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Five Myths about Illegal Immigration in North Carolina
By Mai Thi Nguyen
IEI GlaxoSmithKline Faculty Fellow
Myth #1: The majority of Latinos are illegal immigrants.
Latinos are not all illegal. In fact, most Latino residents in North Carolina are legal. A report by Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill finds that in 2004, 41.4% of Latinos in North Carolina are born in the U.S., and thereby citizens. An estimated 13.6% have visas or are naturalized citizens, leaving the rest, 45%, undocumented.
Most Latinos do not migrate directly to North Carolina from their homeland. The same report indicates that a large proportion, 40.2% of Latinos are migrating to North Carolina from traditional U.S. ports of entry, such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, and Washington, DC, and not directly from Latin or Central America. Roughly 22% are born in North Carolina.
Myth #2: Illegal immigrants do not pay their fair share of taxes.
Until recent changes in legislation, illegal immigrants in North Carolina were able to apply for and receive a driver’s license, which provided them with a legal form of I.D. In order to qualify for a driver’s license, illegal immigrants often used an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number), which they can only be granted if they filed their income taxes in the last tax cycle. Therefore, the ability to obtain a driver’s license was a significant incentive for illegal immigrants to pay their income taxes.
If they do not get an ITIN, some illegal immigrants borrow an acquaintance’s social security number or other IDs in order to pass through the employment screening process. In these cases, they still pay income taxes and put money into the Social Security and Medicare system, but often do not collect on it. Illegal immigrants who own property also pay property taxes. When they shop, they pay sales taxes. Although there is no conclusive data on the amount that illegal immigrants pay in taxes, the incentives to pay taxes were very high in North Carolina until recent changes to driver’s license criteria.
Myth #3: Stricter border enforcement is a deterrent to illegal immigration.
Building a longer, bigger fence, funneling more money into border enforcement, or militarizing our border will not stem the tide of illegal immigration if other measures are not taken to deal with the macroeconomic forces shaping migration. A study by Professor Manuela Angelucci at the University of Arizona finds that for each additional border patrol agent, some would-be illegal immigrants are deterred. At the same time, however, many more illegal immigrants who are already residing in the U.S. may not return to their home country for fear of being caught. With the increasing emphasis on stricter border enforcement, many illegal immigrants have decided to stay longer in the U.S. than they had originally intended. Migratory workers who used to be able to work in the U.S. and return home periodically have also chosen to settle permanently in the U.S. The increase in illegal residents, therefore, may be due, at least in part, to stricter border patrol.
In addition, a report by the General Accountability Office indicates that nearly 50% of illegal immigrants are visa overstays. These visa overstays enter the country legally, through a work, student, or visitor visa and fail to return to their home country. There has been very little discussion about what to do with visa overstays even though they constitute a large portion of the illegal immigrants in this country. This half of the illegal immigration problem will also not be solved by stricter border enforcement.
Myth #4: Illegal immigrants lower wages for low-skill American workers.
There is a debate raging over the effect of illegal immigrant labor on the wages of American workers. There is no real consensus among the best academic researchers in the field of demography and immigration as to whether the labor of illegal immigrants depresses wages. Some scholars say that illegal immigrants do affect the wages of high-school dropouts, their direct competitors for jobs, by between 3.6-8.2%, depending on how it is measured. Critics of this study say that this is an overestimation and argue that illegal immigrants are heavily concentrated in a small number of employment sectors and, therefore are in direct competition with only a small number of American workers. Furthermore, scholars charge that illegal immigrants migrate to areas where there is a labor shortage, thereby filling jobs that are open, not displacing the American worker.
When the larger economy is considered, illegal immigrants tend to contribute significantly to the economy by spurring job and economic growth. For example in the construction industry illegal immigrants might make it more difficult for high school drop-outs to get a construction job, but their labor in the construction industry also sparks growth in the real estate industry, creating jobs for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, loan officers, insurance agents, and real estate lawyers. Then there may be those high-school drop-outs who have benefited from illegal immigrants through upward job mobility. In industries in which high-school drop-outs are working side-by-side with illegal immigrants, they are typically in higher positions of authority because they speak English or understand the work culture better. In Texas, where there are an estimated 1.4 million illegal immigrants, they contributed $1.58 billion to state revenues through sales taxes and user fees, but only cost the state $1.16 billion in state services. Overall, illegal immigrants are estimated to boost the Texas economy by $17.7 billion.
Myth #5: Imposing stiff fines on employers will discourage them from hiring undocumented workers.
The current laws already impose civil and criminal penalties for hiring undocumented workers. For each undocumented individual hired, employers can face a fine of up to $2000. If the employer repeatedly hires undocumented individuals, the fines become increasingly stiffer. In January 2006, Zirkle, a fruit company based in Washington paid $1.3 million to settle out of court for allegedly conspiring with other fruit orchards and packers to hire undocumented workers to keep wages down.
With the spate of recent workplace raids for undocumented workers and the emerging threat of lawsuits, employers in North Carolina are keenly aware of the penalties and consequences of hiring undocumented workers. The vast majority of employers follow legal procedures for checking documentation, but they are not experts in detecting false identification nor do they have the capacity to check the validity of social security numbers. That is left up to the Federal government. The problem with workplace documentation fraud is not due to employers knowingly hiring undocumented workers, but rather that there is a demand for labor that is not being filled and undocumented workers are finding a way to fill this demand.
Some may argue that employers turn a blind eye to suspicious documentation because they would rather hire undocumented workers and pay them lower wages. Many employers argue that this is simply not true. In fact, many employers would welcome following legal channels to fill their labor shortage. But, there are a significant number of industries in North Carolina, in particular, the food processing industries, which have no legal mechanism to provide work visas to fill their labor shortage. Besides farm visas, there are two types of work visas available, the H1 and H2B visas, that allow roughly 111,000 workers in the country. H1 visas, are reserved for college-educated workers employed in “specialty occupations.” The H2B visas are provided to “temporary or seasonal non-agricultural” workers. Therefore, jobs in the food processing plants that are year round do not qualify under either of these categories. This is also true for other year round jobs in North Carolina, such as in manufacturing, textile, or construction industries. Even if they wanted to, many employers have no means to legally hire out-of-country workers.