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from The World &
I Magazine, May 2000
from
The Economic Impact of Immigrants
by Bronwyn Lance
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 When Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan speaks, people listen. Indeed, the power
of his words is such that world markets fluctuate at his merest utterance,
and entire roomfuls of reporters will race for the telephone upon hearing
a particularly  oracular
comment. Recently, . . . Greenspan told Congress that the United States
should be considering "expanding the number of people we allow in."
In an era of high immigration to America,
the very notion of encouraging a steady—let alone increasing—number
of immigrants has been met with vehement naysaying.
Immigration foes range from . . . [those] who want to fence America in
to keep foreigners from corrupting our culture, to . . . [others] who
maintain that immigrants steal jobs from Americans. In 1996, anti-immigrant
forces in Congress passed an omnibus
bill, signed into law by President Clinton, that was harsh on almost every
aspect of immigration.
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“The idea of immigrants coming
to the United States with very little and ending up successful
is not a worn-out cliché.”
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One argument used by those favoring
this legislation is that immigrants are a drain on our economy. This law
forced anyone who wants to sponsor an immigrant family member to earn
125 percent of the poverty level, and the 1996 welfare-reform law kicked
noncitizens off the welfare rolls. Still, immigrants do not need a handout;
by most accounts, they are doing better than ever. Recent research and
anecdotal
evidence indicate that immigrants, both skilled and nonskilled, are having
a very positive and visible effect on the U.S. economy.
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"Successful Immigrants" Not a Cliché
The idea of immigrants coming to the
United States with very little and ending up successful is not a worn-out
cliché. A stroll through one of the many vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods
that have taken root in our cities will reveal that foreign-born Americans,
both past and present, have renovated
countless blighted
areas.
Long before the Vietnamese moved to
northern Virginia and the Ethiopians and Central Americans revitalized
the inner city of Washington, D.C., New York had a Little Italy, Chicago
had its Polish neighborhood, and San Francisco had a Chinatown. In each
of these places, immigrants of our great-grandparents' era heard the same
epithets
hurled at them: They would never assimilate, they would never learn English,
and they were stealing jobs.
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From: "The Economic Impact of Immigrants" from The World & I Magazine, May 2000. Copyright © 2000 by News World Communications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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