US economy benefits much from Filipino immigrants

By Jun Burgos

INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines—The United States economy has been greatly helped by Filipino immigration, or the entry of our countrymen into that country for the purpose of permanent residence and work there.

This can be deduced from a recent study which revealed that the US economy benefitted from immigration both in times of recession and in times of economic expansion.

The study was released by Migration Policy Institute (MPI), an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think-tank based in Washington DC analyzing the movement of people worldwide.

Entitled “The Impact of Immigrants in Recession and Economic Expansion,” it was conducted by economist Giovanni Peri, associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis), a public research university located in Davis, California and one of 10 campuses in the University of California system.

The New Filipino Immigrants to the United States (Papers of the East-West Population Institute, Issn 0732-0531; No 115)

According to the study, “there is broad consensus among economists that immigration has a small but positive impact on the average income of Americans over the long term. But far less analysis has been done on the impact of immigrants on the labor market in the shorter term, particularly when viewed through the lens of the recession and its lingering labor market effects.”

The author asserted that immigration “unambiguously improves US employment, productivity, and income.”

The study, examining the short- and long-run impacts of immigration on average and over the business cycle of growth and contraction, underscored the positive contribution of immigration to US economy, but stressed that “it also involves some short-term adjustments (such as worker retraining or adoption of new technology).”

Here are some of the findings in the study:

* “Immigrants do not reduce native employment rates over the long run (10 years), while increasing productivity and average income for native-born workers. Immigration to the United States over the 1990-2006 period can be credited with a 2.9-percent increase in real wages for the average US worker.

* The adjustment process, however, is not immediate. When immigration occurs during a downturn, the economy does not appear to respond as quickly as it would during economic expansions and there is evidence of modest negative impacts on employment and average income in the short run. These impacts dissipate over periods of up to seven years.

* During periods of economic growth, by contrast, new immigration creates jobs in sufficient numbers to leave native employment unharmed even in the short run. This holds true even for less-educated workers. Immigration during economic expansions has no measurable, short-term negative effect on income per worker.”

Peri said, “Adjustments to employment, productivity, and income are more difficult during downturns. This suggests that the United States would benefit most from an immigration system that better adjusts to economic conditions, allowing legal immigrant inflows to be more responsive to the economic cycle.”

He suggests “allowing employers’ demand for work visas to play a stronger role in determining the number of visas issued annually, and that a share of the visas be allocated to less-skilled workers, particularly those who perform primarily manual jobs that native workers increasingly are much less interested in filling.”

MPI president Demetrios Papademetriou added, “This report offers further evidence yet of the need for the immigration system to become significantly more responsive to the US economy’s constantly evolving labor market needs, so that the benefits of immigration can be captured more fully and any negative effects neutralized.
Establishing an independent executive-branch agency that would make regular recommendations to the President and Congress for adjusting employment-based immigration levels would inject a greatly needed degree of flexibility into the current rigid immigration system.”

The study didn’t mention it, but Filipinos are a big part of the immigrants contributing tremendously to the US economy.

Based on the online Wikipedia’s most recent entry on “Filipino Americans,” there were approximately four million FilAms, or Americans with Filipino ancestry, in the US in 2007, comprising some 1.5 percent of the United States population.

According to data from the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS) of the US Census Bureau, “the number of Filipino immigrants in the United States tripled between 1980 and 2006, from 501,440 to 1.6 million, making them the second largest immigrant group in the United States after Mexican immigrants and ahead of the Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese foreign born.”

It is understandably difficult to have an account of the exact number of Filipino immigrants to the US, owing to the decision of some, especially the “tago ng tago, or TNTs” not to participate in census surveys.

But it is safe to say that the millions of Filipinos who have immigrated to the US have indeed contributed much to that country’s economy.

It may be just fitting for the US government to consider a little relaxing of its immigration requirements.