Positive Report on Immigrants Fails To Cool a Fiery Debate

A new report highlighting immigrants' contribution to New York State's economy has added fuel to an often furious debate among researchers who study the impact of immigration.

The immigration issue has most recently become a weapon in presidential campaign mudslinging, but it has also long been the fodder of higher-brow tussling among economists wielding numbers and statistics instead of campaign slogans. Not surprisingly, the overwhelmingly positive tenor of the study released yesterday by the Fiscal Policy Institute — showing that immigrants contribute a quarter of New York's GDP and can be found widely represented in jobs ranging from taxi drivers to doctors to CEOs — were unable to sway the strongest opponents of immigration. Meanwhile, economists who lean toward the middle and the left politically alternately praised and questioned the report.

Their conflicting responses illustrated the inexact science of boiling down the activities and lives of millions of newcomers into numbers to help judge whether their presence in America is good or bad.

Some researchers — often those who lean right — have focused on comparing the amount immigrants contribute in taxes versus the amount of public service dollars expended to support them to argue that immigrants, especially illegal ones, are bad for American society.

"The social costs and government costs of low-skill immigrants outweigh their contribution — but when you put them all together into one big study, you come up with a net benefit," a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has argued that unskilled immigrants are pushing unskilled native workers out of New York City, Steven Malanga, said.

Others from both sides of the political spectrum have instead tried to measure their impact on jobs and wages.

A University of California-Davis economist whose research has found that immigrants do not crowd out native-born city dwellers, Giovanni Peri, argues that the data on wages and jobs is more reliable than measuring immigrants' use of public services. He has found that the impact of immigrants is largely positive.

The report released jointly yesterday by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, and the pro-immigrant New York Immigration Coalition took a different tack, focusing on the value of goods and services immigrants add to the economy.

"Any way of thinking about whether immigration is good for the country that doesn't look at the contribution to the overall economy is missing a big part of the picture," the report's principal author, David Dyssegaard Kallick, said. "Taxes matter. … But the economic contribution is much broader than that."

The report did not distinguish between the statewide GDP contributions of illegal immigrants and legal immigrants — numbers the author said were nearly impossible to pin down.

A senior fellow for the Hudson Institute who is a contributor to The New York Sun, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, praised the report for highlighting the lifelong contributions of immigrants, while the senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Pia Orrenius, who tracks the economics of immigration, questioned its focus.

"What really matters is whether natives are better or worse off," she said. "It doesn't necessarily make them better off to have a larger economy."

A former congressman who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Herman Badillo, applauded the report's positive results, but said its findings had far from settled the debate.

"Obviously doctors and accountants and CEOs are not the ones who are illegal," he said.