal policy institute indicates that 18% of the small business owners are solely by the immigrants ( Brue, McConnel & Macpherson , 2016). Jobs ranging from salon and barber shops to small community stores are the fundamental facets that grow the economy. Intuitively, such contribution by the immigrants may seem insignificant to the high-end citizens who shop at malls and other exquisite outlets. However, the impact is always felt by the disadvantaged in the community.
In addition, immigration can be perceived to add more young energy through the foreigner's active power. Native Americans join the working bracket at young ages. The quick aging working native population is reimbursed or balanced by the availability of young immigrants looking for employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) indicates that persons working in the USA from the age of 16 years represent a 62 percent of the natives and 66% of the foreigners as of February 2017 (Wojcik, 2018). Consequentially, this representation shifts from 13% workforce representation to 17%. The BLS attributes such changes to the increase of the younger foreigners in the United States through reproduction and multiplicity of the foreigner's generations in the United States.
Professional Skills
High-skilled immigrants are a force for the American economic growth. The IT department has experienced a shift with the immigration of high relatable skills in the computer science department (Furtado, 2018). The good thing about the availability of outsourced immigrant skills is that there is a dilution of the native expertise. Equally, such immigration impacts emanate from immigration for scholarship activities. Learners who come to further their studies in the United States end up settling in the United States to earn a living. Through this sequence, the US has experienced additional expertise in different fields. Professional Immigrants spread through various industries in the United States through employment and personal investments. This facilitates the broadening of the market, and thus the United States citizens can get services at affordable prices as immigrants add in the struggle to offset the monopoly of goods and services.
Gross Domestic Product
The American Action research Forum stated that scrapping the immigrant workers from the United States economy would decline the nation Gross Domestic product by $380 billion. Also, this would create a shortage of 4 million workers in the American economy (Wojcik, 2018). The GDP is a monetary tool to measure the aggregate of all the goods and services produced by a jurisdictional economy. GDP is also a measure of comparison that most countries scrutinize before making international trading and other business relations. The United States has the highest nominal GDP which indicates that the other nations transact heavily with the United States. Also, the US dollar is the most used transaction currency in the world. Distorting these GDP statistics would alter the way the international trade arena views the US and consequently, this will affect the overall economy.
Additionally, the immigrant contributes to the GDP through work. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the average growth of the immigrant would continuously be 1 million immigrants per year which transited to 2% growth of the economy in the next ten years. However, these statistics reflected a nation without the mass outmigration of the foreigners in the United States. Such indicators reveal the importance of the United States immigration authority to keep track of the incoming legal foreigners to keep the economy thriving.
Wages
A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) indicates that 1% immigrant employment in the United States increases the income per worker by 0.5%. This study suggests that immigrants are an imperfect substitution for the Native American workers. They are subject to a language barrier, education constraints and the levels of experience. For instance, less-educated immigrants lack the adequate language skills to work in formal industries and are likely to be deployed to labor-intensive manual careers as in the agricultural and the construction industries (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2018). The low-skilled native employees are advantaged by the superiority of their communications skills such that they could shift to more specialized advisory services other than the manual sectors. Therefore, when immigrant workers are absorbed in the US labor market, they result to increase in income gains for the American workers. Nevertheless, the foreigner's contribution on the economic growth can be quantified as an additional workforce to the informal and formal sectors. The informal sector needs low-skill labor which mostly is not adequate. Therefore, maintaining the rational immigration policies will enable the informal sector to grow perpendicularly with the other formal sectors of the United States economy.
Conversely, other studies indicate that immigration fosters a cut in the Native American wages when the labor provided by the foreigners directly suits the work descriptions provided by the employers. However, economics indicates that the wages are affected in the short-run, and after the production profits income of the employer industry catches up with the overall wage expenditure; they allocate more investments which later boost the wages to restore the normal or better rates in the market (Wojcik, 2018). In the long run, the capital-labor indicators maintain the average worker productivity without disruptions of risk. Moreover, the capital-labor ratio extrapolated before the 1980s in ten United States did not deviate from the forecasted trend. In this way, native and foreign workers can sustain their wage levels under standard provisions of the economy.
International Relations
Economic growth is guaranteed within a stable political arena. The United States immigration policies mean a lot of international relations with the countries represented by the foreigners living in the United States (Meissner et al., 2013). Such associations trigger trading relations of the United States with the other nationalities. Undoubtedly, international relations promote the economy of any nation and any procedures intended to constrain the interrelations, has an equitable effect to the overall growth of the economy. Former President Barack Obama was a representation of the African Americans living in the United States. Though there could never lack the political alignment woes between the Republican and the Democrats, his presidency symbolized better international relations which would subsequently improve the confidence of other nations willing to trade with the United States.
Fiscal Impact
Immigrants contribute significantly to the fiscal impact of the United States. However, the budgetary impact varies at the local levels of the states and counties affected. Whether the immigrants are documented or not, their presence affects the federal budget designed for various states of the US. Subjects to these disparities are the age, education and the skill level of the foreigners living within the state. Immigrants are eligible for public social amenities such as security and Medicare which are the largest portion of the United States national expenditures (PPI & PPI, 2018). In this perspective, a state that recently indicates more immigrants of an older age are charged relatively small cost of the resources compared to a state that has higher numbers of young immigrants.
Also, the immigrants are often less educated compared to the natives. Subsequently, most immigrants have lesser wages compared to the natives. Therefore, Immigrants pay smaller tax by the progressive nature of the taxation system. Due to this disparity, the immigrants use the federal-funded programs like Medicaid at higher rates than the natives. Moreover, immigrants are associated with larger family hence more burden to the K-12 education system that accounts for large portions of the state budgets (PPI & PPI, 2018). Through the immigrants, the United States economy progresses as there is more tax attributable to the local authority. Nevertheless, more immigrants would offset the imbalance, and the federal taxation policy will be adjusted to cater for the inequity.
Moreover, the economy develops by the balance positioned by the use of social resources and the income contributions to the states. Contextually, the state of New Jersey has more educated and working immigrants who contribute to the state fiscal budget than the burden they impose. Conversely, the state of California has a significant share of the low–skilled and low –income immigrants (PPI & PPI, 2018). This necessitates that the immigrants of California contribute less to the state fiscal budget as compared to the burden they impose on consumption of entitlement programs. This notion infers that immigrants contribute to the overall economy, but their public consumption index is alarming as well. If more immigrants are facilitated through allocation to better vocational and apprenticeship programs, they will lessen the aggregate fiscal burden in the United States economy.
Conclusion
Overall, immigration has a significant impact on the economy of the United States. Various Indicators show that immigrants foster different benefits to the economy by partly affecting the population numbers, labor distribution and competition, the GDP, the wages and the fiscal budgets of the United States. Firstly, immigrants increase the aggregate population of the United States which increases the demand and consumption trends. Secondly, through immigration, the economy of the United States receives better labor participation and distribution mechanisms. Immigrants form a large part of informal employment sectors compared to the congestion perceived in the formal areas. Also, immigrants have invested in the American economy. Therefore, immigrants offer more job opportunities thus uplifting the states of the state localities. High skilled immigrants contribute to the innovations of the United States as perceived by the increase in information technology immigrant professionals. Thirdly, the Gross Domestic Product attained by the aggregate economy of the United States induces the relevance of the working immigrant population. Deportation policies will lessen the GDP considerably and the competence of working with other international treaties. Fourthly, the wages are affected by the immigrant in different ways, but the result suggests that more immigrants will consequentially increase the economies investment partaking's that the native and the foreigners will eventually foster better or higher wages. Finally, through the state contribution by the taxation structures, immigrants facilitate the development of local and overall fiscal policies. However, some other states suffer a more significant burden of state entitlement programs as a result of more low-skilled and low- income immigrants. Thus, the immigration policies should be streamlined to curb immigration illegitimacies and process more legal immigrants who act to flourish the economy of the United States.
References
Abrego, L. J., & Menjívar, C. (2016). Immigration in the United States. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies.
Brue, S. L., McConnell, C. R., & Macpherson, D. A. (2016). Contemporary labor economics . McGraw-Hill Education.
Furtado, C. (2018). Economic Development of Latin America. In Promise Of Development (pp. 124-148). Routledge.
Meissner, D. M., Kerwin, D. M., Chishti, M., & Bergeron, C. (2013). Immigration enforcement in the United States: The rise of a formidable machinery. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Peri, G. (2012). The effect of immigration on productivity: Evidence from US states. Review of Economics and Statistics, 94(1), 348-358.
PPI, W., & PPI, W. (2018). The Effects of Immigration on the United States' Economy. Penn Wharton Budget Model. Retrieved 10 April 2018, from http://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-effects-of-immigration-on-the-united-states-economy
The Pew Charitable Trusts, R. (2018). Immigrants in the Workforce, State by State and Industry By Industry. The Atlantic. Retrieved 10 April 2018, from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/immigrants-in-the-workforce-state-by-state-and-industry-by-industry/458775/
Wojcik, D. (2018). The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford University Press.
