6th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference
In a major address at the 6th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference sponsored by MPI, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., and Georgetown University Law Center, Senate Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Charles Schumer outlined the seven principles he said will form the basis for the immigration legislation he intends to introduce by this fall. The conference, also addressed by Homeland Security Assistant Secretary John Morton and other top immigration experts in and out of government, included sessions on “Bringing Immigration Policymaking into the 21st Century,” “Prospects for Immigration Reform: What to Expect from Washington?” “ Discussion on the Economic Recession and its Impact on Immigration,” “ Communities Laying the Groundwork for Immigration Reform and Beyond,” and “Immigrant Integration:  A Full Federal Policy Agenda.”
Watch the conference | Schumer speech | Conference details

Harnessing the Advantages of Immigration for a 21st-Century Economy
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Doris Meissner, Marc R. Rosenblum, and Madeleine Sumption
The US immigration system neither meets labor market needs efficiently nor minds the interests of US workers with particular success, and has yet to devise a way that uses immigration to promote US economic growth and competitiveness well. This paper proposes an institutional solution to address this systemic failure: Creating a permanent and independent body, situated within the executive branch, that is charged with recommending adjustments to immigration laws to the president and Congress: the Standing Commission on Labor Markets, Economic Competitiveness, and Immigration. The bipartisan panel would provide timely, evidence-based, and impartial analysis and recommendations to the president and Congress regarding employment-based immigration.
Download Report | Press Release

Prospects for Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Testimony of Doris Meissner, Director of MPI's US Immigration Policy Program, before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Citizenship, at its hearing: "Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do It and How?" April 30, 2009.

Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Aaron Terrazas
As the nation sinks into a recession that may be the worst since the Great Depression, the economic crisis raises fundamental questions about future immigration flows to and from the United States and how current and prospective immigrants will fare. This report, a research product of MPI's new Labor Markets Initiative, examines how the number of immigrants has changed since the recession began; how legal and illegal immigration flows may change; and how immigrants fare in the labor market during downturns.
Download Report | Press Release | Listen to the Briefing
More on the Labor Markets Initiative here

Uneven Progress: The Employment Pathways of Skilled Immigrants in the United States
By Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix with Peter A. Creticos
More than 1.3 million college-educated immigrants in the United States are unemployed or working in unskilled jobs because they are unable to make full use of their academic and professional credentials, MPI reports in the first assessment yet of the scope of the "brain waste" problem. The report analyzes and offers possible solutions for the credentialing and language-barrier hurdles that deprive the US economy of a rich source of human capital at a time of increasing competition globally for skilled talent.
Download Report | Press Release
Purchase a hard copy at the MPI bookstore: US | International

State Responses to Immigration: A Database of All State Legislation
The State Responses database is a unique, searchable online tool that catalogues all 1,059 immigration-related bills introduced in state legislatures in 2007, and allows users to search legislation by state, geographic region, subject area, bill status, and legislative typology. The database includes a synopsis of each bill and is accompanied by a report, Regulating Immigration at the State Level: Highlights from the Database of 2007 State Immigration Legislation and the Methodology.
Report | Press Release

New Data Guide On Finding, Using the Most Accurate, Recent Immigration Data Resources
The Immigration: Data Matters guide shows where to locate some of the most credible, up-to-date US and global immigration-related data compiled by government and non-governmental sources. The online guide, also available in hard copy, includes clickable links to resources that offer immigrant population estimates; the size of the unauthorized immigrant population; English proficiency rates; the share of immigrants in the workforce; education, health, and income and poverty statistics relating to immigrants; and other data.
Download Report | Press Release
For video and audio of the event, click here
Purchase a hard copy at the MPI bookstore: US | International

Foreign-Born Veterans of the US Armed Forces
By Iris Ho and Aaron Terrazas
Fact Sheet No. 22, October 2008
As the United States prepares to commemorate Veterans Day, an MPI analysis finds there were about 645,000 foreign-born veterans of the US armed forces in 2007, representing nearly 3 percent of all surviving US veterans. The Fact Sheet, using data from the US Census Bureau's 2007 American Community Survey, provides a demographic portrait of the foreign-born veterans' countries of origin, states of residence, and periods of service.
Fact Sheet | Press Release

The Redesigned Citizenship Test: High Stakes
By Laureen Laglagaron and Bhavna Devani
MPI Backgrounder No. 6, September 2008
More than a decade in the making, the redesigned citizenship test required for use after October 1, 2008 is supposed to provide a more meaningful opportunity for applicants to demonstrate knowledge about US history and civics, and allow the government more standardized test administration. This MPI Backgrounder details the redesign process, examines whether the government met its goals, and provides policy recommendations.
Backgrounder | Press Release

Hometown Associations: An Untapped Resource for Immigrant Integration?
By Will Somerville, Jamie Durana, and Aaron Matteo Terrazas
Hometown associations, the organizations that immigrants create for social, economic development, and political empowerment purposes, play an important – and underexamined – role in immigrant integration. Though policymakers focus chiefly on the associations’ development potential, this MPI Insight recommends cooperative interventions to strengthen their immigrant integration capacity.
Download Report | Press Release
Purchase a hard copy at the MPI bookstore: US | International

For a webcast of the 5th Annual Immigration Law & Policy Conference, which MPI co-sponsored on May 20, 2008, with Georgetown University Law Center and Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), click here

Behind the Naturalization Backlog
By Claire Bergeron and Jeremy Banks
Fact Sheet No. 21, February 2008
The processing time for naturalization applications has risen dramatically since mid-2007, to an 18-month average, as the federal government has struggled to cope with a surge in applications driven in part by a substantial fee increase. More than 460,000 people filed naturalization applications in July 2007 right before the fee hike took effect — fully one-third of the nearly 1.4 million applications that were filed during the entire fiscal year. This MPI fact sheet examines the causes, context, and concerns surrounding the backlog.
Fact Sheet | Press Release

With the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2007, the politics and the policy issues of immigration remain difficult, complex, and contentious leading up to the 2008 election.

It is more important than ever that policymakers and the American public have solid information, fact-based analysis, and sound policy ideas on which to base their discussions, and, ultimately, their decisions. MPI is uniquely to contribute this knowledge because of the work that went into the report of its Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future.

The Task Force was convened by MPI and co-chaired by former Senator Spencer Abraham (R-MI) and former Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN). MPI Senior Fellow Doris Meissner directed the panel’s work. Members of the bipartisan group included leaders of key immigration stakeholder groups, experienced senior public policy actors, elected officials, and immigration experts, with ex-officio participation from Mexico, Canada, the European Commission, and executive branch agencies. The Division of United States Studies and the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, as well as Manhattan Institute, collaborated with MPI on this project.

The Task Force undertook a careful analysis of the economic, social, and demographic factors driving today’s large-scale immigration. Concluding that immigration is essential to US national interests and will become even more so in the years ahead, the Task Force recommended that the United States fundamentally rethink its policies and overhaul an outdated system to better reflect current realities.

Its final report, Immigration and America’s Future: A New Chapter, details recommendations for policies that are needed both to harness the advantages of immigration in a new era and to minimize its inherent tensions.

Specific Task Force recommendations include:

• Simplify and redesign the immigration system by drastically reducing the number of visa classifications and by establishing a new provisional visa category providing legal employment for workers at all skill levels. Provisional visas would bridge the false divide between temporary and permanent immigration and eliminate the need for a large guestworker program.
• Introduce a new type of immigration visa called a strategic growth visa to help the United States compete more effectively for international talent.
• Create a small, independent federal agency — the Standing Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets — to systematically monitor and analyze workforce, economic, and demographic trends, and make regular recommendations
  to the Congress for adjusting temporary,
  provisional, and permanent immigrant admissions levels.
• Place mandatory employer verification and workplace enforcement at the center of immigration enforcement reforms and replace existing Social Security cards with secure, biometric cards so that they — along with existing, already secure “green” cards and immigrant work authorization documents — would be the only ones that could verify work eligibility.
• Accelerate implementation of “smart border” measures and strengthen immigration enforcement at legal ports of entry (air, land, and sea) and as part of overseas visa issuance.
• Work collaboratively with Canadian and Mexican partners on improving security, curtailing unauthorized migration, and facilitating legal movement and trade.
• Create a National Office on Immigrant Integration to provide leadership, visibility, and a focal point at the federal level for integration policy.

The Task Force recommendations articulate a vision that promotes US global competitiveness in the context of post-9/11 security imperatives, while tackling many of the technical details that have made immigration such an intractable public policy problem. This report serves as a durable foundation upon which to build the discourse and policies that can meet the challenges and opportunities that immigration poses for the 21st century.

Executive Summary | Order Online (US) | Order Online (International)

Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants in the United States
December 2008 — The most sought-after statistics on immigrant origins, numbers, and characteristics are catalogued in this article by MPI's Aaron Terrazas and Jeanne Batalova.

Adult English Language Instruction in the United States: Determining Need and Investing Wisely
By Margie McHugh, Julia Gelatt, and Michael Fix
Report, July 2007
This report offers first-time estimates of the numbers and costs to provide English language instruction to legal and unauthorized immigrant adults. The authors estimate that in to get to a level of proficiency necessary for civic integration or to begin post-secondary education, approximately 5.8 million adult lawful permanent residents (LPRs) currently in the United States will need about 277 million hours of English language instruction a year for six years. The cost of meeting these needs would be $200 million a year for six years over and above current expenditures. In order to remain in the United States under the terms of the failed Senate immigration bill or to fully participate in US civic life, approximately 6.4 million unauthorized immigrants will need about 319 million hours of English instruction a year for six years, with a projected cost of an additional $2.9 billion a year for six years.

Document Security Provisions: What's in the Cards?
By Dawn Konet
Fact Sheet No. 17, June 2007
This Fact Sheet provides a chart of the security features -- from photos and fingerprints to holograms and lamination -- of documents issued by government agencies and used by US residents to work, travel and verify their identities. While some of the other commonly used documents have had their security features steadily improved, there have been no significant changes to the Social Security card, one of the most commonly used to show work eligibility.

MPI Publications on US Immigration Policy | All Publications

View the Webcast from the 5th Annual Immigration Law & Policy Conference.

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