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THE U.S. BENEFITS FROM IMMIGRATION BUT POLICY REFORMS NEEDED TO
MAXIMIZE GAINS  
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Daniel Costa, Josh Bivens, Ben Zipperer, Monique Morrissey
October 4, 2024
Economic Policy Institute
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_ Recommendations and a review of key issues to ensure fair wages and
labor standards for all workers _

Thousands of the local Latin population, and other supporters
participated in the Immigration Reform Rally, Lexington, KY April 10,
2006., Britt Selvitelle from San Francisco, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia
Commons

 

INTRODUCTION AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Immigration has been a source of strength for the U.S. economy and has
great potential to boost it even more, but the current U.S.
immigration policy regime squanders too many of its potential benefits
by depriving immigrants of their full rights as workers and granting
employers too much power to manipulate the system. It is crystal clear
that immigration expands U.S. gross domestic product and is good for
growth. And immigration overall has led to better, not worse, wages
and work opportunities for U.S.-born workers. Yet, it is also clear
that when workers are denied full and equal labor and employment
rights, as some immigrants are when their immigration status is used
against them—it makes immigrant workers’ lives more precarious and
can harm the people with whom they work side-by-side in the same
industries.

Even in the face of our unjust policy regime, immigration today
provides numerous benefits to the U.S. economy. The nation could
benefit even more, and the benefit could be shared more widely with a
smarter set of immigration policies that benefit all workers.

The benefits are too often overlooked, and the challenges it poses for
policymakers and U.S.-born workers are often grossly exaggerated. In
this paper, we assess the evidence on immigration’s effect on a
number of economic outcomes given the policy status quo. We then go on
to highlight how immigration status impacts wages and working
conditions, and finally, offer recommendations on how to craft a
better immigration policy regime—one that grants immigrants their
full rights as workers in U.S. labor markets, generating broad
benefits for U.S. and foreign-born workers alike. Our key findings
are: 

* IMMIGRATION IS ENABLING ECONOMIC GROWTH DESPITE THE SHARP
DECELERATION IN THE GROWTH OF THE U.S.-BORN WORKFORCE. Immigrants
have risen as a share of the U.S. population in recent decades.
Because immigrants are younger and more likely to be working age than
the U.S.-born population, they have risen even faster as a share of
the labor force. These trends are driven as much by the sharp
deceleration of growth of the U.S.-born workforce as they are by a
sharp increase in the absolute scale of immigration flows. Even when
available data are adjusted to better reflect the notable increase in
immigration in recent years, the growth of the foreign-born population
since 2022 is not out of line with other historical periods (and is
lower than what prevailed in the late 1990s).
What _is_ unprecedented in recent years is the rapid deceleration of
growth in the U.S.-born population—a population that will soon start
seeing outright contraction. Without immigration, the prime-age
workforce (between the ages of 25 and 54) would have seen essentially
no growth at all in the past quarter century, dramatically
constricting the ability to grow our economy and staff key
industries. 
* IMMIGRATION DOES NOT REDUCE THE NUMBER OF JOBS AVAILABLE FOR
U.S.-BORN WORKERS AND HAS PROVIDED A SOURCE OF DEFLATIONARY PRESSURE
IN RECENT YEARS. Macroeconomic policymakers like the Federal Reserve
and Congress have both the necessary tools and the obligation to
ensure that demand in the economy is strong enough to absorb willing
workers in a reasonable amount of time. Historical periods when job
opportunities _have_ become scarce were not driven by increased
immigration flows but instead by the failures of macroeconomic
policymakers to respond in a timely fashion to weakness in demand for
labor. Immigration flows generally do not make policymakers’ task of
matching macroeconomic supply and demand any harder because immigrants
add to both economywide supply (by increasing labor supply) and demand
(by buying goods and services). Overall, immigrants likely tilt this
balance more toward supply relative to U.S.-born workers, but only by
a bit. This net supply increase is sometimes quite useful—by
boosting supply a bit more than demand over the 2021–2023 period,
immigration provided a source of deflationary pressure that helped
bring inflation down in those years, while also assisting in
preventing a recession. 
* IMMIGRATION’S EFFECTS ON U.S. WAGES OVERALL RANGE FROM NEUTRAL
TO SLIGHTLY POSITIVE. Immigrant workers tend to complement rather than
substitute for U.S.-born workers of similar educational levels. The
educational mix of immigrants is much more similar to that of
U.S.-born workers than is often recognized, hence limiting the scope
for competition from immigrants to lower wages for any U.S.-born
workers of any particular educational background. Additionally, while
the overall wage effects from immigration are neutral to slightly
positive for U.S.-born workers, it is true that our flawed immigration
policy regime often sees employers use the precariousness of some
immigrant workers to suppress wage growth in particular sectors.
Immigration reforms that remove this precariousness would aid the wage
growth of both immigrants and the U.S.-born workers they work
alongside in these labor markets. 

* IMMIGRATION IS CLEARLY POSITIVE FOR THE BALANCE OF TAXES AND
SPENDING AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL. Immigrants pay substantial amounts of
tax (nearly $100 billion in the most recent years, and almost $60
billion in federal taxes) and yet are often excluded from drawing on
key benefits. At the state and local level, the balance is much
closer. The types of goods and services provided by these governments
(public education and infrastructure, for example) are generally more
available to immigrant families regardless of their legal status.
Taken together, the net of federal and state/local taxes and spending
stemming from immigration flows is positive, with immigrants paying
more in taxes relative to what they draw in spending than U.S.-born
households.

* INCREASED HOUSING COSTS ARE CAUSED NOT BY IMMIGRATION, BUT BY THE
FAILURE OF U.S. HOUSING MARKETS TO MEET ANY NEW DEMAND WITH MORE
HOUSING UNITS RATHER THAN HIGHER PRICES. Immigration, like any source
of population growth, can put upward pressure on housing prices on the
demand side. Yet the rapid rise in housing costs over the past decade
has come at a time when overall population growth has slowed
significantly—indicating strongly that the root of the problem is a
dysfunctional housing supply side that translates any housing demand
increase into sharp price increases rather than newly constructed
housing. This can be seen most clearly in the very large run-up in
home prices in 2020 and 2021, just as rates of immigration were
plummeting. Further, higher rental costs stemming from the
intersection of population growth and supply-side rigidity actually
boost housing wealth for homeowners, who are disproportionately
U.S.-born. Finally, immigrants are a key source of labor that boosts
the supply side of housing markets. Anti-immigrant reforms (like mass
deportations) done in the name of preserving housing affordability for
U.S.-born workers could well see large increases in housing costs due
to resulting shortages of workers employed in residential
construction.

* PEOPLE WHO IMMIGRATE INTO THE UNITED STATES INCREASE THE
ECONOMY’S STOCK OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND IDEAS, TWO CRUCIAL INGREDIENTS
FOR LONG-RUN ECONOMIC GROWTH. Immigrants can provide a key source of
innovation and economic vitality. If immigration into the United
States allows talented individuals a better chance of realizing their
full potential and contributing to economic activity at their maximum
level than they would have had in their country of origin, this
immigration flow can be highly beneficial for both the U.S. and global
economies. Research on past waves of immigration shows that they had
positive causal effects on long-run economic growth in the United
States. 

* POLICY REFORMS THAT GRANT IMMIGRANTS FULL RIGHTS IN THE LABOR
MARKET SPUR BENEFITS FOR EVERYONE IN THE U.S. ECONOMY. The evidence is
clear that workers who lack formal immigration status or have
precarious or temporary immigration statuses experience degraded pay
and conditions. Thus, the most obvious and pressing policy priority is
to provide a quick and broad path to legal status and a green card
(and eventually citizenship) for the currently unauthorized immigrant
population. Regularization would provide a near instant wage boost for
these workers, which would in turn bid up wages in the labor markets
they share with U.S.-born workers. The same logic, backed by research,
suggests that future immigration flows should rely much more on green
cards than temporary work visas. Green cards give immigrant workers
the ability to shop around for the best fit for their skills and
abilities, which breaks employers’ power over these workers and
helps lift standards for all workers. Allowing temporary migrant
workers to control their own visas rather than being tied to specific
employers would also be a win-win for both foreign-born and U.S.-born
workers.
* UNDERRESOURCED LABOR STANDARDS ENFORCEMENT IS ENABLING LOW-ROAD
EMPLOYERS TO ABUSE IMMIGRANT WORKERS WITH IMPUNITY AND FLOUT BASIC
WORKER PROTECTIONS. Rather than spending tens of billions of dollars
per year for immigration enforcement, what’s needed are more
resources and staffing for labor standards enforcement agencies and a
more strategic focus on labor standards enforcement that does not take
immigration status into account. Lawbreaking employers who abuse
workers of any status should face much higher chances of being caught
and much higher penalties than they currently do.

Immigration to the U.S. provides many economic benefits, and those
benefits would increase substantially if immigration policy was
improved to guarantee equal and enforceable labor and workplace
rights. With proper alignment with other policy spheres, such as
investment in physical and human infrastructure, win-win opportunities
abound for the United States with respect to future immigration flows
or even expansions. 

CURRENT AND HISTORICAL IMMIGRATION AND WHERE IMMIGRANTS ARE IN THE
U.S. ECONOMY

Immigrants in the economy and recent growth in the immigrant
population

Migrants and immigrants who resided in the United States in 2022
accounted for 13.8% of the population, as measured by the American
Community Survey (ACS). The ACS is perhaps the most commonly used
source for the size of the foreign-born population. However, we can
get slightly more timely data from a different data source, the
Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is also the most cited source
of data on labor market trends in the United States. Because of this,
we also show CPS-based trends in the annual foreign-born shares of the
U.S. population in FIGURE A. In 2023, this share was 14.9%.1
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Because so many debates around immigration center around its effect on
U.S. labor markets, in FIGURE B we also present the number and share
of immigrants in the overall labor force, defined as those ages 16 and
older who are working or seeking jobs. As of last year, the U.S.
workforce had 31.0 million immigrants, or 18.6% of the total U.S.
labor force. Since 2000, immigrants have been more likely to be in the
labor force than U.S-born workers, largely reflecting the fact that
immigrants are younger and more likely to be of working age than the
U.S. born population.2
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Immigrant flows have fluctuated greatly in recent years. During the
beginning of the Trump administration and also the beginning of the
coronavirus pandemic, immigration slowed due to border closures and
other restrictions. As those restrictions were lifted, a strong U.S.
labor market and high employer demand for workers coincided with a
reestablishment of the administrative elements of the immigration
system and higher immigration flows. Immigration flows over the last
two years have been relatively high according to some estimates,
prompting calls for more immigration enforcement at the U.S. southern
border and restrictions on asylum, and discussions about the number of
new arrivals that the U.S. economy can absorb. However, Figure C shows
that while recent flows of migrants and immigrants into the United
States have been high, the number of immigrants residing in the United
States at any given point is growing at a rate similar to other
periods of high immigration like the late 1990s. The decennial
censuses estimated that the foreign-born (immigrant) population grew
by 4.6% annually between 1990 and 2000. Between 1994 and 2000, the
immigrant population in the CPS grew by 5.6% annually. In contrast,
recent data from the CPS show that the 2022–2023 immigrant
population growth rate was 3.7%.

Recently there has been some debate as to whether the CPS may
underestimate recent growth in immigration levels.3
[[link removed]] After
making an adjustment to account for this undercount, the CBO (2024)
estimated significantly higher immigration levels using CPS data, but
even with this adjustment, the modified CBO/CPS flows between 2022 and
2023 are still lower than estimates from the late 1990s. The modified
CBO/CPS immigrant population growth between 2022 and 2023 was 4.8%,
compared with an annual rate of 5.6% between 1994 and 2000 using the
unmodified CPS.4
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The rates in Figure C also show how U.S.-born population growth has
been declining, from 0.9% annually in the 1990s to 0.2% in
2022–2023. FIGURE D examines this in more detail, focusing on the
prime-age labor force—i.e., those who are ages 25 through 54 and
employed or seeking work. Over the last three decades, the total size
of the U.S.-born prime-age labor force has essentially stayed the
same. In fact, were it not for immigration, the total prime-age U.S.
labor force would have stagnated: Over 95% of the cumulative growth of
the labor force in the past three decades is due to immigration.

In 2023, immigrants were about 18.6% of U.S. employment, and many
immigrants are disproportionately concentrated within a select number
of occupations. Table 1 shows the top-ten major occupation groups with
the highest shares of immigrants. These occupations have immigrant
shares of employment ranging from about 21% to 40%, and together they
comprise just over half (54%) of all employed immigrants in 2023.

Immigrants are often associated with agricultural occupations—and
they do comprise two-thirds of the workforce in crops (Fung et al.
2023), but because of the relatively small total size of agricultural
occupations overall, most immigrants work in other types of jobs. For
example, in 2023, 2.2 million immigrants were employed in “Building
and grounds cleaning and maintenance” occupations, like janitors,
custodial workers, and landscapers, accounting for 40% of employment
in the occupation. For the purpose of comparison, the 2.2 million
immigrants in the occupation is the roughly the same number of all
hired farmworkers, including immigrants and U.S.-born citizens (USDA
2024). Immigrants were also about one out of every four (24%) workers
in “Healthcare support occupations,” which include jobs like home
care aides and nursing, dental, and medical assistants.

While immigrants work in some high-paying occupations, many of the
occupations in which immigrants are disproportionately concentrated
typically pay low wages. Table 1 shows that a majority of the top-ten
occupation groups with higher shares of immigrants have median hourly
wage rates that are substantially lower than the national median wage.
For example, building and grounds cleaning and maintenance workers,
who had a national median wage of $17 an hour in 2023, were paid 32%
less than the 2023 national median wage of $25 per hour.

Health care support occupations are also paid a wage that is much
lower than the median national wage (28% lower). These occupations,
however, are expected to be among the fastest growing over the next
decade according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2023). If BLS
employment projections turn out to be correct, and if we assume that
immigrant workers will continue to fill the same share of jobs in the
occupation that they do now (24%), then that implies over 250,000 more
immigrants will be needed for health care support jobs alone between
2023 and 2032 (BLS 2024b). Low wages and large workforce requirements
suggest that we should ensure that immigrants who fill these jobs
arrive with full and equal employment rights and a path to
citizenship. The second-fastest growing occupation according to BLS
will be in computer and mathematical occupations, an occupation that
is expected to grow by 15.2% (BLS 2023) and in which 27% of current
workers are immigrants.

ECONOMIC EFFECTS AND IMPACTS OF IMMIGRATION

This section provides a review of arguments and evidence on how
immigration can affect economic outcomes. We focus on a range of
issues in which particular concerns about the effects of immigration
have been commonly raised in public debates: jobs, wages, fiscal
effects, housing, and long-run economic growth. We also highlight in
each section how policy changes can loosen any particular trade-off
that might bind from balancing the benefits of higher immigration and
the economic welfare of U.S.-born residents.

This focus on the economic welfare of U.S.-born residents is not
because it is the only population we care about. It is instead because
this is a politically salient issue, and because disentangling the
effects on U.S.-born residents helps inform sound policymaking to
promote broadly shared prosperity.

For example, calculations are occasionally presented regarding the
“economic impact” of immigration that simply tally up all spending
done in the U.S. by immigrants. This is a large-sounding number (on
the order of hundreds of billions of dollars at least). But increasing
overall gross domestic product (GDP) or overall consumer spending by
increasing the number of people (and workers) in an economy does not
mean much in terms of impacting the welfare of any individual (whether
immigrant or native-born) in that country. What matters far more for
human welfare is income or spending _per capita_, and how it grows
over time.

An equally useless exercise would be to remove a particular set of
immigrants from calculations of per capita GDP—note that this
removal increases per capita GDP—and suggest that this tells us
something about the economic effect of immigration. Removing
lower-income segments will inflate the average income of any group
simply through composition effects. This removal does nothing to boost
any real person’s income or living standards; it is simply an
arithmetic quirk.

In what follows, we aim to provide a serious discussion of the
substantive effects of immigration on various economic outcomes.

Employment effects of immigration

A common trope in immigration debates is that immigrants take jobs
away from native-born workers. The weakness in this argument is fairly
obvious: It presumes there are a fixed number of jobs that does not
respond at all to rising immigration flows. But that’s not how
employment generation works. Take the most obvious example of why this
reasoning is wrong: There are 70 times more people in the United
States as there are in Norway (a similarly rich country). There are
also almost 70 times as many jobs in the United States as there are in
Norway. Is it just a lucky coincidence that the United States was able
to generate 70 times as many jobs as Norway and give decent employment
outcomes for our much larger population?

Obviously not. When an economy is being managed well, it should be
providing a job for essentially all people in the economy who want to
work regardless of how large or small that number of people is.
Immigration does not change this, and it does not even put much
pressure at all on the mechanisms that are supposed to ensure near
full employment of every person who wants a job.

In the jargon of macroeconomists, unemployment rises when growth
in _aggregate demand_ lags behind growth in _potential output_.
Aggregate demand is simply all desired spending in the economy;
consumption spending by households, investment spending by businesses,
and public spending by governments. Potential output is a measure of
how much the economy could produce if nearly all of the economy’s
willing workers were employed. When aggregate demand falls beneath the
economy’s potential output, then unemployment rises.

This logic might at first glance seem to buttress fears about
increased immigration in generating unemployment—a larger labor
force boosts the economy’s potential output, and if this boost
pushes it above the economy’s aggregate demand, then unemployment
results. But the fault in this story is essentially never that
potential output is rising too fast; it is instead that aggregate
demand is falling too rapidly (or rising too slowly).

The key insight here is that aggregate demand moves far more quickly
than potential output, and it swings up and down much more in
compressed periods of time. In short, recessions and recoveries are
clearly driven by these quick and large movements in aggregate demand,
not in the steady rise of potential output.

So long as policymakers recognize any change in potential output in a
reasonably short time frame—like an increased labor supply stemming
from immigration—then they can adjust aggregate demand to ensure
enough jobs are created to keep unemployment rates from rising.
Aggregate demand can be boosted through either monetary or fiscal
policy interventions, with the Federal Reserve using monetary policy
tools like interest rate cuts to boost demand and Congress and the
president setting taxes and spending at levels that boost demand when
that is needed (in practice, fiscal policy is the more powerful tool
if used effectively). Support for the idea that policy can quickly
restore falls in aggregate demand is provided by the U.S. economic
recovery from the COVID-19 recession. In late 2020, there was a burst
of job creation as the first wave of the pandemic eased and the
economy reopened. Nevertheless, in December of that year, the
unemployment rate remained high at 6.7%, and job growth had turned
negative. But thanks to fiscal recovery packages passed in December
2020 and March 2021, by the end of 2021 the unemployment rate had
already fallen below 4.0%—essentially matching the immediate
pre-pandemic level.5
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Further, policymakers in charge of aggregate demand really do not have
to try all that hard to keep aggregate demand matched to potential
output as immigration flows rise. Immigrants do boost potential
output—but they also boost aggregate demand. That is, immigrants are
not only workers, but they are also consumers.

Relative to U.S.-born residents, immigrants do tend to boost potential
output a bit more than they boost aggregate demand, mostly by virtue
of being younger and hence more likely to work than U.S.-born
residents.6
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immigration boosts potential output a bit more than aggregate demand,
the net effect is slightly _deflationary_. Overall, this deflationary
slant of immigration is neither good nor bad. Sometimes deflationary
influences in the economy need to be counterbalanced by policymakers,
but sometimes deflationary influences just help reach targets
policymakers are already aiming for.

The obvious example of the latter is the beneficial deflationary
effect of a rebound in immigration following the immigration collapse
of 2020. The pandemic led to a very sharp fall in net immigration in
that year (in part because of slowdowns of visa processing at U.S.
consulates around the world and mass layoffs in sectors with a heavy
immigrant worker presence). As the pandemic also led to a sharp rise
in inflation as the economy recovered, policymakers began looking for
ways to reduce these inflationary pressures in late 2021 and 2022. The
rebound in immigration flows in 2022 and 2023 clearly went in the
correct direction to help tamp down inflation, though this effect can
be exaggerated. The overall dynamics of inflation over the whole
2021–2023 period were generally not driven by the labor market. Wage
growth consistently muffled instead of amplified price inflation, and
it was the extraordinary growth in corporate profit margins that was a
key part of the initial inflation surge in 2021.7
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inflation was not caused by labor markets, the rebound of immigration
flows in 2022 and 2023 provided some measure of deflationary relief in
those years.

It is also worth noting that immigration is not the only challenge
facing policymakers in charge of aggregate demand. Similar challenges
exist for all sorts of economic influences—technological change,
exchange rate movements driven by events abroad, sharp changes in
household wealth driven by financial market excesses, and many others.
There is nothing uniquely challenging about sustaining job creation in
the face of immigration flows if policymakers have the will to do it.
If any significant number of U.S.-born workers are finding it hard to
find work, it is macroeconomic policymakers, not immigrants, who are
to blame.

As important as it is for policymakers to keep unemployment low for
all workers, this consideration should be mostly irrelevant when
considering optimal immigration policy. U.S. immigration policy should
decide the level and composition of immigrant flows that the U.S.
should seek to absorb—taking into consideration the need for new
workers or to meet humanitarian obligations, etc.—and in terms of
the effect of that immigration policy on jobs and employment for
U.S.-born workers, macroeconomic policymakers should just seek to keep
aggregate demand at levels that keep unemployment low and jobs
plentiful for the number of people entering the workforce.

It is worth reemphasizing how much the experience of the U.S. labor
market in the years after the pandemic highlights the point that there
is no trade-off between immigration and job opportunities for
U.S.-born workers. Even as there has been an increased inflow of
immigrants and immigrant workers in recent years following the dip
driven by the Trump administration and pandemic shutdowns,
unemployment rates for U.S.-born workers are historically low, and the
share of prime-age U.S.-born workers with a job is historically high.
While we remain concerned that in the medium- to long-term, there are
potential significant challenges to having millions of new workers
entering the workforce who only have temporary, precarious statuses,
it is nevertheless an odd historical moment indeed to raise the
specter that rapid growth of immigrant workers is hurting the job
prospects of U.S.-born workers. Very simple policy changes—namely,
providing these workers with full workplace rights and the ability to
participate in society that comes with a green card—could blunt
those challenges and maximize the economic benefits these new workers
can bring.

Finally, we should note that while immigration poses no real challenge
to creating enough jobs for U.S.-born workers, one particularly
damaging form of immigration policy could profoundly affect these
jobs: mass deportation. One example comes from a recent study by East
et al. (2023), which looked at past episodes of significant
deportations and found that for each 1 million immigrants seized and
deported from the United States, 88,000 jobs were lost for U.S.-born
workers. These deportations reduced local demand for output, which led
to job loss, and they led to employers having to shut down all
production in the face of key bottlenecks incurred by losing their
immigrant workforce, including production that supported employment of
U.S.-born workers.

Immigration and wages

One of the major concerns about immigration is that it could reduce
the wages of U.S.-born workers. Yet across the economy broadly, a
large body of empirical evidence suggests this concern is misplaced. A
review by Peri (2014) of more than 270 estimates from 27 published
studies found that the average effect of immigration on native-born
wages is essentially zero. Two-thirds of studies were clustered around
zero, finding small positive or small negative effects. The
comprehensive review of immigration, wages, and employment by the
National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) found
that “when measured over a period of more than 10 years, the impact
of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small” (NASEM
2017). Below we explain some of the mechanisms behind why increased
immigration does not tend to harm the wages paid to U.S.-born workers,
at least at the broader nationwide level.

The conventional warning about how immigration can reduce the wages of
U.S.-born workers is a supply-side story in which large flows of
immigrants push down the market wages of otherwise comparable
native-born workers. In this story, the labor market employs some mix
of workers of different education levels: workers with college degrees
and workers without college degrees. Under this theory, the relative
supply of and demand for these different types of workers determine
their relative wages. Immigration can then change the wage structure
by changing the mix of low-education and high-education workers. In
particular, if immigration increases the relative supply of workers
without a high school degree, there could be downward pressure on
market wages for all low-education workers, including U.S.-born
workers.

To a rough approximation, however, immigration in the United States in
recent decades has not dramatically changed the relative mix of the
workforce that has or doesn’t have college degrees. FIGURE E shows
that the share of foreign-born workers with a college degree is
similar to that of U.S.-born workers: About 4 in 10 people in the U.S.
labor force has college degrees, whether or not they were born in the
United States or in another country. This empirical fact greatly
reduces the scope of any substitution between types of workers and
therefore also limits any resulting wage effect of immigration on
U.S.-born workers. Historically, increasing the number of immigrants
has had little effect on the educational mix of U.S. workers.

Wages are, of course, not solely determined by a simple model of
college and noncollege labor, and the education distribution of
immigrants is not completely identical to U.S.-born workers. There are
relatively more foreign-born workers with no high school degree, but
also relatively more foreign-born workers with advanced degrees. But
adding more real-world complications to a simple model of wage
determination also further limits the scope of immigration’s effect
on the overall wages of U.S.-born workers. For example, immigration to
a particular area also increases demand for goods and services. As
immigrants purchase food and housing, they raise the overall demand
for labor, offsetting the potential wage decreases induced by
increased labor supply. In addition, investment will eventually
respond to the increased demand and also to the increased population
growth that raises the relative productivity of physical capital. Once
capital can adjust to the change in population, there is little to no
long-run effect of immigration on average wages (Card 2012). The
naïve story about college and noncollege workers above implicitly
assumes that at least within education categories, foreign-born
workers are essentially identical to U.S.-born workers. However,
empirical evidence like Peri and Sparber’s (2009) makes clear that
even within education categories, U.S.- and foreign-born workers often
have different skills and perform different tasks at work. It is also
useful to point out here that the idea or claim that most immigrants
work in low-wage jobs is inaccurate. As depicted in Figure F, Kallick
and Capote (2023) found that among persons who work full-time and
year-round, the share of immigrants with higher-wage jobs that pay
more than twice the median earnings level (17%) is the same as the
share of U.S.-born workers. They also found that 65% of immigrant
workers who work full-time and year-round earn at least two-thirds of
median earnings.

Immigrants may be overrepresented in some jobs and underrepresented in
others, but the difference between the U.S.- and foreign-born shares
is rarely as dramatic as is often assumed. Immigrants are strongly
represented in some high-wage jobs and play a significant role in many
middle-wage jobs. For example, 24.6% of dental, nursing, and health
aides are immigrants, as are 37.7% of computer software
developers—well above immigrants’ 18.6% share of the labor force.8
[[link removed]] While
immigrants are overrepresented in low-wage occupations, immigrants are
a significant part of the top, middle, and bottom of the economic
ladder in the workforce.

A final reason the wage impact of immigration is smaller than one
might expect is that recent immigrants are very geographically mobile.
Basso and Peri (2020) show that newly arrived immigrants with less
than ten years in the United States are more likely to move across
states and different labor markets than U.S.-born workers. When
employment demand in a local labor market is declining (or
increasing), recently arrived immigrants are much more likely than
native-born workers to move away from (or into) that locality. Because
of this exit option, employers may have somewhat less leverage over
immigrants than they would otherwise. Recently arrived immigrants
therefore reduce the monopsony and wage-setting power employers have
over immigrants and also U.S.-born workers who are viewed as
substitutes.

At the same time, research has shown that some incumbent foreign-born
workers are more likely than U.S.-born workers to be substituted by
employers for newly arrived immigrants. As a result, the wage effects
of increased immigration on previous immigrants may be more negative.
Ottaviano and Peri (2012) found that while immigration had small
positive effects on the wages of U.S.-born workers, it had negative
effects on the wages of foreign-born workers. Policies should thus be
implemented to ensure that wages are not degraded for immigrants who
have already resided in the United States for many years.

Immigration, taxes, and public spending

The preponderance of the research and evidence shows that immigration
does not create a fiscal burden. Differences between the U.S.-born and
immigrant populations in the taxes they pay and the public services
and benefits they receive improve the fiscal position of the federal
government while, to a lesser extent, putting financial pressure on
state and local governments. As detailed in the 2017 NASEM report and
related research, the net effect is positive over the lifetimes of
immigrants, their children, and grandchildren (NASEM 2017; Orrenius
2017).

The fact that immigration is a boon to the federal government’s
fiscal balance but a strain on state and local governments’ balances
can be addressed by increasing the federal share of jointly funded
programs. Since the federal government already transfers nearly a
trillion dollars annually to state and local governments through
numerous grant programs, these transfers could simply be made more
generous. A perhaps bigger challenge is that the short-term fiscal
impact of immigration can be negative even if the long-term impact is
positive.

Relative to U.S.-born residents at equivalent income levels,
immigrants put less strain on other taxpayers because they have high
employment rates and do not qualify for many public services and
benefits. Further, immigrants have little or no impact on the cost of
national defense, foreign aid, interest on the national debt, and
similar expenses known as public goods. However, if an equal share of
these costs is assigned to immigrants, the NASEM report found that
they and their children and grandchildren will pay less in taxes than
they will receive in services and transfer payments over their
lifetimes, as is also true of U.S.-born residents (keeping in mind
that the United States consistently runs a budget deficit in the
consolidated government sector).

This does not mean that immigration is costly to U.S.-born residents,
however. To the contrary, immigrants will pay more in taxes than the
additional public spending they generate. That is, immigrants’ net
contribution is enough to reduce the taxes paid by others—just not
enough to cover a proportionate share of public goods like national
defense and interest on the debt (NASEM 2017; Orrenius 2017).

Most immigrants to the United States arrive as adults, and some
30–40% later return to their countries of origin, often following a
drop in earnings (NASEM 2017; Migration Policy Institute 2022; Akee
and Jones 2024). As a result of these patterns of migration and return
migration, much of the cost of immigrants’ upbringing and education,
and some of the cost of supporting them in disability or old age, are
borne by their families and the governments in their countries of
origin. More of their time spent in the United States, meanwhile, is
during prime working-age years when people tend to pay more in taxes
than they receive in public services and benefits.

Immigrants have somewhat larger families than U.S.-born residents,
though not large enough to stem a decline in the under-20 U.S.
population in recent years (SSA 2023). In 2017, immigrant women were
estimated to have 2.18 children over their lifetimes, versus 1.76 for
U.S.-born woman (Peri 2020
[[link removed].]).
Given the low U.S. birth rate, immigration itself and larger immigrant
families were the only factors preventing the U.S. population from
shrinking.

As discussed elsewhere in this report, immigrants are more likely than
U.S.-born residents to lack high school degrees, but also more likely
to have advanced degrees and to work in STEM fields (“STEM” refers
to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Research shows
that immigrants tend to be highly innovative and entrepreneurial, and
their presence boosts productivity growth. For example, Hunt (2011)
found that immigrants were roughly twice as likely as U.S.-born
residents to be granted patents, including patents that are licensed
or commercialized, and Peri (2012) found that productivity is higher
in areas that attract immigrants based on historical settlement
patterns and distance from the Mexican border (factors that are used
as statistical instruments to differentiate between higher
productivity attributable to immigrants versus immigrants being drawn
to higher-productivity areas).

While lifecycle patterns tend to benefit countries attracting
immigrants, economic migration of less-educated immigrants from poorer
to richer countries can increase spending on means-tested benefits.
This may be less true in the United States than in many other
destination countries, however, because the United States has a less
generous safety net than most wealthy countries and because many
immigrants to this country are ineligible for, or dissuaded from,
accessing benefits (Lacarte, Gelatt, and Podplesky 2024). Moreover,
people who take on the costs and risks of migration, even if they hail
from countries with lower educational attainment, tend to have a high
capacity for gainful employment, often supporting less healthy or
skilled family members back home (Feliciano 2020).

Immigration of working-age adults slows the rise in the age dependency
ratio—the size of the population 65 and older relative to that of
the prime working-age population. Immigrants’ relatively high birth
rate, conversely, slows the decline in the youth dependency
ratio—the under-20 population relative to the working-age
population. The net effect on the working-age share of the U.S.
population is positive, though the impact on public finances also
depends on the relative cost of different programs.

Generally, faster population growth will tend to increase the tax
rates needed to fund education and other programs that primarily
benefit young people while reducing the tax rates needed to fund
Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that primarily benefit
older people. In addition to the relative cost of these different
programs, timing matters. As a result of the decline in birth rates
that followed the post-World War II baby boom, the United States, like
many countries, has an aging population, such that funding Social
Security and Medicare is a bigger challenge than funding education.
This demographic imbalance is even more acute in other countries,
notably Japan, which admits too few immigrants to allow a shrinking
workforce to support its aging population.

Age, family size, and earnings potential are not the only factors
affecting the net impact of immigration on public finances. For
example, recent research indicates that unauthorized immigrants pay
just under $60 billion per year in federal taxes and over $37 billion
in state and local taxes (Davis, Guzman, and Sifre 2024). Yet many
benefits, notably Medicare, are not accessible if an immigrant returns
to their home country even if they are naturalized U.S. citizens or
were legal residents who had paid into the program and would have been
eligible for benefits if they had remained in the United States. Other
benefits, such as Social Security, are portable but are not available
to unauthorized workers. Though some means-tested benefits are
currently available to unauthorized immigrants—a few states extend
health and other benefits to low-income families regardless of legal
status—take-up by immigrants is low since many fear it could
jeopardize their ability to remain in the country or apply for
citizenship (KFF 2023).

Millions of unauthorized immigrant workers contribute to Social
Security using numbers that are not their own. This reduces Social
Security’s projected shortfall but does so at the expense of a
disadvantaged population. Immigration reform that allows immigrants to
fully participate in society would help future immigrants receive the
benefits to which they contribute. It could also potentially help some
immigrants access benefits that can be linked to past contributions
through Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs).

As discussed elsewhere in this report, immigration reform that
includes a broad regularization for those who lack an immigration
status would increase earnings, reported earnings, and the taxes paid
on these earnings, including contributions to social insurance
programs such as Social Security and Medicare. However, the net impact
on these contributory programs as well as some programs funded by
general revenues, such as Medicaid, could be negative in the short run
if immigrants who paid into these programs gain access to benefits.
Factoring in both increased revenues and increased costs, however, the
Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2013 that legislation that
would have significantly increased the number of immigrants living and
working legally in the United States would have decreased federal
budget deficits by nearly $200 billion over a 10-year period
(Elmendorf 2013).

In the long run, society generally gains when workers have full legal
rights and protections and are able to achieve their full potential.
However, there is always the potential that a large influx of new
migrants or immigrants earning low wages, if they were eligible for
most government benefits, could tilt the balance toward a negative
fiscal impact in the short run. This should not be the only
consideration, however, in decisions about whether to welcome or
extend government benefits to vulnerable immigrants, just as
humanitarian policies should not be expected to pay for themselves. It
is worth noting, in any case, that even in the case of refugees and
asylees who tend to have low educational attainment and are eligible
for the same government services and benefits as U.S. citizens, a
recent report found that their fiscal impact is positive in the long
run (Ghertner, Macartney, and Dost 2024).

Studies that find negative fiscal impacts from immigration of
lower-wage workers typically ignore dynamic effects on prices,
productivity, and profits that improve U.S. residents’ living
standards. Correcting for one of these omissions, a study accounted
for increased tax revenue from higher profits attributable to
immigration and found that the net fiscal impact of immigrants without
college degrees changed from negative to positive when this revenue
was taken into account (Clemens 2022).

Immigrants’ positive fiscal impact reflects their strong motivation
and ability to improve their lives. Uprooting one’s life to travel
to a new country to live and work is costly and risky, so people with
a higher-than-average earning potential are more likely to emigrate,
even if their formal education is limited (Feliciano 2020). As a
result, after an initial adjustment period, immigrants tend to have
high employment rates compared with the general population. They also
tend to be more geographically mobile in response to economic
conditions within the United States, boosting productivity growth by
better matching workers and jobs (Basso and Peri 2020).

The success of immigrants extends to their families and can have
spillover effects on the general population. The children of
immigrants, most born in the United States, are more likely to have
college degrees and are less likely to be poor than other Americans
(Pew 2013). The presence of foreign-born and second-generation
students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of other
students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Figlio et
al. 2024).

Immigration and housing affordability

One of the most pressing issues regarding immigration and housing in
the current moment is providing adequate and humane shelter for the
significant number of migrants who have entered the United States in
recent years—many of whom are applicants for asylum who are awaiting
a hearing. These migrants often have steep barriers to finding
employment or other means of earning income, and they have had to rely
on already inadequate systems to help the unhoused population in the
United States.

In the shorter term, there are a range of stopgap and ameliorative
measures that could be taken to provide humane housing options for
recent arrivals. Solf, Guerrero, and Sherzad (2024) outline the scope
of the problem and offer some short-term solutions, and a report by
Eikenberry and Obser (2023) for the Women’s Refugee Commission
provides an in-depth discussion about the key challenges and offers
best practices for managing and housing large numbers of new arrivals
at the federal, state, and local levels. 

In the longer run, the larger issue of homelessness in the United
States would be greatly alleviated if measures that broadly reduced
the cost of rent and homeownership were implemented. Given existing
shelter capacity for the unhoused population, policies that increased
housing affordability in the long run would also create more slack
that could help absorb temporary surges in demand for short-term
shelter. 

Further, the issue of housing affordability is not just an issue of
people becoming unhoused; it has become a prime concern for working
families up and down the income scale in the United States. Since the
mid-1990s, housing cost inflation has outpaced overall price inflation
significantly, particularly in a subset of major cities that provide
promising employment opportunities.

The root cause of the housing affordability crisis is simply that
housing supply has not kept up with rising demand, especially in areas
experiencing strong economic and population growth. Essentially, new
housing supply is not responsive enough to increased demand, so demand
surges mostly are resolved with higher prices rather than greater
housing output.9
[[link removed]]

This unresponsiveness of housing supply to demand surges means
that _any_ demand change can cause distress in local housing
markets. For example, during the pandemic, millions of people realized
they would be able to work from home (at least partially) for an
extended period of time. This led to a strong change in preferences
regarding what they wanted from a home. More space to accommodate home
offices was desired, while the benefits of a short commute eroded.
These changing preferences led to a surge of population away from city
centers and into surrounding suburbs, and, to a lesser extent to
increased intercity movements. Given the unresponsiveness of housing
supply generally, this sharp change in demand patterns led to a
historically large increase in housing costs—even in years when
immigration from abroad dropped sharply.10
[[link removed]]

The constraints on housing supply are varied, but a major factor is
restrictive land-use policy, generally set by local governments. The
policy agenda to alleviate these constraints is multifaceted and
beyond the scope of this paper but suffice to say that such a policy
agenda would provide huge relief to U.S.-born residents if it was
enacted  regardless of the level of immigration flows.11
[[link removed]] As
we noted before, housing demand shocks can (and do) happen constantly,
even during times of low immigration flows (like during 2020 and
2021), and they lead to sharp affordability problems.

It is certainly true that given our dysfunctional housing supply side
in the United States, any source of housing demand will put upward
pressure on housing costs. Both long-term immigrants and new
migrants—like U.S.-born residents—need housing and hence, higher
levels of immigration will boost housing demand. Under our current
housing supply-constrained regime, this does put some upward pressure
on housing costs. Saiz (2007) and Mussa, Nwaogu, and Pozo (2017) find
that an increase in immigration equal to 1% of the existing population
leads to an increase of roughly 1% in housing costs. However, as we
showed earlier, increased immigration flows in recent decades in the
United States have largely not even made up for _declining_ growth
in the U.S.-born population. If our housing supply regime in the
United States cannot even provide affordable housing for a population
whose overall growth is steadily decelerating, it seems there is
clearly a more important issue to address.

Another key issue is the difference between the cost of housing
services and the price of homes. Generally, economists looking to
measure inflation or the burden of housing costs use measures of
housing _rents_. These rents are seen as the _consumption_ value of
housing services. Home prices bundle the cost of housing services as a
consumption good with the cost of purchasing an _investment_ good (a
home is a valuable asset). In a country like the United States in
which most families live in a home that they own, this raises some
measurement challenges. But aside from this, it also introduces some
distributional conflict regarding housing costs. For a family that
must rent a home, rising rents are a pure cost burden that lowers
consumption possibilities on nonhousing items. For a family that owns
a home, rising rents are an implicit _income_ that drives up the
value of their assets and hence their net worth. Additionally, because
most homeowners either own their home outright or have fixed-rate
mortgages that pin down their monthly payment, the only significant
effect of rising rents they face is a rising value of their home. In
short, anything—including higher levels of immigration—that raises
rental costs for housing also raises the value of homeowners’
wealth. Given that homeownership rates are substantially higher among
U.S.-born residents than foreign-born households, rising rents
stemming from higher immigration flows are a direct transfer from
immigrant households to native households.

There is one final important intersection between immigration and
housing: Immigrants are _exceedingly_ overrepresented in the
construction workforce, and particularly so in residential
construction (see Bivens 2014). They are a key source of skilled labor
for this sector. Policy changes that sharply slowed (or reversed)
immigration flows could quickly reduce the labor supply in
construction, restrict housing output, and raise the cost of building
new homes. Howard, Wang, and Zhang (2024) examined the staggered
rollout of a national immigration enforcement increase to see if it
affected costs and output in residential construction. They found that
counties that saw greater immigration enforcement effort saw
reductions in the residential construction workforce, fewer homes
built, and higher prices, all consistent with immigration enforcement
suppressing labor supply in this sector. 

Of course, one could argue the same thing about any policy change that
raised wages in construction—and part of our policy recommendations
includes measures (like providing a path to citizenship)
that _would_ raise wages for immigrants in construction. However,
the rise in wages stemming from boosting immigrants’ bargaining
power vis-à-vis employers (by regularizing their legal status) would
largely come from a pure redistribution from business income.
Employers’ power in labor markets—particularly relative to
unauthorized immigrant workers—means they can impose a
“markdown” on wages and earn supernormal profits.12
[[link removed]] Curtailing
this power will overwhelmingly show up in lower supernormal profits
and not in higher construction prices. Further, evidence has shown
that the higher wages that accompany normalizing immigrants’ legal
status are often “financed” largely through higher productivity.
With more secure, permanent, and lawful immigration status, immigrants
are incentivized to invest in productivity-enhancing training and
education and are freer to enter occupations with higher productivity
that require more stringent scrutiny of their immigration status. 

The direct effect of reduced labor supply, on the other hand, is to
immediately _lower construction output,_ and this would almost
surely raise home prices.

All in all, it is mechanically true that _any_ population growth
puts stress on the nation’s dysfunctional system of housing supply.
Recent decades have seen very little change in overall population
growth, so the inability of the nation’s housing supply sector to
accommodate this (slow and unchanged) growth without creating
affordability problems is glaring. It is this dysfunctional supply
side of the housing market, not anything—including immigration—on
the demand side that should be the focus of policymakers. Further, the
overall effect of immigration on U.S. housing should take into account
the effects of immigration flows on the housing wealth of U.S.-born
residents and on the construction industry’s ability to produce new
homes at reasonable costs. Tallying these up leads to very little
reason to think that increased immigration flows are a first-order
challenge in U.S. housing policy. 

Immigration and long-run growth

The size and growth rate of aggregate GDP will obviously be directly
affected by immigration in coming decades. But when economists talk
about growth, they mostly are referring to growth in per capita GDP or
even growth in productivity—the amount of output generated in an
average hour of work in the economy. Productivity growth is the basis
of rising living standards—the level of productivity (and not the
level of aggregate GDP) is what determines if a country is rich or
not. Bangladesh, for example, has an aggregate GDP roughly 4 times
larger than Norway, yet it is Norway’s tenfold advantage in GDP per
capita that makes it rich relative to Bangladesh.

Accordingly, when economists assess the effect of any
influence—including immigration—on economic growth, they are
mostly talking about the effect on productivity growth. It is true
that if immigrants are younger than U.S.-born residents, that an
influx of immigrants can boost per capita GDP simply by virtue of
having higher employment rates. But for most of the following section,
we will abstract from that when discussing the literature on
immigration and growth (the greater employment rates of immigrants,
however, are of first-order importance in their effect on the
nation’s fiscal balances, as we discuss in a later section).

Theories of economic growth have enough variety and complexity that it
is nearly impossible to make firm predictions about the effect of
immigration on this long-run growth, but we will note just a few
things in this section.

First, in all growth models that posit a negative relationship between
growth in per capita income and population growth (including
immigration), the influence of faster population growth that slows per
capita income growth is its effect in suppressing growth in the
capital-to-labor ratio. But the evidence over business cycles shows
little relationship between slower growth of the capital-to-labor
ratio and immigration flows in the U.S. data. The scatterplot
in FIGURE G shows the change in the overall capital-to-labor ratio
in the U.S. economy over various decades, along with the change in the
immigrant share of the population. If the worries about immigration
and growth are to be sustained, there should be a clear negative
relationship: A higher immigrant share should be associated with a
smaller increase in the capital-to-labor ratio. But there is no
obvious relationship (if anything, it appears to be slightly
positive). This is not dispositive evidence, obviously, but it does
highlight once again that rising shares of immigrant workers in the
U.S. economy are mostly matched by declining growth rates of the
native-born population and labor force.

Further, richer models of economic growth consider other determinants
of growth besides just the rate of physical capital accumulation. Many
models highlight that human capital (the skills and training of the
workforce) not only matters for growth but also generates
externalities (positive economic returns that are not fully captured
by the workers creating them). Given this, immigration that increases
human capital in the destination country might actually boost per
capita income growth.

A related (but not identical) idea is that today’s economic growth
depends on the existing _stock of ideas_ (including ideas from
decades or even centuries ago). If the total stock of ideas is related
strongly to the simple size of the population, then rising population
can be an aid to growth rather than a drag. Because ideas are often
fluid across national borders, the link between a larger population
and faster growth might hold more tightly at the global rather than
the national level, but if any parts of idea formation are nationally
“sticky,” then it might hold at the national level as well (and
patents and copyrights and other forms of intellectual property
protection probably do make ideas’ economic benefits “sticky” in
the country in which they are formed, for good or for ill).

A recent paper from Bernstein et al. (2022) highlights the
disproportionate success of immigrants in patenting new inventions
from the period 1990–2016. Immigrants constituted 16% of inventors
applying for patents in the United States, but accounted for 23% of
the total patents, and 25% of the most cited patents (a proxy for the
importance of the innovation).

Sequeira, Nunn, and Qian (2017) provide examples of how past
immigration flows into the United States brought ideas that surely
contributed strongly to growth:

One example of such an innovation is the suspension bridge, which was
pioneered by John A. Roebling, a German-born and trained civil
engineer, who built numerous suspension bridges, including the Niagara
Fall Suspension Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge (Faust, 1916, p. 10).
Other notable engineers include… John F. O’Rourke, an Irish
engineer, who built seven of the tunnels under the East and Hudson
Rivers, and six of the tunnels of the New York subway systems (Wittke,
1939, pp. 389–390). Another example is Alexander Graham Bell
…[who] developed an acoustic telegraph…. Other notable inventors
include David Thomas (Welsh), who invented the hot blast furnace; John
Ericsson (Swedish), who invented the ironclad ship and the screw
propeller; Conrad Hubert (Russian), who invented the flashlight; and
Ottmar Mergenthaler (German), who invented the linotype machine
(Kennedy, 1964, pp. 33–34). Immigrants also made important
contributions to the educational system of the United States. For
example, the concept of kindergarten, which has been shown to have had
important economic effects, was brought to the United States by German
immigrant Friederich Fröbel (Paz, 2015, Ager, Cinnirella and Jensen,
2016). Recent research by Paz (2015) finds that the presence of
kindergartens during the kindergarten movement (1890–1910) resulted
in an average of 0.6 additional years of total schooling by adulthood
and six percent higher income…The State University system… was
modeled after the Prussian… system… (Faust, 1916, pp. 10–11). 

These crosscutting theoretical effects of immigration on growth are
likely why the empirical estimates of immigration on growth yield
mostly neutral results. For example, Borjas (2019) uses cross-state
estimates of income growth and immigration flows and finds largely
neutral results for the causal effect of immigration flows on per
capita income growth. Kane and Rutledge (2018) also use cross-state
data to assess the link between immigration flows and growth. In the
raw data, there is an unambiguous positive correlation between
immigration flows and state growth, but some of this is due to
immigrants settling in states with strong economies. Using techniques
to isolate the causal effect of immigration flows on per capita GDP
growth, they find modestly negative _growth_ effects, but no effect
on _levels_, which they interpret as indicating that the negative
growth effects are transitory. Using historical data, Sequeira, Nunn,
and Qian (2017) find that past waves of immigration in the United
States had significantly positive short- and
long-run _causal_ effects on economic growth.

Finally, it is worth noting again that the possible win-win economic
effects of immigration are often squandered by bad immigration
policies and a system that doesn’t work well enough for workers. It
is very likely that the returns to innovation and human capital that
would accrue to many immigrants within the United States are
artificially suppressed because the immigrant workers would not be
able to claim the same benefits from innovation that U.S.-born workers
might. If a U.S.-born worker has an idea for a great invention, they
can start their own company and retain full control over the resulting
patent. Many highly skilled and educated temporary migrants must
remain attached to a specific employer as a condition of residence and
employment in the United States, and this means that they may see
their employer able to claim many of the benefits of their innovation
instead of getting it themselves.

The artificially created labor market monopsony facing many temporary
migrant workers in the United States almost surely stifles many
potential innovations. Take a couple of recent examples: One of the
key inventors of the mRNA vaccines was Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian
citizen working in the United States on an academic visa. When Karikó
tried to change jobs and move to another lab with better working
conditions, her academic adviser threatened to have her deported. The
resulting legal entanglements led to the offer from the other lab
being withdrawn (Shrikant 2023). Another example is Sandeep Maganti
whose situation is detailed in a recent Bloomberg investigative news
report on the H-1B visa program. Maganti is a software engineer who,
while on a student visa, created a business that grew “into a
million-dollar company that employed six people” (Fan et al. 2024).
U.S. “visa rules wouldn’t allow Maganti to sponsor himself” for
an H-1B visa so that he could remain and run his company. Without a
viable path to a temporary H-1B visa—a visa that would require
Maganti to be sponsored by an employer and become an employee—he
thus “had to sell his stake and stop working at his own company”
(Fan et al. 2024).

IMMIGRATION PATHWAYS AND STATUSES IN THE UNITED STATES

While the previous sections of this paper have focused on the migrant
and immigrant population and what existing research says about their
impact on the economy, wages, and housing, it has so far only briefly
mentioned how people arrive to the United States from abroad, and how
those pathways and the resulting immigration statuses—or lack
thereof—impact the economic outcomes of immigrants themselves and
labor standards for all workers writ large. In order to provide some
background, this section summarizes the broad immigration statuses for
migrants and immigrants in the United States, and the different rights
they have depending on their particular pathway and status. The
following section will focus on why the differences in immigration
status matter to the economy and workplaces across the country.

A note about terminology

While in the previous sections we have used the term “immigrant”
in the broad sense in which it is used in the United States, to mean
anyone who is foreign-born—the term “immigrant” in U.S. law has
a specific meaning: It means a lawful permanent resident with a green
card. Someone who previously held a green card but has become a
naturalized citizen may also be considered an immigrant. Persons who
do not have a green card are not technically “immigrants” under
U.S. law. The word “migrant” is a broader term that can encompass
anyone who is foreign born and may have arrived in the United States
in any of the other pathways, such as with a temporary visa, or
without authorization, or who is in a quasi-status that provides
temporary protection from deportation. But the term “migrant” can
also include immigrants in some cases or is sometimes used
interchangeably with the term “immigrant.” Ideally, persons who
arrive through humanitarian pathways like asylum seekers, asylees, and
refugees should be specified as such, but common usage of the term
“migrant” often labels them simply as migrants, especially when
their status or method of arrival is unknown.

In the following sections of this report, we do our best to refer to
green card holders as immigrants and people in other statuses as
migrants, and to specify the humanitarian pathway or status when
applicable. And with respect to foreign-born persons who do not have
an immigration status, some people and organizations refer to them as
“irregular migrants” or “irregular immigrants,” as well as
“unauthorized migrants” or “unauthorized immigrants,” or
“undocumented migrants” or “undocumented immigrants” 
interchangeably. We use these terms interchangeably and try to reflect
the usage of the author when citing and discussing specific pieces of
academic literature. 

Pathways into the United States and immigration statuses

There are multiple pathways that persons abroad take to arrive in the
United States. The following is a brief summary:

GREEN CARDS: One of the available lawful pathways includes adjusting
to lawful permanent resident (LPR) status—also commonly referred to
as obtaining a permanent immigrant visa or “green card”—which
can be through the family-based (FB) or employment-based (EB)
preference categories, through a humanitarian pathway such as a
refugee resettlement program or by qualifying as an asylee, through
the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, or through one of the lesser known
narrower categories, which account for a small share of total green
cards. 

The total number of green cards granted averaged just over one million
per year between 2003 and 2022 (1,021,966). One thing to keep in mind
with respect to this total number is that not all green cards granted
go to newly arriving immigrants from abroad; in most years, half to
two-thirds of green card recipients were already present in the United
States in some other status and adjusted to lawful permanent resident
status.13
[[link removed]] Persons
with green cards are eligible to apply for citizenship after five
years, or three years if they have been married to a U.S. citizen. In
terms of employment, green card holders may work for nearly any
employer, except for positions that require citizenship, and may
change jobs or employers without requiring authorization from the U.S.
government.

TEMPORARY, NONIMMIGRANT VISAS: The other major pathway into the
United States is as a temporary visitor, student, trainee, diplomat,
exchange visitor, or employee acquiring a “nonimmigrant” visa or
status.14
[[link removed]] Nonimmigrant
visas and statuses are temporary, meaning that the foreign-born person
to whom the visa is issued must depart the United States after the
visa expires unless they adjust to LPR status by acquiring either one
of the green cards described or another valid nonimmigrant status.
Many nonimmigrant visa classifications authorize the visa or status
holder—sometimes referred to as the visa beneficiary—to be
employed in the United States. Employed nonimmigrants are also often
referred to as temporary foreign workers, temporary migrant workers,
or guestworkers, but no one definitive term has been agreed upon (for
the purposes of this report, we refer to them as temporary migrant
workers). Most temporary migrant workers are only permitted to work
for one employer, the employer that sponsored their visa. In 2023,
nearly 1.8 million new temporary work visas were issued to temporary
migrant workers and their accompanying family members.15
[[link removed]] The
total number of temporary migrant workers in the United States who are
employed in a given year is estimated to be just over 2 million
(because some temporary visa statuses can last for more than one year)
(Costa 2021).

HUMANITARIAN PATHWAYS (REFUGEES, ASYLEES, AND ASYLUM SEEKERS): As
noted above regarding green cards, some persons obtain green cards
through the U.S. refugee resettlement program or after being granted
asylum (a person granted asylum is referred to as an asylee). The
refugee pathway comes from the United Nations Refugee Convention of
1951, which defines a refugee as someone fleeing his or her country
because of persecution or “owing to a well-founded fear of being
persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a
particular social group or political opinion, is outside of the
country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is
unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” In
the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as
amended by the Refugee Act of 1980, implements the Refugee Convention
and its 1967 Protocol into U.S. law, and authorizes and governs the
admission and resettlement of refugees into the United States.16
[[link removed]] The
number of refugees admitted to the United States in 2023 was just over
60,000 (Migration Policy Institute 2024). Refugees are permitted to
work for any employer, just like green cards holders (except for
positions that require U.S. citizenship).

Asylum is another form of humanitarian legal protection for persons
who have been forcibly displaced and fear harm and persecution,
similar to the protections available to those who qualify as refugees,
although under U.S. law, there is a separate process for persons who
apply for asylum (i.e., asylum seekers or asylum applicants) and those
applying for refugee status. Like refugees, asylum seekers must meet
the definition of a refugee; however, a major difference between
applying for refugee status or asylum is that to apply for asylum, the
applicant must already be in the United States or apply for asylum at
an official U.S. port of entry, rather than applying from abroad as
refugees do.17
[[link removed]] Successful
asylum applicants who become asylees are eligible and on the path to a
green card. However, processing of asylum claims through the relevant
government agency or in immigration court often takes years before
they are adjudicated.

Asylum may also be claimed as a defense to deportation for persons who
are detained by immigration authorities. During that time, asylum
applicants (aka asylum seekers) do not have a formal immigration
status but are authorized to remain in the United States while their
claim is adjudicated.

Asylum seekers are authorized to work in the United States, but they
are subject to applicable rules and wait times. They must first be
issued an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) from U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), but may only file for an
EAD 150 days after they have applied for asylum, and then become
eligible to receive an EAD once their asylum application has been
pending for a total of 180 days. There were an estimated 1.5 million
asylum seekers employed in the United States in 2023.18
[[link removed]]

IRREGULAR MIGRATION: The other pathway involves migrants who are
present in the United States but who do not have an authorized
immigration status; such individuals are sometimes referred to as
unauthorized, undocumented, or irregular migrants (being in an
irregular status), and sometimes (derogatorily) called illegal
migrants or illegal immigrants. Unauthorized migrants either entered
into the United States without inspection by the appropriate
authorities—often referred to as entering without inspection (EWI)
in government documents and data—and may have done so in a
clandestine manner. Other unauthorized migrants may have originally
entered the United States lawfully with a nonimmigrant visa or through
the Visa Waiver Program and after an inspection by government
authorities, but then lost their temporary immigration status. The
loss of status may have occurred because of a violation that led to
the revocation of their visa or status or the simple expiration of a
nonimmigrant visa that was temporarily valid for a set time, usually a
period of authorized travel, employment, or study.

There are a few existing estimates on the number of persons in the
United States who lack an immigration status, the most recent of which
estimate the population at between 11 and 11.3 million as of 2022.19
[[link removed]] The
vast majority of the unauthorized migrant population is settled, with
79% being long-standing residents who arrived in the United States in
2010 or earlier (Baker and Warren 2024). Unauthorized migrants are not
authorized to be employed in the United States, but an estimated 8.3
million were employed in the U.S. labor force in 2022, accounting for
just under 5% of the total U.S. labor force (Passel and Krogstad
2024).

PRECARIOUS IMMIGRATION STATUSES: There are a few types of temporary
protections or quasi-statuses, which are not technically immigration
statuses and which do not directly lead to any form of permanent
immigration status. For example, while unauthorized immigrants lack a
formal immigration status, some may nevertheless be in an authorized
period of stay in the United States in which they are temporarily
“lawfully present,” which can occur if they have qualified for
some sort of temporary immigration relief like deferred action,
humanitarian parole, parole-in-place, or Temporary Protected Status
(TPS).

Because of their temporary nature, we refer to them as precarious
statuses and other analysts like the Migration Policy Institute have
referred to them as “twilight,” “liminal,” or “limbo”
statuses.20
[[link removed]] Persons
may either enter the United States with one of these precarious
protections already in place—for example if they qualified for the
parole program for Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua—or they may
have entered without inspection and later qualified for TPS, deferred
action, or parole-in-place (a form of parole granted to persons who
are already in the United States). Persons with these precarious
statuses are usually eligible to obtain an Employment Authorization
Document (EAD), also known as a work permit, which allows them to work
lawfully. There were an estimated 2.8 million persons in precarious
statuses as of early 2024.21
[[link removed]]

The U.S. foreign-born population by immigration status

The pathways described above, and the resulting statuses, are
generally categorized into four major categories of immigration status
for immigrants (or lack thereof): Either immigrants have obtained
lawful permanent residence (having a green card), or they have
naturalized, meaning they have become U.S. citizens, or they have a
temporary lawful nonimmigrant status, or they lack a lawful
immigration status. For the purpose of population estimates—in part
because of data limitations—the migrants who have qualified for some
sort of precarious temporary immigration relief like deferred action,
parole, or TPS, or who are pursuing an asylum claim, are counted as
unauthorized migrants or immigrants, even though they technically have
a form of authorized stay.22
[[link removed]]

In terms of the shares of persons in these statuses, according to an
analysis done by the Pew Research Center (represented in FIGURE H),
as of 2022, roughly half of all immigrants (49%) were naturalized U.S.
citizens, one-quarter (24%) were lawful permanent residents, 4% were
temporary lawful residents, and 23% were unauthorized immigrants
(lacking an immigration status or having a precarious form of
temporary protection) (Passel and Krogstad 2024).

THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION STATUS ON WAGES AND WORKPLACE RIGHTS

All persons in the United States have—at least on paper—basic
labor and employment rights under U.S. law, which in theory, should
protect them from lawbreaking employers. However, the extent to which
those rights are able to be exercised, and the extent to which they
are enforceable in practice, depends very much on immigration status
because of the power that employers have over workers vis-à-vis that
immigration status and because of how employers can exploit that
power. This section briefly discusses the connection between
immigration status and workplace rights and the existing research on
the impact that immigration status can have on wages and labor
standards.

Naturalized citizens

All persons who become naturalized citizens enjoy all of the same
labor and employment rights as native-born U.S. citizens, including
being able to work for any employer and in any position—(except they
lack the ability to become elected to the office of president of the
United States). Naturalized citizens are not subject to removal from
the United States, which is a fear that many migrants and immigrants
in other statuses have (unless they are found to have committed fraud
during the naturalization process). Naturalized citizens also have
access to the same social safety net benefits as native-born citizens
and are the only group of immigrants that can vote in federal
elections—meaning they are allowed to fully participate in political
life.

These rights, benefits, and protections—in particular, not fearing
deportation—result in better economic outcomes, including higher
wages, than persons in other immigration statuses or compared with
persons who lack an immigration status. Below are just a few examples
of research showing the impact of naturalization on economic outcomes.

Peri and Zaiour (2021) modeled a number of scenarios for a
legalization program that would provide status to unauthorized
immigrants, to all or a subset of them, depending on certain
characteristics. In their first scenario, which would consist of a
legalization and path to a green card and citizenship for all
unauthorized immigrants, they found that in the short run—meaning
five years, in which unauthorized immigrants would have a lawful
immigration status but would not yet become naturalized U.S.
citizens—workers who were previously unauthorized would see a wage
gain of 10%, amounting to $4,300 per year. Peri and Zaiour then assume
that all those who gained an immigration status would become
naturalized citizens after five years—and in the long run, meaning
five to ten years—the newly naturalized immigrants would see an
increase in their annual wages of 32.4%, amounting to an increase of
$14,000 per year. They also found a positive wage impact beyond just
the workers who naturalized, estimating that all other workers would
see an annual increase in wages of 1.1%, or $700. Their estimate on
the broader impact of a pathway to citizenship was that it would
increase gross domestic product by up to $1.7 trillion over the next
decade and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Lynch and Oakford (2013) estimated the wage gains for both
legalization as a first step and the additional wage gains that would
follow after naturalization. They estimated first, the same increase
in income that unauthorized immigrants saw from legalization after the
Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), as measured by the U.S.
Department of Labor, of 15.1% after five years (see more discussion in
the next section on green cards). They then calculate the effect of
moving from legalization to citizenship, estimating an additional 10%
increase in income after acquiring citizenship. In total, they
estimate that “the full effect of granting legal status and
citizenship to unauthorized immigrants is an income gain of 25.1%. Of
this boost in income, about three-fifths comes from legalization and
about two-fifths is attributable to transitioning from legal status to
citizenship.”

Pastor and Scroggins (2012) also found that citizenship would boost
individual earnings of workers by 8% to 11%, “leading to a potential
$21–45 billion increase in cumulative earnings over ten years that
will have ripple effects on the national economy.”

Shierholz (2010) observed a difference between foreign-born adults who
had become naturalized citizens and those who had not become
naturalized, in terms of both economic outcomes and poverty rates.
Naturalized citizens in 2007 had a median annual family income that
was very similar to that of native-born U.S. citizens, even earning
slightly more than the native-born. But noncitizen immigrants had an
annual median income that was 33.2% below that of naturalized citizen
immigrants. In terms of poverty rates, they were much higher for
noncitizen immigrant adults: In 2007, the poverty rate for noncitizen
immigrants was 20.0%, more than twice the 9.2% rate for naturalized
citizen immigrants and the 9.8% rate for native-born U.S. citizens.
The poverty rate difference was starkest for Latinos, with the poverty
rate for naturalized citizen Latinos being 4.3 percentage points lower
than the poverty rate of Latino noncitizens.

Sumption and Flamm (2012) made very similar findings, showing that
“naturalized citizens earn more than their noncitizen counterparts,
are less likely to be unemployed, and are better represented in highly
skilled jobs.” They further found that:

Most of the gap between citizens’ and noncitizens’ outcomes is
explained by the fact that naturalized immigrants have higher levels
of education, better language skills, and more work experience in the
United States than noncitizens. Even after accounting for these
differences, however, there is some evidence that the naturalized may
earn a wage premium of at least 5 percent.

Green cards

All persons who obtain green cards—whether through the family-based,
employment-based, humanitarian, or Diversity Visa pathways—enjoy
nearly all of the same labor and employment rights as U.S. citizens,
including being able to work for any employer and in any position
except for those that explicitly require citizenship. For the most
part, green card holders are not subject to removal from the United
States, although unlike naturalized citizens, they can be removed if
they commit certain crimes that make them deportable or if they are
deemed to have abandoned their permanent resident status.

Under current federal law, green card holders must wait five years
before using most public support and social insurance programs. Green
card holders are not eligible to vote in federal elections, although
some jurisdictions allow them to vote in local elections for positions
like school boards and city council seats and to run for some local
elected offices.

Being able to work lawfully without fearing deportation results in
better economic outcomes for green card holders, including higher
wages, relative to persons in other lawful immigration statuses or
compared with persons who lack an immigration status. Below are just a
few examples of research showing the impact of naturalization on
economic outcomes. (Estimates of the economic benefits obtained by
green card holders depend on their status before they obtained their
green cards. The two types discussed here are persons who were
previously on a temporary work visa and persons who previously lacked
an immigration status.)

One example of research assessing the economic and workplace impact of
having a green card compared with a temporary work visa comes from
Mukhopadhyay and Oxborrow (2012), who looked at college-educated
migrant workers on temporary visas. They found that “H-1B workers
are paid less than native workers” and that the wage gain associated
with obtaining an employment-based green card was $11,860 per year.
The authors noted that their “result shows that the current process
of acquiring a green card gives too much power to employers and
hinders job mobility among highly skilled immigrants.”

Apgar (2015) reviewed Mexican Migration Project survey data and
compared employment outcomes for Mexican males who were on temporary
visas, unauthorized immigrants, and green card holders. Controlling
for other factors, Apgar found that the hourly wages of temporary
migrant workers were about 11% less than those of immigrants with
green cards and that unauthorized immigrant workers earned about 13%
less than immigrants with green cards.

There is extensive research on the impact of unauthorized immigrants
who regularized their status by becoming eligible for green cards
going as far back as the 1990s, including research on the effects of
the 1986 legalization program implemented after enactment of IRCA,
which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. This research is
particularly relevant for measuring the impact of obtaining a green
card because nearly all migrants legalized under IRCA were eligible to
receive a green card after 18 months. The discussion here only offers
a small sampling of the existing literature.

Smith, Kramer, and Singer (1996), in a report conducted for the U.S.
Department of Labor (DOL), found that after four or five years, the
real hourly wages of persons who had their immigration status
regularized increased on average by 15.1% by 1992 (13.2% for men and
20.5% for women). Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark (2000) found that,
according to the same data set, 38.8% of Mexican men had moved on to
higher-paying occupations by 1992.23
[[link removed]]

Hinojosa-Ojeda (2010) summarizes other related research and notes that
“[t]he findings of these researchers vary according to their
economic models, but the results show uniformly positive results for
IRCA beneficiaries,” including measured wage increases that occurred
even after controlling for factors such as education and English
proficiency, and broader changes in the economy that might have
impacted wages more generally.24
[[link removed]]

Temporary work visas and temporary migrant workers

Although they are legally authorized to work, temporary migrant
workers are among the most exploited laborers in the U.S. workforce
because employer control of their visa status leaves many virtually
powerless to defend and uphold their rights. The vast majority of
temporary migrant workers do not have a path to permanent residence
through their nonimmigrant visa, and under current federal law, are
ineligible for most federally funded public benefits. 

The first major temporary migrant worker programs in the United States
were the Bracero programs, which were negotiated as bilateral
agreements between the United States and Mexico in 1917 and 1942
(Martin 2020). Since then, numerous cases of abuse and exploitation of
migrant workers employed with temporary visas have come to light
through the media, reports from advocates and labor unions, and
government audits.25
[[link removed]] Many
of the abuses occur because of the structure of the visa programs,
which have few rules and inadequate protections and oversight by
federal or state labor standards authorities.

Temporary migrant workers have good reason to fear retaliation and
deportation if they speak up about wage theft, workplace abuses, or
other working conditions like substandard health and safety procedures
on the job—not because they don’t have a valid immigration status,
but because their visas are almost always tied to one employer that
owns and controls their visa status. That visa status is what
determines the worker’s right to remain in the country; if they lose
their job, they lose their visa and become deportable (Bauer and
Stewart 2013). That leaves them afraid to speak up and complain to
their employer or government authorities if their wages are stolen or
other workplace violations take place. This arrangement results in a
form of indentured servitude.26
[[link removed]] Further,
employers can punish temporary migrant workers for speaking out by not
rehiring them the following year or by telling recruiters in countries
of origin that they shouldn’t be hired for other job opportunities
in the United States (effectively blacklisting them).27
[[link removed]]

Although on paper, temporary migrant workers have labor and employment
rights and access to remedies that are on par with those of U.S.
workers—including immigrants who are green card holders and
naturalized citizens—the specter of retaliation makes it
understandably difficult for temporary migrant workers to hold
lawbreaking employers accountable through complaints to their
employers or to government agencies about illegal conditions like
unpaid wages and substandard working conditions. Private lawsuits
against employers who break the law are also an unrealistic avenue for
enforcing rights for two reasons: First, most temporary migrant
workers are not eligible for federally funded legal services under
U.S. law, and second, those who have been fired are unlikely to have a
valid immigration status permitting them to stay in the United States
long enough to pursue their claims in court. Because of the conditions
created by tying workers to a single employer through their visa
status, temporary work visa programs have been dubbed by some as
“close to slavery” or “the new American slavery,” and
government auditors have noted that increased protections are needed
for temporary migrant workers.28
[[link removed]]

It is also well established that many, if not most, temporary migrant
workers pay hefty fees to obtain their temporary jobs in the United
States (CDM 2013 and 2020). Those who are in debt after paying
recruitment fees are anxious to earn enough to pay back what they owe
and hopefully make a profit, exacerbating their situation and making
them even more unlikely to speak up at work when things go wrong on
the job.

When it comes to wages, there is abundant evidence that the laws and
regulations governing major temporary work visa programs—such as
H-2B and H-1B—permit employers to legally pay their temporary
migrant workers much less than the local average wage for the jobs
they fill.29
[[link removed]] For
example, in the H-1B program—which has a prevailing wage rule that
is intended to protect local wage standards—60% of all H-1B jobs
certified by the DOL in 2019 were certified at a wage that was below
the local average wage for the specific occupation (Costa and Hira
2020). However, most work visa programs have no minimum or prevailing
wage rules at all—and while employers are still required by law to
pay temporary migrant workers at least the state or federal minimum
wage, that’s often far less than the true market rate, or the local
average wage, for the occupation in which they are employed.30
[[link removed]] Evidence
also exists of rampant and systematic wage theft committed against
temporary migrant workers.31
[[link removed]]

Considering how the wage rules or lack thereof in these programs
operate, and the situation workers are left in, perhaps it is no
surprise that according to one study, there is evidence that temporary
migrant workers in low-wage jobs earn approximately the same wages, on
average, that unauthorized immigrant workers do for similar jobs,
despite being in a technically lawful status (Apgar 2015
[[link removed]]).
In other words, temporary migrant workers may have little financial
incentive to work legally through visa programs since there is a small
or zero wage premium to be gained for it—and, in fact, authorized
temporary migrant workers can end up worse off economically than
unauthorized workers because of the debts they incur through fees paid
to recruiters, and the fact that many have no family or social
networks to rely on. This can incentivize workers to migrate without
authorization, rather than using available legal channels.

In essence, these visa programs give employers dangerous levels of
monopsony power over workers—similar to company towns in which an
employer has enormous leverage over workers because it is the only
employer in town.32
[[link removed]] A
growing body of research, some of it focused on temporary work visa
programs, has shown that even modest amounts of employer monopsony
power are corrosive to workers’ ability to bargain for better
wages.33
[[link removed]] 

Unauthorized immigrants

Unauthorized immigrants, who make up nearly 5% of the U.S. labor
force, contribute to the economy in vital industries and pay billions
in taxes and contributions to the social safety net (Davis, Guzman,
and Sifre 2024; Fernández Campbell 2018). But these nearly eight
million workers are not fully protected by U.S. labor and employment
laws because they lack an immigration status. Unauthorized immigrants
are also vulnerable to exploitation by employers because they are
largely ineligible for federally funded public support and social
insurance programs because of their immigration status (as discussed
earlier in this report) (Lacarte, Gelatt, and Podplesky 2024). There
are a few narrow exceptions to this rule, which allow immigrants to be
eligible for certain benefits regardless of immigration status; those
programs include emergency Medicaid (if otherwise ineligible for their
state’s Medicaid program), programs that provide immunizations
and/or treatment of communicable disease symptoms, and school
breakfast and lunch programs.34
[[link removed]] Under
federal law, all children have equal access to public education at the
elementary and secondary level regardless of their immigration status
or the status of their parents. 

On paper, unauthorized immigrants have labor and employment rights and
access to remedies that are on par with those of U.S. workers35
[[link removed]]—including
immigrants who are green card holders and naturalized citizens—but
the specter of retaliation makes it understandably difficult for
unauthorized immigrants to hold lawbreaking employers accountable.
These workers are often afraid to complain about unpaid wages and
substandard working conditions because employers can retaliate against
them by taking actions that can lead to their deportation. Thus,
complaints to their employers or to government agencies about illegal
conditions like unpaid wages and substandard working conditions seem
like risky options—and perhaps with a low chance of success given
how underresourced and understaffed labor standards enforcement
agencies are (Costa 2022).

This imbalanced relationship gives employers extraordinary power to
exploit and underpay these workers, also making it more difficult for
other workers to improve their wages and working conditions. The
exploitation described here is not theoretical. A landmark study and
survey of 4,300 workers in three major cities by Bernhardt et al.
(2009) found that 37.1% of unauthorized immigrant workers were victims
of minimum wage violations, compared with 15.6% of U.S.-born citizens.
In other words, unauthorized immigrants are more than twice as likely
to be the victims of wage theft compared with U.S.-born citizens.
Immigrants who had a lawful immigration status (labeled as
“authorized immigrants” in the study) were also more likely to be
the victims of wage theft, but the gap with U.S.-born citizens was
significantly narrowed, compared with unauthorized immigrants: 21.3%
of authorized immigrants were the victims of wage theft versus 15.6%
of U.S.-born citizens. Bernhardt et al. (2009) also looked at overtime
pay violations and found that an astounding 84.9% of unauthorized
immigrants were not paid the overtime wages they worked for and were
legally entitled to, compared with 67.2% of authorized immigrants and
68.2% of U.S.-born citizens. And finally, beyond just the higher rates
of wage theft, research related to IRCA by Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark
(2002) also examined the value of the wage _penalty_ for being an
unauthorized immigrant worker, estimating that it ranged from 14% to
24%.

Migrants with precarious temporary immigration protections and work
permits

When it comes to migrants with precarious temporary immigration
protections like TPS, parole, and deferred action, or who are going
through the asylum application process, most of the migrants who
qualify for those temporary protections are also eligible to receive
an Employment Authorization Document, which is often referred to
simply as a work permit or EAD. All foreign-born persons who are not
authorized to work by virtue of being a naturalized citizen, green
card holder, or temporary migrant worker must first obtain an EAD from
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) within the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) before they can be authorized to
work.36
[[link removed]] To
do so, they must belong to an eligible group, including, for example,
certain foreign students, or the spouses of temporary migrant workers
in certain visa programs, such as H-1B or J-1, or they may obtain an
EAD by qualifying for one of the forms of administrative immigration
relief, such as TPS, deferred action, Deferred Enforced Departure,
humanitarian parole, or parole-in-place. EADs are also available for
other categories of individuals such as asylum applicants (after a
waiting period of six months), certain applicants for adjustment of
status, asylees, and refugees who have not yet obtained green cards,
as well as persons granted withholding of removal.37
[[link removed]]

For workers who lack a permanent or more durable immigration status,
obtaining a temporary EAD can mean having enforceable workplace rights
that the individual would otherwise not have. While all workers have
some labor and workplace rights under U.S. law—regardless of
immigration status, as discussed in other parts of this section in
this report—enforcing them in practice becomes virtually impossible
because of the threat of deportation, which prevents workers who lack
an immigration status or an EAD from calling out lawbreaking employers
and demanding that they comply with the law, or from reporting
workplace violations to labor enforcement agencies. But having
protection from deportation through temporary administrative
immigration protections accompanied by an EAD means that, in practice,
workers can report workplace violations to government officials
without fear of retaliation that can lead to deportation. It also
means that a migrant worker with an EAD can be employed by just about
any employer and change jobs or employers, unlike temporary migrant
workers who must be employed by the sponsor of their visa.

There are some examples of research showing the important economic
contributions that hundreds of thousands of migrants with precarious
statuses and EADs are able to make thanks to their temporary
protections. For example, when the TPS population was approximately
354,000 in 2021, AIC (2023) estimated that “TPS holders contributed
more than $2.2 billion in taxes, including almost $1 billion to state
and local governments,” as well as “held $8 billion in spending
power.” Another estimate by Moriarty (2024) found that TPS-eligible
individuals “annually contribute some $31 billion in wages to the
national GDP.” The total number of TPS holders in 2024 is now
roughly 864,000; thus these totals are likely to be much higher now.

Research has also quantified some of the contributions made by persons
who have qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
DACA was created by the Department of Homeland Security during the
Obama administration in 2012, and recipients are eligible for
protections from deportation and EADs that are valid for two years and
renewable. More than 835,000 persons have benefitted from DACA, and
more than 500,000 are currently still protected by DACA (President’s
Alliance 2024). Svajlenka and Truong (2021) found that DACA recipient
households “pay $6.2 billion in federal taxes and $3.3 billion in
state and local taxes each year,” and “after taxes, these
households hold $25.3 billion in spending power,” and that DACA
recipient families “own 68,000 homes, making $760 million in
mortgage payments and $2.5 billion in rental payments annually.”

When it comes to measuring the workplace impact and economic benefits
of being issued an EAD for the workers themselves, there are limited
examples, but three are worth citing here. One is an annual survey of
DACA recipients that was conducted in 2024 for the ninth time. The
most recent survey, conducted by Wong et al. (2024) and published by
the Center for American Progress, showed that DACA has been an
essential tool to improve the economic and educational outcomes of
recipients. In terms of the impact that deferred action and an EAD
have had on the employment of DACA recipients: 59.1% of respondents
moved to a job with better pay; 47.3% moved to a job with better
working conditions; 47.5% moved to a job that “better fits [their]
education and training”; 49.6% moved to a job that “better fits
[their] long-term career goals”; 57.3% moved to a job with health
insurance or other benefits; and 19.6% of respondents obtained
professional licenses.

Wong et al. also measured the impact of DACA and EADs on wages,
finding that “[d]ata from the past nine years show that DACA has had
a significant and positive effect on wages: Recipients’ average
hourly wage more than doubled from $11.92 to $31.52 per hour—an
increase of 164.4 percent—after receiving DACA.” These significant
wage increases are no doubt a result of the labor and workplace rights
and stability that DACA recipients gain from having an EAD.

Orrenius and Zavodny (2014) examined the wage and employment impact of
another form of temporary immigration protection, that of TPS—which
allows those who are eligible to also be granted an EAD. They looked
specifically at migrants from El Salvador, finding that having TPS
increased employment rates, and that less-educated Salvadoran men who
were employed earned 13% more if they had TPS. They note that “As a
whole, the results suggest that less-educated Salvadoran men who
receive TPS are able to move into better jobs and become more
selective about the jobs they hold, increasing their earnings but also
their job search and unemployment incidence.”

One other analysis that assesses the wage impact of being issued an
EAD comes from Kallick (2023), which looks specifically at asylum
seekers in New York and nationwide. Relying on previous methodologies
for measuring the impact of a lawful immigration status being granted
to unauthorized immigrants, Kallick estimates that asylum seekers who
are granted EADs increase their wages by 10%.

While the relative benefits of precarious and temporary immigration
protections and EADs to migrant workers and the broader economy are
clear, it is important to note here that the protections and EADs are
only temporary and will end if renewals are not approved. This may
occur either because the migrant no longer qualifies or because the
program that authorized them has ended or not been renewed (for
example if DHS decides not to renew a TPS designation or if DACA or
another program is ended by DHS or found to be unlawful according to a
federal court ruling). Since migrants with precarious immigration
protections and EADs do not have a direct path to a green card, they
may never obtain one unless Congress passes reforms to provide them
with such a path—keeping them in a precarious status indefinitely
until there is a policy change or their protections are not renewed.

In fact, if we include asylum seekers with EADs, there are
approximately 4.3 million migrants who have protections through a
precarious immigration status as of early 2024.38
[[link removed]] But
more than half are in danger of losing their protections and EADs if
the current U.S. president or a future president decides to end any or
all of the administrative immigration relief programs or if a court
rules them invalid. Thus, millions who have been issued temporary
protections and an EAD could potentially lose the workplace rights and
protections that a work permit provides, leaving them vulnerable to
exploitation by employers. In the case of asylum seekers, many can and
will lose their ability to remain lawfully in the United States along
with their work permits, depending on how their case is adjudicated in
immigration court or by USCIS.

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND THE IMPACT OF INADEQUATE RESOURCES FOR
LABOR STANDARDS ENFORCEMENT

The inability of both unauthorized immigrants and temporary migrant
workers to hold employers accountable through regular channels, as
discussed in this report, is exacerbated by the current immigration
enforcement regime, which prioritizes removing unauthorized
immigrants, detaining migrants, and detecting persons who attempt to
enter the United States without authorization. This section briefly
discusses the U.S. government’s lopsided enforcement priorities, the
resulting challenges faced by labor standards enforcement agencies,
and the impact on all workers.

Labor standards enforcement agencies are underfunded and short-staffed

In order to carry out its immigration enforcement priorities,
as FIGURE I shows, U.S. immigration enforcement agencies received
$30.2 billion from Congress in fiscal year 2023. All U.S. labor
standards enforcement agencies that protect workers, on the other
hand, only received $2.2 billion (also Figure I). That gap between the
amounts appropriated for immigration enforcement as compared with
labor standards enforcement means that immigration enforcement
agencies are now funded at a rate that is nearly 14 times higher than
the budgets of all federal labor standards enforcement agencies
combined. This is up from 12 times as much in 2021—and when it comes
to staffing, immigration enforcement agencies had eight times as many
staff as labor standards enforcement agencies in 2021 (Costa 2022).
The ultimate result of these disparities is to increase the fear that
unauthorized immigrants already have when considering whether to
report workplace violations, thereby making it even less likely that
labor standards enforcement agencies will know about employer
lawbreaking and be able to adequately respond.

Hinojosa-Ojeda (2010) provides a useful summary of a 2008 report from
the Atlanta Federal Reserve (Brown, Hotchkiss, and Quispe-Agnoli 2008)
that examined the negative impact that the current immigration
enforcement regime has on low-wage labor markets:

The enhanced [immigration] enforcement regime moves unauthorized
workers further underground, lowering their pay, and ironically,
creating a greater demand for unauthorized workers. A 2008 report from
the Atlanta Federal Reserve analyzes how this vicious cycle is
activated and expands as firms find themselves forced to compete for
the supply of cheaper, unauthorized labor. When a firm cuts costs by
hiring unauthorized workers for lower wages, its competitors become
more likely to hire unauthorized workers for lower wage, as well, in
order to benefit from the same cost savings.

This impact of escalating immigration enforcement, coupled with a lack
of funds for labor standards enforcement, leaves workers vulnerable
and largely unprotected from employer lawbreaking. There are some
clear examples in particular industries in which enforcement is
inadequate, but violations are common, for example, in agriculture, as
we discuss in the next subsection—in which more than half of the
workforce is comprised of unauthorized immigrants and temporary
migrant workers (Costa and Martin 2023).

First, some background is appropriate regarding how one of the main
federal worker protection agencies, the Wage and Hour Division (WHD),
part of DOL, has been impacted by inadequate staffing and funding. WHD
is responsible for enforcing provisions of several federal laws
related to minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor, federal contract
workers, work visa programs, migrant and seasonal agricultural
workers, family and medical leave, and more. Yet, despite this broad
portfolio and the 167 million workers who are covered by these
protections (WHD 2023),39
[[link removed]] funding
for WHD has not kept pace with the growth of the U.S. labor force.

FIGURE J shows that, in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars, WHD’s
budget in 2006 was $250 million, and in 2023, $260 million—an
increase of just $10 million over nearly two decades. As Figure J also
shows, this trend has been consistent with appropriations for two
other key worker protection agencies, the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB). At both OSHA and the NLRB, inflation-adjusted appropriations
were significantly lower in 2023 compared with 2006.

In addition to funding levels that have barely kept up with inflation
at WHD and the 167 million workers WHD has a mandate to protect, the
number of WHD investigators that the agency employs, who are primarily
responsible for ensuring that federal wage and hour laws are obeyed by
employers across all 50 states and U.S. territories, is near an
all-time low. FIGURE K shows that there were only 733 WHD
investigators at the end of 2023 to enforce all federal wage and hour
laws, 79 fewer than in 1973, the first year for which data are
available, and 499 fewer than the peak year of 1978 when there were
1,232 WHD investigators. Meanwhile, the number of workers that WHD has
a mandate to protect has increased sharply. The average number of
workers in 2023 was 167.1 million, which amounts to 227,989 workers
for every wage and hour investigator. Compare this with 1973 when
there were 72,588 workers for every wage and hour investigator.40
[[link removed]] Investigators
are now responsible for more than triple the number of workers as in
1973.

The value of back wages recovered by WHD, the number of employees who
received back wages as a result of WHD actions, and the total number
of hours the WHD spent on investigations “all dropped in fiscal year
2022 compared to the year prior” according to WHD data reported on
by _Bloomberg Law_ in December 2022 (Rainey 2022). Despite WHD’s
stated intention to hire 100 new investigators during the Biden
administration, a heavy workload and inadequate funding from Congress
appear to be hindering WHD from hiring enough staff for the tasks at
hand. As the same _Bloomberg Law_ report noted, WHD has “struggled
to recruit new investigative staff.”

Inadequate labor standards enforcement in agriculture exemplifies the
impact of underfunded and short-staffed worker protection agencies

What has been the result of underfunded and short-staffed worker
protection agencies like WHD and OSHA in an industry like agriculture
in which half of workers lack an immigration status and roughly
one-tenth have a precarious status through temporary H-2A visas? There
has been a clear downward trend in the number of closed investigations
of agricultural employers by WHD over the past two decades, from more
than 2,000 a year in the early 2000s, to 1,000 or fewer a year during
the last three fiscal years. In fiscal year 2023, WHD closed only 831
investigations of agricultural employers—a record low during the
2000 to 2023 period—amounting to an average of 68 a month in 2023
(WHD 2024). Eight hundred thirty-one investigations in 2023 is just
over a third of the 2,431 agricultural investigations closed in 2000,
the peak year for WHD agricultural investigations (Costa and Martin
2023). 

The low number of investigations means that most farms are never
investigated by WHD; in fact fewer than 1% of agricultural employers
are investigated per year (Costa and Martin 2023). Since farm
operators know there is a very low likelihood that they will ever be
investigated, some may feel emboldened to have a business model that
relies on wage theft and other forms of lawbreaking. In addition, when
it comes to health and safety violations on farms, reporting
from _ProPublica_ suggests that farmworkers are unwilling to come
forward to report employer violations because of a perception that
OSHA doesn’t have adequate resources to investigate (Sanchez and
Jameel 2023).

These issues extend beyond agriculture, but the agricultural industry
is a useful microcosm that exemplifies the broader issues. Another
problem that was recently identified that extends beyond agriculture
is that even when WHD detects and can confirm employer violations, as
another report from _Bloomberg Law_ revealed, WHD “cannot litigate
every case due to resource issues,” citing violations in the H-2B
visa program where employers violated the law but were not punished
(Rainey 2023).

Yet another enforcement gap has to do with governance of temporary
work visa programs. WHD data show that violations of the H-2A visa
program—which allows farm employers to hire temporary migrant
farmworkers—now account for the vast majority of back wages owed and
civil money penalties assessed on employers (73%) (Costa and Martin
2023). Thus, nearly three-fourths of all penalties in agriculture now
result from violations of work visa program rules. WHD also recently
reported that in the previous five fiscal years, “in 88 percent of
WHD’s H-2A investigations, WHD found employers in violation of the
law” (ETA and WHD 2024). That means that when WHD investigates H-2A
violations, they nearly always detect them. These data strongly
suggest that violations of the H-2A visa program in agriculture are
not limited to a few employers who are “bad apples,” but instead
that widespread and systematic violations of H-2A rules are ongoing.

In addition, in all U.S. temporary work visa programs, employers that
have been found to violate the law—whether it be wage and hour,
labor, health and safety, discrimination, or civil rights laws—are
nevertheless allowed to continue to hire through visa programs. As
numerous investigative reports have shown, even some of the worst
violators are allowed to keep hiring, even after they have been
sanctioned for lawbreaking and extreme abuses of their workers.41
[[link removed]] Changing
and enforcing a rule to prohibit them from hiring would also likely
require a significant increase in funding to DOL’s Office of Foreign
Labor Certification (OFLC), which certifies the applications of
employers seeking to hire temporary migrant workers. But funding and
staffing levels there have not increased proportionally with the rise
in the number of applications for work visas and prevailing wage
determinations over the past decade. (OFLC’s workload has increased
by nearly 50%, while funding has declined by 4% since 2012 after
adjusting for inflation (Costa and Hira 2024)). WHD would also need
increased funding to help enforce the rule to bar employers that
violate the rules.

Taken together, all of these realities further embolden lawbreaking
employers to victimize their employees who lack an immigration status
or only have a temporary or precarious status because employers know
that unauthorized migrants and temporary migrant workers are unlikely
to complain and report violations. And even when workers are brave
enough to do so, employers know that labor standards enforcement
agencies don’t have the resources or capacity to respond adequately.
The ultimate result is that employers can often steal wages and
violate labor and employment laws with impunity, which degrade labor
standards for all workers, including the U.S.-born workers who work
alongside foreign-born workers.

HOW TO REFORM IMMIGRATION POLICIES TO MAXIMIZE BENEFITS FOR WORKERS
AND MINIMIZE CHALLENGES

So far in this report we have discussed existing analyses of how
immigration impacts the economy and how immigration status impacts
wages and worker rights. But we wish to reiterate that most, if not
all, of the negative impacts or potential negative impacts that
immigration could have on the economy, wages, or labor standards, are
the result of how the immigration system is structured and its legal
framework. In particular, the rights and protections that migrants and
immigrants have depending on their immigration status, or lack
thereof, and the employment relationships that result between migrants
and immigrants and their employers, are the result of policy choices.
A severe power imbalance between workers and employers that is tilted
almost entirely in favor of employers is what leads to worker
exploitation. Temporary and precarious immigration statuses, or the
lack of status, can embolden employers to break laws while making it
difficult to hold them accountable.

This section briefly discusses some of the most important policy
reforms that should be made to update the immigration system in order
to level the playing field between workers and employers, and thereby
lift standards and raise wages economywide. Successfully doing so
would maximize the economic benefits of immigration and bring
credibility to the immigration system, allowing all workers to see
that the system is not being misused by employers to degrade wages and
labor standards. That credibility is necessary in order to build
public support for higher levels of immigration and to assuage the
concerns of those who have valid critiques of the current pro-employer
U.S. immigration policy framework.

In sum, an immigration system that leads to shared prosperity for all
workers means lifting standards and ensuring that all workers have
equal and enforceable labor and workplace rights regardless of
immigration status—as well as having a flexible and data-driven
immigration system that can adjust based on the needs of the economy.

A broad and quick path to a green card for the unauthorized immigrant
population and those with precarious statuses

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first and most important reform needed is
a quick and broad legalization for the current unauthorized immigrant
population—roughly 5% of the total U.S. workforce—that leads to
lawful permanent residence (green cards), making beneficiaries
eventually eligible for citizenship. Having 5% of the U.S. workforce
vulnerable to exploitation and workplace abuse only benefits
lawbreaking employers—and it drags down labor standards for all
workers, including  the U.S.-born, naturalized citizens, and green
card holders. This reality has existed for far too long and should be
an urgent priority for Congress to address.

To maximize economic gains that come with the path to a green card and
citizenship—which include raising wages significantly, especially
for workers in low-wage industries—the path must be as inclusive as
possible. The pathway should not be long and arduous like those that
have been proposed in major immigration reform bills of the past, such
as S.744 from 2013, which required a 10-year path to a green card and
another three years for citizenship eligibility. As discussed earlier,
the 1986 IRCA legalization made beneficiaries eligible for green cards
after 18 months; the same timeline should be the goal. However, one
valid critique of IRCA was that the law’s legalization program was
not nearly broad enough; it failed to legalize millions, which left
behind the core of today’s unauthorized population (Chishti and
Kamasaki 2014).

Having a long and difficult pathway with onerous requirements (which
may be designed to reduce the number of eligible beneficiaries for
green cards) will have the effect of leaving potential beneficiaries
who are awaiting green cards vulnerable to abuse by employers. For
example, a requirement that workers be employed for a set number of
days per year in a particular industry, such as agriculture, could
have the effect of leaving them in a quasi-indentured state. S.744
required potential applicants for green cards to pay processing fees
and back federal taxes, as well as meet minimum income and employment
tests—requirements that would have led to a significant share of the
total unauthorized immigrant population never obtaining a green
card—dooming the nation to repeat history.

A long and difficult pathway to permanent status also delays potential
wage gains for immigrants and other workers, including U.S.-born
workers and earlier immigrants, and the additional tax revenue
associated with increased earnings. It makes no sense to restrict the
wage gains and other societal benefits that come with a green card,
which have been measured time and time again through rigorous
research. And it would delay the ability of immigrants to fully
integrate and participate in civic life, and make them less likely to
make the kind of longer-term investments in their future that would
also benefit the broader economy, whether it be purchasing a home,
starting a business, or investing in job training and education.

The executive branch should use existing authority to expand temporary
rights and protections and issue work permits to protect workers and
improve labor standards

The number of people in precarious statuses through temporary
protections like parole, deferred action, or Temporary Protected
Status (TPS), has increased. There were almost 2.8 million migrants in
those statuses as of early 2024, nearly all of whom are eligible for
work permits, which are formally known as Employment Authorization
Documents (EADs).42
[[link removed]] There
has also been a large increase over the past decade in the number of
asylum seekers who are lawfully employed with EADs, over 1.5 million
as of late 2023, who are also in a precarious quasi-status while they
pursue their claims.43
[[link removed]]

In fact, the recent increase in precarious statuses has resulted in
close to one-third of the entire unauthorized immigrant population
having some form of temporary protection and the workplace rights that
come with an EAD.44
[[link removed]] As
discussed in this report, the workers in precarious statuses who
possess EADs are in a vastly better situation compared with being
unauthorized with no EAD—because work permits allow them to have
workplace rights that can be enforced in practice—even if most are
unable to access an eventual path to a green card and citizenship. The
current status quo in which one-third of an exploitable population has
enforceable workplace rights—however precarious and temporary—is
vastly preferable over the prior reality where nearly all had rights
that only existed on paper and were virtually impossible to enforce in
practice.

Whether through the use of TPS and humanitarian parole—which are
based in statute—or deferred action and other forms of prosecutorial
discretion, the executive branch has demonstrated across multiple
presidential administrations that it has the requisite tools and legal
authority necessary to expand temporary rights, protections, and work
permits for the millions of migrants who lack an immigration status.
(Many of whom have resided in the United States for decades and are
deeply integrated into communities across the United States.)

The executive branch should thus take immediate action to improve
standards for all workers through new and expanded TPS designations,
additional use of humanitarian parole and parole-in-place, and grants
of deferred action—at least until Congress acts and passes the most
essential reforms necessary. Doing so would instantly improve wages
and working conditions for both foreign-born and U.S. born workers in
countless industries.

Green cards instead of temporary work visas

There are now at least 2 million temporary migrant workers in the
United States who are employed through temporary work visas. The
numbers of visas issued and workers in the programs have grown
exponentially since the Immigration Act of 1990, while the number of
employment-based green cards has remained relatively flat due to the
annual numerical limit for employment-based green cards (Costa 2020).
Temporary work visas are often the only viable employment-based option
for migrant workers seeking jobs in the United States, but as
discussed earlier in this report, temporary work visas leave those
workers indentured and often (legally) underpaid compared with
similarly situated U.S. workers—creating a two-tiered system of
rights and standards in the workplace. Moreover, most temporary work
visas do not offer a viable or direct path to permanence.

To ensure that all workers have equal rights and to restore the
balance of power between employers and workers, the U.S. immigration
system should be tilted away from temporary work visa programs and
toward providing more green cards for workers. Instead of arriving in
a quasi-indentured status and having limited rights, the vast majority
of migrant workers should be able to arrive with a green card in hand,
giving them the freedom to change jobs if they can earn more or be
more productive working for another employer or starting their own
business. This will also allow them to benefit from the economic gains
associated with green cards and citizenship and to make long-term
investments in their future that benefit the U.S. economy.

Reforming work visa programs

Given the critiques reiterated in this report and explained with
extensive evidence through various EPI publications, we strongly
believe that the U.S. immigration system should shift away from
temporary work visa programs because of their inherent flaws that
allow employers to exert a coercive amount of power over workers,
which allows them to exploit and underpay workers and to violate labor
and employment laws with impunity. The bargaining power of all U.S.
workers is undercut when more than 2 million temporary migrant
workers—1.2% of the U.S. labor force—are underpaid by employers
and cannot safely complain to labor standards enforcement agencies or
sue employers that exploit them because their visa status is owned and
controlled by their employer.

The issue is not that all employers of temporary migrant workers break
laws or have bad intentions, but that the current structures and legal
frameworks of temporary work visa programs facilitate worker
exploitation and are coupled with inadequate mechanisms in place for
oversight and accountability. Reforming the system would ensure an
even playing field for employers and raise wages and improve standards
for both temporary migrant workers and U.S. workers in adjacent
occupations and industries.

To achieve this, we propose several key reforms that are necessary to
protect workers and modernize the U.S. immigration system:45
[[link removed]]

* Congress should require employers to recruit and offer jobs to
qualified U.S. workers before being allowed to recruit workers abroad.
* Congress should regulate foreign labor recruiters to protect
migrant workers and ensure transparency in recruitment chains, and
hold end-user employers jointly liable for the actions of their
recruiters.
* Employers should be prohibited from hiring through temporary work
visa programs if they have violated labor and employment laws, as well
as civil rights, anti-discrimination and anti-trafficking laws.
* Temporary migrant workers should be paid fairly according to U.S.
wage standards based on the specific occupation and region.
* Temporary migrant workers should be allowed to change employers
and never be indentured to their employers through their visa status.
* Temporary migrant workers should be allowed to self-petition for
permanent residence after a short period in temporary status; ideally
no longer than 18 months.
* Much more funding should be appropriated to the U.S. Department of
Labor to enforce an updated work visa system and strengthen the
department’s mandates to conduct adequate oversight and debar
employers, as well as to conduct random audits of employers.
* Transparency in temporary work visa programs should be improved to
protect workers and aid anti-trafficking efforts, in particular
through the systematic release of more and better government data on
temporary work visa programs.
* An independent commission on employment-based migration and
immigration should be established to make the system more flexible and
data-driven and to depoliticize the adjustment of numerical limits in
temporary work visa programs and for employment-based green cards.

Making U.S. labor migration more transparent, data-driven, and
flexible with an independent commission on immigration

The U.S. immigration system needs to be much more flexible and
data-driven in order to be responsive and able to adjust to the needs
of the economy. Adjusting annual visa caps for both employment-based
green cards and temporary work visa programs requires congressional
action, which can be contentious because it is influenced by lobbying
and opaque political considerations rather than facts, and too slow to
keep up with changing economic conditions. Most permanent and
temporary employment-based visa quotas have not changed since 1990,
despite a vastly different U.S. economy and workforce three and a half
decades later.

EPI has long proposed an independent commission on immigration and the
labor market that would report regularly to Congress and the
president, proposing new quotas on an annual or semiannual
basis—based on economic needs and conditions, and issue public
reports citing the evidence for its recommendations, which would be
based on methodologies that are credible and transparent. The
commission would consider the many trade-offs inherent in immigration
policymaking in its recommendations, and Congress would ultimately
decide which policies to adopt or reject. Basing quotas on evidence,
data, and changing economic realities would depoliticize the process
of setting numbers and provide an evidence base for decisions that can
be inspected by all.46
[[link removed]] Other
expert organizations and groups have also called for a similar
commission model.47
[[link removed]]

Expanding and strengthening humanitarian migration pathways

The world is experiencing the largest global displacement crisis in
modern history, and the forced migration seen on the Western
Hemisphere is a major component of the broader global trend (UNHCR
2024). Given the history of interventions in its own hemisphere, the
United States government has a special responsibility to at least
accept more refugees and asylum seekers from the region,48
[[link removed]] but
should also accept more from other regions. Existing research already
shows that humanitarian migrants see wage gains and integrate well
into communities across the United States and make important economic
contributions, leaving little to fear from an economic perspective.

Existing humanitarian pathways should be expanded to meet the current
need of persons fleeing persecution, conflict, and environmental
change by (1) increasing the annual refugee ceiling quotas and
investing in a more robust and durable network for resettlement
assistance and support and (2) making the U.S. asylum system more
welcoming, including by broadening the definition of asylum, either by
statute or executive action where possible, including the creation of
pathways for migrants who are displaced by the climate crisis and
armed conflict. In addition, humanitarian pathways should be improved
through strengthening worker protections for newly arriving refugees,
asylees, and asylum seekers through know-your-rights trainings. And
employers that regularly recruit and hire refugees, asylees, and
asylum seekers, should be required to commit to providing fair and
decent working conditions, including a commitment to labor neutrality.

To further facilitate workforce integration, public assistance should
be made available to new arrivals; work permits should be expedited to
boost economic gains and reduce the workload of social services
providers, including shelters; and government agencies should partner
formally with unions, workers’ centers, and assistance providers on
job training and matching workers with employment opportunities.

Adequately funding labor standards enforcement and stricter penalties
for lawbreaking employers

As EPI has reported numerous times over the years and as discussed in
this report, the U.S. government now appropriates nearly 14 times more
for immigration enforcement than on all labor standards enforcement
combined ($30.2 billion vs $2.2 billion). Rather than spending tens of
billions of dollars per year for immigration enforcement, what’s
needed are more resources and staffing for labor standards enforcement
agencies, and a more strategic focus on labor standards enforcement
that does not take immigration status into account. A shift away from
immigration enforcement will result in removing barriers to organizing
in workplaces across the country—which will boost economic outcomes
through the adoption of collective bargaining agreements—that also
serve to close racialized and gendered gaps in wages and working
conditions.

At present, labor standards agencies are underfunded, short-staffed,
and ill-equipped to hold lawbreaking employers accountable. While
immigration benefits the U.S. economy overall as discussed in this
report, when worker protection agencies cannot adequately do their
jobs, employers can exploit the millions of migrant workers who lack
an immigration status or who only have a temporary or precarious
status in ways that degrade standards for all workers.

U.S. labor standards enforcement agencies must therefore be staffed
and funded adequately to protect the rights of all 167 million workers
in the United States, including migrant and immigrant workers, so that
lawbreaking employers who abuse workers of any status will face much
higher chances of being caught and much higher penalties than they
currently do. Congress must make major investments to achieve this, by
at least tripling the funds appropriated to worker protection agencies
like the Wage and Hour Division and the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration in the U.S. Department of Labor, and the National Labor
Relations Board.

Family-based immigration should remain an important pathway

Family-based immigration accounts for roughly two-thirds of all green
cards and should remain a robust and important immigration pathway.
While EPI’s immigration analyses and proposals mainly focus on the
employment-based aspects of immigration, we fully support family
reunification remaining the dominant pathway in the U.S. immigration
system. Family reunification is in the national interest because
families are our most basic learning and support systems and therefore
greatly facilitate the assimilation of immigrants into American life.
Many, if not most, family-based immigrants also enter the labor market
and make important economic contributions to the United States, even
if these contributions have not been analyzed and measured to the same
extent as those of other migrants and immigrants.

CONCLUSION

As the body of evidence in this report shows, immigration to the
United States has contributed greatly to growing the economy, and
foreign-born workers have been complementary to U.S. workers and
expanded opportunities for them. From an economic and labor force
perspective, continuing or increasing immigration levels is not
something to be feared if the right polices are in place and
governance is improved. The challenges and potential pitfalls that
must be addressed are mainly the result of workers lacking equal
rights in the workplace due to their immigration status.

The share of those workers in the U.S. labor force, who either lack an
immigration status or only have a temporary and precarious status that
can expire or be rescinded, is large and growing. A workforce with so
many workers in this situation results in a massive power imbalance
that benefits employers and allows them to keep workers in fear of
calling out workplace violations like wage theft and various other
forms of lawbreaking. The precariousness of migrant workers makes it
nearly impossible for them to exercise the labor and employment rights
they ostensibly have on paper, which leads to degraded workplace
conditions for all workers, compared with an ideal scenario in which
all workers have full and equal rights. The reforms and policy
interventions we have outlined are needed to fix this.

Nevertheless, despite an unjust immigration policy regime and the
abuses enabled by the status quo, immigration has still benefitted the
economy greatly, including most foreign-born and U.S.-born workers.
But if the recommendations outlined here were implemented, leading to
a guarantee of full and equal workplace rights for all workers and an
improved and expanded labor standards enforcement regime—then future
immigration flows and even expansions will result in a fairer and more
broadly shared prosperity for all workers and increased dynamism for
the U.S. economy.

NOTES

1. 
[[link removed]]In
this report, the statistics we present from the American Community
Survey and Current Population Survey follow the convention that
immigrants are synonymous with what the U.S. Census Bureau calls the
“foreign-born population”, which are defined as those people in
the U.S. who were not citizens at birth. The small number of U.S.
citizens born abroad to U.S. parents are not included in the
foreign-born population and in this report, are treated as “U.S.
born”.

2. 
[[link removed]]The
labor market participation rate in 2023 was 66.6% for immigrants and
61.8% for U.S.-born workers (BLS 2024a).

3. 
[[link removed]]CBO
(2024) in particular adjusts for the possibility that growing survey
nonresponse in the CPS is causing an undercount of the size of the
foreign-born population. Correcting this possible undercount also
helps to make sense of a recent gap between the household-based CPS
and the establishment-based Current Employment Statistics survey, as
explained by Edelberg and Watson 2024 and Tedeschi 2024. At the same
time, Butcher et al. 2023 argue that the CPS may be overstating the
size of the foreign-born population.

4. 
[[link removed]]Appendix
B of CBO 2024 reports that their adjustments to the CPS increase the
estimated foreign-born population share to 15.6% in 2022 and 16.2% in
2023. In Figure 2 of the CBO report, the total Social Security area
population estimates are about 335.5 million in 2022 and about 338.4
million in 2023. Together, these estimates imply that the foreign-born
population grew by about 4.8%.

5. 
[[link removed]]See
Bivens 2022 for an overview of the U.S. economic situation before the
American Rescue Plan passed and the law’s subsequent effect on labor
markets.

6. 
[[link removed]]Immigrant
workers at a given income level also likely have smaller propensities
to consume out of current income than U.S.-born residents because they
are much more likely to send remittances abroad to family members in
their origin countries. This is another reason why a larger share of
immigrants in the population is likely deflationary.

7. 
[[link removed]]For
an overview of the evidence on the weak causal link between labor
market developments and subsequent inflation, see Banerjee and Bivens
2023.

8. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
analysis of the 2023 Current Population Survey basic monthly
microdata. “Dental, nursing, and health aides” refers to the
occupations Home Health Aides, Personal Care Aides, Nursing
Assistants, Orderlies and Psychiatric Aides, Occupational Therapy
Assistants and Aides, Physical Therapist Assistants and Aides, Massage
Therapists, Dental Assistants, and Medical Assistants.

9. 
[[link removed]]See
Saiz 2010 for evidence on the lack of responsiveness of supply to
shifts in demand for housing.

10. 
[[link removed]]See
Kmetz, Mondragon, and Wieland 2022 for the effect of the pandemic
shock on housing demand.

11. 
[[link removed]]See
Schuetz 2022 for an overview of this agenda.

12. 
[[link removed]]For
a discussion of monopsony power and wage markdowns, see Manning 2020.

13. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
analysis of Baugh 2023 and Department of Homeland Security Statistics,
Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (various years).

14. 
[[link removed]]The
fact that these visas are called “nonimmigrant” in U.S. law has to
do with the fact that foreign nationals who apply for them are not
allowed to immigrate permanently to the United States. U.S. law
presumes that all foreign nationals wish to reside permanently in the
United States, and in order to be issued a nonimmigrant visa, the
applicant for the visa has to prove to the U.S. government that they
do not intend to reside permanently in the United States.

15. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
analysis of State Department nonimmigrant visa statistics and U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services petition data.

16. 
[[link removed]]The
Refugee Act of 1980, S.643-Refugee Act of 1979 (title upon
introduction), 94 Stat. 102, Public Law 96-212 (March 17, 1980), 96th
Congress (1979–1980), Congress.gov.

17. 
[[link removed]]There
are also separate provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act
for the granting of asylum on a case-by-case basis to persons who are
physically present in the United States or who arrive in the United
States and who meet the definition of a refugee. For more background,
see Bruno 2019.

18. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
analysis of USCIS Form I-765 data for fiscal years 2022 and 2023.

19. 
[[link removed]]See
Ruiz Soto, Gelatt, and Hook 2024, Passel and Krogstad 2024, Baker and
Warren 2024, and Warren 2024.

20. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Chishti and Bush-Joseph 2023, Chishti, Bush-Joseph, and
Putzel-Kavanaugh 2024, Ruiz Soto, Gelatt, and Hook 2024.

21. 
[[link removed]]See
Table A1 in Batalova, Gelatt, and Fix 2024, updated by authors with
latest TPS population estimate in Wilson 2024. The 2.8 million total
cited here excludes asylum seekers whom we also consider to be in a
precarious status. As noted above, there were 1.5 million asylum
seekers who held valid EADs in 2023, but the total number of asylum
seekers is greater but unknown.

22. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, discussion of data in Passel and Krogstad 2024, Baker and
Warren 2024, and Ruiz Soto, Gelatt, and Hook 2024.

23. 
[[link removed]]See
discussion in Hinojosa-Ojeda 2010.

24. 
[[link removed]]Hinojosa-Ojeda
2010 summarizing and citing Rivera-Batiz 1999; Amuedo-Dorantes,
Bansak, and Raphael 2007; and Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark 2002. Kallick
2013 also provides a useful review and commentary on the studies that
measure the impact of granting status to unauthorized immigrants (see
Appendix A).

25. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Galarza 1956, Meissner 2004, and Costa 2021.

26. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Lapinig 2017.

27. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Bauer and Stewart 2013.

28. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Bauer and Stewart 2013, Garrison, Bensinger, and
Singer-Vine 2015, and GAO 2017.

29. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Costa and Hira 2020, Costa 2016, Hira 2015, and Costa
2017.

30. 
[[link removed]]For
example, see discussion in Costa 2021.

31. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Hira and Costa 2021 and Costa and Martin 2023.

32. 
[[link removed]]Bivens
and Shierholz broadly define “monopsony power” as “the leverage
enjoyed by employers to set their workers’ pay.” See Bivens and
Shierholz 2018.

33. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Gibbons et al. 2019 and Naidu, Posner, and Weyl 2018 for
estimates of monopsony power’s effects in wage suppression in the
United States.

34. 
[[link removed]]For
more background, see Broder and Lessard 2023.

35. 
[[link removed]]With
the exception of back pay under the National Labor Relations Act due
to the _Hoffman Plastics_ decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, see
for example WHD 2008.

36. 
[[link removed]]For
more discussion and background, see Kolker and Morton 2023.

37. 
[[link removed]]For
the full list of EAD eligibility categories, see USCIS 2024.

38. 
[[link removed]]This
total includes 2.8 million migrants in precarious statuses like DACA,
TPS, and parole, and the 1.5 million asylum seekers with an approved
EAD (see discussion in previous section).

39. 
[[link removed]]The
document cited from WHD does not list a date but was last viewed by
the authors in mid-2023, meaning it was likely citing the number of
workers in the civilian labor force in 2022; it is referenced as
evidence of the number of workers who are protected by WHD. We cite an
updated number for the number of workers in the civilian labor force
in 2023, as the number for which WHD is responsible for protecting.
The number of covered workers is derived from the annual averages
reported for the total civilian labor force, Bureau of Labor
Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,
Series Id: LNU01000000, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Series title: (Unadj)
Civilian Labor Force Level, ages 16 and over [data tables], U.S.
Department of Labor.

40. 
[[link removed]]To
derive this estimate, the number of workers in 1973 and 2023 was
divided by the number of WHD investigators in those years. The number
of covered workers is derived from the annual averages reported for
the total civilian labor force, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor
Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Series Id:
LNU01000000, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Series title: (Unadj) Civilian
Labor Force Level, ages 16 and over [data tables], U.S. Department of
Labor.

41. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Costa, Martin, and Rutledge 2020, Bensinger, Garrison,
and Singer-Vine 2016, and Cotsirilos 2023.

42. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
analysis of Table A-1 in Batalova, Gelatt, and Fix 2024 plus
additional updated numbers for the TPS population reported in Wilson
2024.

43. 
[[link removed]]Authors
analysis of USCIS n.d. for employment authorization category “C085,
applicant/pending asylum.”

44. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
estimate based on the total population of persons in precarious
statuses as a share of the total unauthorized immigrant population,
which also relies on estimates by Passel and Krogstad 2024 and
Batalova, Gelatt, and Fix 2024.

45. 
[[link removed]]For
more discussion, see Costa 2021.

46. 
[[link removed]]See
further discussion in, for example, Marshall and Eisenbrey 2010,
Marshall 2009 and 2011, and Ruhs and Martin 2013.

47. 
[[link removed]]See
for example Papademetriou et al. 2009 and Gelatt and Chishti 2024.

48. 
[[link removed]]See
for example, Faux 2017, Borger 2018, and Shesgreen 2018.

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Meissner, Doris. 2004. “U.S. Temporary Worker Programs: Lessons
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[[link removed]].”
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[[link removed]].
Data tool. 2022.

Migration Policy Institute. 2024. U.S. Annual Refugee Resettlement
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Data tool, n.d. [accessed July 1, 2024].

Moriarty, Andrew. 2024. “Temporary Protected Status (TPS): 5 Things
to Know
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Mukhopadhyay, Sankar, and David Oxborrow. 2012. The Value of an
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219–237, February 2012.

Mussa, Abeba, Uwaoma Nwaogu, and Susan Pozo. 2017. “Immigration and
Housing: A Spatial Econometric Analysis
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of Housing Economics _35: 13–25, March 2017.

Naidu, Suresh, Eric A. Posner, and E. Glen Weyl. 2018. _Antitrust
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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).
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Orrenius, Pia. 2017. “New Findings on the Fiscal Impact of
Immigration in the United States
[[link removed]].”
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Working Paper no. 1704, April 2017.

Orrenius, Pia, and Madeline Zavodny. 2014. “The Impact of Temporary
Protected Status on Immigrants’ Labor Market Outcomes
[[link removed]].”
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Ottaviano, Gianmarco .I.P., and Giovanni Peri. 2012. “Rethinking the
Effect of Immigration on Wages
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of the European Economic Association _10, no. 1: 152–197, February
1, 2012.

Papademetriou, Demetrios, Doris Meissner, Marc R. Rosenblum, and
Madeleine Sumption. 2009. _Aligning Temporary Immigration Visas with
U.S. Labor Market Needs: The Case for a New System of Provisional
Visas_
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Migration Policy Institute, July 2009.

Passel, Jeffrey S., and Jens Manuel Krogstad. 2024. “What We Know
About Unauthorized Immigrants Living in the U.S.
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Pew Research Center, July 22, 2024. 

Pastor, Manuel, and Justin Scoggins. 2012. _Citizen Gain: The
Economic Benefits of Naturalization for Immigrants and the Economy_
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the Study of Immigrant Integration, University of Southern California,
December 2012.

Peri, Giovanni. 2012. “The Effect of Immigration on Productivity:
Evidence from U.S. States
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Statistics _94, no. 1 (2012): 348–358, February 2012.

Peri, Giovanni. 2014. “Do Immigrant Workers Depress the Wages of
Native Workers?
[[link removed]]” _IZA
World of Labor_ 42: 1–10, May 2014.

Peri, Giovanni. 2020. “Immigrant Swan Song
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& Development Magazine_, International Monetary Fund, March 2020.

Peri, Giovanni, and Chad Sparber. 2009. “Task Specialization,
Immigration, and Wages
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Economic Journal: Applied Economics_, 1, no. 3: 135–169, July 2009.

Peri, Giovanni, and Reem Zaiour. 2021. _Citizenship for Undocumented
Immigrants Would Boost U.S. Economic Growth_
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Center for American Progress, June 14, 2021.

Pew Research Center (Pew). 2013. “Second-Generation Americans: A
Portrait of the Adult Children of Immigrants
[[link removed]].”
February 7, 2013.

President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration
(President’s Alliance). 2024. Breakdown of Dreamer
Populations—Both with and Without DACA
[[link removed]].
Updated May 23, 2024.

Rainey, Rebecca. 2022. “Wage Division Enforcement Declines Again in
Wake of Hiring Woes
[[link removed]].” _Bloomberg
Law_, December 28, 2022.

Rainey, Rebecca. 2023. “Inadequate Labor Department Resources Stymie
Enforcement Efforts
[[link removed]].” _Bloomberg
Law_. November 7, 2023.

Rivera-Batiz, Franciso L. 1999. “Undocumented Workers in the Labor
Market: An Analysis of the Earnings of Legal and Illegal Mexican
Immigrants in the United States
[[link removed]].” _Journal
of Population Economics _12, no. 1 (1999): 91–116, February 1999.

Ruhs, Martin, and Philip Martin. 2013. “On Migration, the US Should
Copy the UK.” _Financial Times_, February 18, 2013.

Ruiz Soto, Ariel G., Julia Gelatt, and Jennifer Van Hook. 2024.
“Diverse Flows Drive Increase in U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant
Population
[[link removed]].”
Commentaries. Migration Policy Institute, July 2024.

Saiz, Albert. 2007. “Immigration and Housing Rents in American
Cities
[[link removed]].” _Journal
of Urban Economics_, 61, no. 2: 345–371, March 2007.

Saiz, Albert. 2010. “The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply
[[link removed]].” _Quarterly
Journal of Economics _125, no. 3: 1253–1296, August 2010.

Sanchez, Melissa, and Maryam Jameel. 2023. “OSHA Investigates Small
Dairy Farms So Rarely That Many Worker Advocates Don’t Bother to
Report Deaths and Injuries
[[link removed]].” _ProPublica_,
November 13, 2023.

Schuetz, Jenny. 2022. _Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken
Housing Systems_ [[link removed]].
Brookings Institution Press, February 22, 2022.

Sequeira, Sandra, Nathan Nunn, and Nancy Qian. 2017. “Migrants and
the Making of America: The Short- and Long-Run Effects of Immigration
During the Age of Mass Migration
[[link removed]].” National Bureau of Economic
Research Working Paper no. 23289, March 2017.

Shesgreen, Deirdre. 2018. “How US Foreign Policy in Central America
May Have Fueled the Migrant Crisis
[[link removed]].” _USA
TODAY_, December 21, 2018.

Shierholz, Heidi. 2010. _The Effects of Citizenship on Family Income
and Poverty_ [[link removed]]. Economic Policy
Institute. February 2010.

Shrikant, Aditi. 2023. “Nobel Prize Winner Katalin Karikó Was
‘Demoted 4 Times’ at Her Old Job. How She Persisted: ‘You Have
to Focus on What’s Next.’
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Social Security Administration (SSA). 2023. 2023 OASDI Social
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Solf, Benedicta, Lindsey Guerrero, and Selena Sherzad. 2024. “Global
Affordable Housing Shortages Can Harm Migrant Reception and
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[[link removed]].” _Migration
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Sumption, Madeleine, and Sarah Flamm. 2012. _The Economic Value of
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Tedeschi, Ernie. 2024. “Immigration and the U.S. Economy Since the
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Department of Homeland Security, August 28, 2024.

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U.S. Department of Homeland Security, n.d.

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[[link removed]].” U.S.
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Migration Studies, January 28, 2024.

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Enforced Departure_ [[link removed]].
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Wong, Tom K., Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, Diana Pliego, Karen Fierro Ruiz,
Silva Mathema, Trinh Q. Truong, and Rosa Barrientos-Ferrer.
2024. _2023 Survey of DACA Recipients Highlights Economic
Advancement, Continued Uncertainty amid Legal Limbo_
[[link removed]].
Center for American Progress, March 25, 2024.

See related work on Collective bargaining and right to organize
[[link removed]] | Immigration
[[link removed]] | Wage, hour, and safety
laws
[[link removed]] | Work
visas [[link removed]] | Unions and Labor
Standards
[[link removed]] | Wages
[[link removed]] | Employer power and monopsony
[[link removed]] | Farm
labor [[link removed]]

See more work by Daniel Costa
[[link removed]], Josh Bivens
[[link removed]], Ben Zipperer
[[link removed]], and Monique Morrissey
[[link removed]]

_DANIEL COSTA is an attorney who first joined the Economic Policy
Institute in 2010 and was EPI’s director of immigration law and
policy research from 2013 to early 2018; he returned to this role in
2019 after serving as the California Attorney General’s senior
advisor on immigration and labor. Costa’s areas of research include
a wide range of labor migration issues, including governance of
temporary labor migration programs, migration for both professional
occupations and lower-wage jobs, worksite enforcement, and immigrant
workers’ rights, as well as farm labor, global multilateral
processes related to migration, and refugee and asylum issues._

_Costa has testified on immigration before the U.S. Senate and House
of Representatives, as well as state governments, been quoted and
cited by many major news outlets, and appeared on radio and television
news. His commentaries have appeared in publications like The New
York Times, Roll Call, Fortune, La Opinión, and others, and he was
named one of “20 Immigration Experts to Follow on Twitter” by ABC
News. Costa is currently a visiting scholar at the Global Migration
Center at the University of California-Davis, and was previously a
visiting scholar at U.C. Davis, School of Law (2019–2020) and an
affiliated scholar with the University of California-Merced
(2015–2017). He is also the proud son of immigrants and fluent in
Spanish and Portuguese. _

_Prior to his tenure at EPI, Costa worked on developing the legal and
normative framework for disaster response and humanitarian relief
operations with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red
Crescent Societies in Geneva, Switzerland, and completed the
International Law Seminar with the UN International Law Commission. He
was also a policy analyst at the Great Valley Center, a former
University of California think tank, where he managed an immigrant
integration program.  _

_JOSH BIVENS is the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute
(EPI). His areas of research include macroeconomics, inequality,
social insurance, public investment, and the economics of
globalization._

_Bivens has written extensively for both professional and public
audiences, with his work appearing in peer-reviewed academic journals
(like the Journal of Economic Perspectives) and edited volumes
(like The Handbook of the Political Economy of Financial Crises from
Oxford University Press), as well as in popular print outlets (like
USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times)._

_Bivens is the author of Failure by Design: The Story behind
America’s Broken Economy (EPI and Cornell University Press)
and Everybody Wins Except for Most of Us: What Economics Really
Teaches About Globalization (EPI), and is a co-author of The State
of Working America, 12th Edition (EPI and Cornell University Press)._

_Bivens has provided expert insight to a range of institutions and
media, including formally testifying numerous times before committees
of the U.S. Congress._

_Before coming to EPI, he was an assistant professor of economics at
Roosevelt University. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the New School
for Social Research and a bachelor’s degree from the University of
Maryland at College Park._

_BEN ZIPPERER joined the Economic Policy Institute in 2016. His areas
of expertise include the minimum wage, inequality, and low-wage labor
markets. He has published research in The Quarterly Journal of
Economics and the Industrial and Labor Relations Review and has
been quoted in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington
Post, Bloomberg, and the BBC._

_Prior to joining EPI, Zipperer was research economist at the
Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He is a senior research
associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a research
associate at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the
University of California, Berkeley, and an associate at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health._

_MONIQUE MORRISSEY joined the Economic Policy Institute in 2006. Her
areas of interest include Social Security, pensions and other employee
benefits, household savings, tax expenditures, older workers, public
employees, unions, and collective bargaining, Medicare, institutional
investors, corporate governance, executive compensation, financial
markets, and the Federal Reserve. She is active in coalition efforts
to reform our private retirement system to ensure an adequate, secure,
and affordable retirement for all workers. She is a member of the
National Academy of Social Insurance. Prior to joining EPI, Morrissey
worked at the AFL-CIO Office of Investment and the Financial Markets
Center._

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