Op-ed: America Has More Foreign Residents than Ever

The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey from January of this year showed 53.3 million foreign-born or immigrant residents (legal and illegal alike) in the United States, equal to 15.8% of the total population. Both are record highs in American history.

My colleague Karen Zeigler and I estimate 38 million of the total foreign born in the data are legal immigrants — naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, and long-term temporary visitors such as foreign students and guest workers. The simplistic idea that legal immigration must be good and illegal immigration is bad avoids the important policy questions raised by the enormous scale of legal immigration.

Legal immigration can be roughly divided into two types, permanent and temporary. Lawful permanent residents, also called green card holders, can live and work in the United States as long as they like and become naturalized citizens after a few years. In recent years, about two-thirds of the 1.1 million new green cards went to the relatives of current LPRs already here and to U.S. citizens — mostly naturalized citizens. Each new immigrant tends to create ever more demand for new green cards under such a system.

We need to address the big questions here. Is mass legal immigration overwhelming the assimilation process? Should we continue to have a system that puts so little emphasis on skills? How do we have legal immigration without spurring illegal immigration? Given the level of legal immigration, it has a much larger impact on our country than illegal immigration, so formulating sensible policy in this area is at least as important as addressing illegal immigration.

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[Read the rest at the Washington Examiner]