By James Feigenbaum, Jesse Baker and Austin Brooksby  

  This paper provides a macroeconomic perspective on the costs and benefits of two very different immigration policy changes—mass deportation and legalization—in comparison to the status quo of allowing illegal immigrants to broadly remain in the country under precarious circumstances. A macroeconomic analysis can capture the economy-wide impact of immigration policies on wages, employment, the government budget, and the stock of productive capital. To provide intuition, the paper begins with a simple analysis before adding layers of complexity that capture how immigration affects the economy. Although the results are sensitive to the assumptions used in the analysis, we find that over a broad range of parameters mass deportation creates worse economic outcomes for US citizens relative to both the status quo and to a policy providing for legalization.  

Logan, UT: The Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, 2020. 18p.

By  Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson 

This policy proposal is a proposal from the author(s). As emphasized in The Hamilton Project’s original strategy paper, the Project was designed in part to provide a forum for leading thinkers across the nation to put forward innovative and potentially important economic policy ideas that share the Project’s broad goals of promoting economic growth, broad-based participation in growth, and economic security. The author(s) are invited to express their own ideas in policy proposals , whether or not the Project’s staff or advisory council agrees with the specific proposals. This policy proposal is offered in that spirit.  

  Immigration is good for the US economy and for the fiscal picture at the federal level, but some local areas experience adverse fiscal impacts when new immigrants arrive. Edelberg and Watson propose a transparent system for redistributing resources from the federal government to these localities. Local areas would receive $2,500 annually for each adult immigrant who arrived to the US within the past five years without a college degree—those more likely to generate negative fiscal flows at the subnational level. The funds would take the form of unrestricted transfers to local educational agencies through the existing Impact Aid program and to Federally Qualified Health Centers. This support would help to offset educational, health, and other costs to local areas associated with immigrant inflows, and more equitably share the overall fiscal and economic benefits of immigration.   

Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution and The Hamilton Project , 2022.   26p.