Immigration policy is a complex field of law, politics, and economics. The specifics of different countries’ historical trajectories, their social and economic policies, and the geopolitical drivers of major migratory flows shape how modern immigration laws are framed and regulated. Yet, despite these differences, most states tend to categorize their immigration policies in one of four ways: humanitarian protection (granting asylum and family-based visas), labor recruitment (work-based immigration), or acquisition of full citizenship rights by immigrants through naturalization.
In a path-breaking essay, Gary Freeman (1995) developed a rational-choice model of why liberal states, despite restrictionist elite rhetoric and public opinion, continue to be open to immigration. In the model, immigrants’ diffuse costs are overwhelmed by their concentrated benefits from employers and co-ethnics, in a constellation that Freeman called “client politics.”
Moreover, the conventional warning that large immigrant flows depress native-born wages is flawed. Rather than pushing down the wages of low-skilled workers, immigration typically increases wages by raising the supply of and demand for high-skilled workers, lifting the average wage of the whole labor market. Immigrants also pay substantial taxes, including for Medicare and Social Security, and many are homeowners. Moreover, because of demographic changes, it is more important to bring in high-skilled immigrants than it was 50 years ago to ensure that the U.S. can compete with the world’s other developed economies for global talent. Consequently, it is reasonable to reform immigration policies to shift the balance of temporary work and green card flows toward higher-skilled migrants and away from low-skilled ones.
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