“Make my day punk!” said William Gheen of ALIPAC in a press release on the group’s Website. “Gutierrez and his fellow traitors in Washington know they are running out of time on this Amnesty legislation and since 78% of Americans oppose what they are trying to do and many consider it Treason.”

The Tea Parties Against Amnesty, scheduled across the country on Nov. 14 are only a warm-up, said Gheen. He said he is preparing many more events for the spring, when the “Amnesty battle will be full swing.”

Here’s the anti-amnesty pitch, posted on www.AgainstAmnesty.com:

President Obama along with Republican and Democrat DC insiders are preparing a mass ‘Comprehensive’ Amnesty for illegal immigrants in America that will provide a path to citizenship and turn illegal aliens into voters even though a vast majority of Americans oppose this. This will only bring more ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION to America!

It is time for Americans of every race, religion, and political party to unite and make it OUR MISSION to stop amnesty, stop and reverse illegal immigration, and place America back in the hands of We The People.

That was the overall message of a panel of immigration experts, pollsters and advocates who convened for a lunchtime talk on the subject at the Center for American Progress today.

On one hand, as CAP fellow Ruy Teixeira pointed out (and has shown in a recent study), the growing Latino population, the aging of white conservatives and the increasing political role of the Millennial Generation (born between 1978 and 2000) suggests that the culture wars should become a thing of the past — and so should the opportunity for conservatives to use immigration as a wedge issue.

But it’s not so easy. In recent elections, conservative Republicans have continued to use fears of immigration to galvanize voters against Democrats, though they were rarely successful, noted Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice. Still, both Democrats and Republicans this year haven’t been willing to advance an immigration reform bill, and President Obama, despite election promises to Latino voters to advocate for reform in his first year in office, has admitted that’s not going to happen. And experts say it will only be more difficult as midterm elections approach.

“If immigration reform doesn’t get approved, it will it become a wedge issue,” predicted Anna Navarro, national co-chair of John McCain’s Hispanic Advisory Council and the lone Republican on the panel. “It will make a comeback. Not anti- and pro-, but rather, ‘you promised, and you didn’t deliver.’ It would be a good issue for Republicans.”

Perhaps, but it won’t lead to “a rush to the Republican party,” predicted Sharry. Still, it could dramatically reduce turnout among Latinos for Democrats in future elections.

Republicans are still identified as the restrictionists, though, said E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post. “As long as the loudest Republican voters are identified as restrictionist, the message Latinos get is that the Republican party is broadly hostile to them.”

But Democrats themselves are split on the issue, between more conservative Democrats and business groups who favor a large guest worker program, and more liberal Democrats and labor advocates who say that undermines American workers, and the answer is to create a path to citizenship.

“This is a very hard task,” said Dionne. “It’s not simply a matter of guts; it takes a lot of political and policy intelligence to put this thing together.”

Ultimately, all sides agreed that both parties need to unite behind bipartisan leadership and come to an agreement on this issue, or risk losing supporters.

“I think Republicans are waiting for this White House and this Congress to lead,” said Navarro. “The best thing Republicans can do is come up with an agreement and get rid of the issue once and for all. Get rid of the issue, and go back to what Ronald Reagan believed: that Latinos are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.”

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

When President Obama showed up for a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday, he heard more than just protests against health care.

“We don’t need illegals,” yelled a white-bearded protester into his megaphone outside the high school auditorium in Portsmouth, caught on video here. “Send ‘em all back. Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

If the threats of violence weren’t clear enough, the man goes on to say: “Read what Jefferson said about the Tree of Liberty — it’s coming, baby.” Thomas Jefferson’s actual quote was “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

As the heat gets turned up on the health care reform debate, anti-immigrant activists are using the issue to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants, portraying them as a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system. Angry questions about illegal immigrants getting health care at town hall meetings across the country have put many lawmakers on the defensive.

At his town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter had to assure protesters that illegal immigrants would not be covered. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has gone out of her way to make that point as well. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) faced similar shouted questions at his town hall forum on Wednesday, and repeatedly emphasized that illegal immigrants are not covered by the House bill. President Obama has also made the point, although it’s not clear that the anti-reform activists have heard it.

The protesters are spurred on in large part by immigration restrictionist groups who are using the health care debate to spread fears about immigrants. The restrictionist group Numbers USA, for example, has been posting video interviews online with unnamed “experts” warning that emergency rooms are overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants, and that subsidized health care won’t be available for other low-income Americans because immigrants will be using it all up.

The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, meanwhile, a non-profit research organization that says it’s “animated by a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision,” is sponsoring a panel discussion next week in Washington called The Elephant In the Room: Immigration’s Impact on Health Care Reform. Steven Camarota of the center writes on the group’s web site that “one out of three people in the U.S. without health insurance is an immigrant (legal or illegal) or the U.S.-born child (under 18) of an immigrant,” and claims that immigrants and their children “account for one-fourth of those on Medicaid.” Yet “the enormous impact of immigration, both legal and illegal, on the health care system has generally not been acknowledged in the current debate.”

Immigrants’ advocates vehemently dispute the CIS statistics, and argue that immigrants — particularly illegal immigrants — are actually far less likely to use even emergency health services than American-born U.S. citizens are.

“We’re really concerned about what the anti-immigration community is doing to try and stop health care reform from moving forward,” said Jennifer Ng’andu, Deputy Director of the Health Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza. “We see it as those communities trying to stir the pot and create controversy. These are not folks who come to the table with solutions. They’re not looking to talk about a health care reform plan. They just assume that by creating anxiety about immigrants, that they’ll stop this debate.”

The protests have put lawmakers on the defensive. At town hall meetings focused on the health care debate, they’ve repeatedly been questioned about whether they support providing health care for illegal immigrants. Pelosi, Specter and Obama have all emphasized that illegal immigrants would not be covered under the current health care proposals.

The issue has gotten so heated that even the Congressional Hispanic Caucus issued a statement supporting health coverage only for “legal, law abiding” immigrants who pay their “fair share” for health care.

Under federal law, illegal immigrants are entitled to receive only emergency health care, although some states offer assistance to uninsured children. But conservative groups such as CIS and the Heritage Foundation complain that even emergency care for illegal immigrants is a big problem.

Immigrants’ advocates deny that that immigrants, legal or illegal, are driving up the costs of the health care system or disproportionately relying on government health services. And they point to a stack of studies showing that, on the contrary, immigrants actually use fewer health services than do American-born citizens.

A July 2009 article in the American Journal of Public Health, for example, found that insured immigrants had much lower medical expenses than insured U.S.-born citizens. And while recent immigrants constituted 5 percent of the nonelderly adult population, they were responsible for only 2 percent of adults’ total health care costs.

Meanwhile, a study by the non-partisan Kaiser Commission found that although noncitizens receive less primary health care than citizens, they are far less likely to use the emergency room.

The current House health care bill would not provide insurance coverage for illegal immigrants, and severely restricts coverage even for legal United States immigrants. Immigrant adults have to wait five years before becoming eligible for Medicaid or federal Children’s Health Insurance Plan benefits, for example. (CHIP covers pregnant women in addition to children.) That concerns both immigration and public health advocates.

“Legal immigrants might not achieve equitable access to health coverage in this health care reform bill, but they will be subject to the same requirements to purchase insurance,” said Ng’ara. “They pay the same taxes and will have to share in the responsibility of fixing our health care system, but they may be subject to waiting periods or restrictions before they qualify for many of the benefits.”

Michele Waslin, Senior Policy Analyst at the Immigration Policy Center, made the point in a recent blog post that including immigrants in any health insurance plan would actually help reduce the costs for everyone else. “An important function of health insurance is to pool risks and use premiums collected from the healthy to pay for the medical care of those who need it,” says Waslin. “It is common sense that the more people who pay into the health care system, the more the risk—and thus the costs—are spread out over the entire population.”

What’s more, she argues, public health improves the more people receive regular health care, including preventive services. “It’s also very expensive when people do not receive regular health care and wait until they are very sick to receive care,” she said.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has concluded that “Comprehensive prevention programs are the most economical way to maximize health and minimize costs.”

The economics of health care may not be what’s actually motivating the controversy, however. The move to bar even legal immigrants from receiving any support to purchase health insurance is consistent with a broader rise in anti-immigrant sentiment that experts who track hate groups are noticing.

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center released this week, for example, noted a dramatic rise over the past decade of right-wing militia movements. The group attributes the phenomenon in part to “high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America,” which has made race a much larger focus of its anti-government “Patriot movement.” The result, says the law center, has been that even “ostensibly mainstream politicians and media pundits have helped to spread Patriot and related propaganda, from conspiracy theories about a secret network of U.S. concentration camps to wholly unsubstantiated claims about the president’s country of birth.”

Immigration reform has never been at the top of the president’s agenda, although he’s said he supports it, but today he made clear that health care reform comes first. (Meanwhile, some immigration restrictionists are using the immigration debate to argue against health care reform, saying we’d just be paying to provide services to a bunch of illegal immigrants.)

Putting the immigration debate off until next year could put the whole effort at risk, though, given that it’s a hot-button issue — particularly in border states — and that 2010 is an election year.

As Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) said in June — before he announced on Friday that he would resign from the Senate — “This is the kind of issue that in an election year becomes very, very difficult.”

In the meantime, Obama and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano have been expanding controversial programs to allow local police to enforce federal immigration laws and preparing for the deportation of tens of thousands more illegal immigrants next year.

Although “the flow of immigrants from Mexico to the United States has declined sharply since mid-decade,” Pew reports, “there is no evidence of an increase during this period in the number of Mexican-born migrants returning home from the U.S..”

Pew has previously reported that the recession has been particularly hard on Latino immigrants, leading many to speculate that Mexicans were returning home. That’s not the case, this new study finds, possibly because conditions aren’t any better in Mexico. The Mexican-born population in the United States is currently about 11.5 million — down just 100,000 from last year. It was 11.2 million in 2007.

Glenn Beck of Fox News (Youtube)

If the anti-immigrant reactions to the outbreak of swine flu are any indication, advocates for immigration reform are going to have an uphill battle in Congress this year.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship held its first hearing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform. The hearing was full of powerful arguments for why comprehensive immigration reform would boost the U.S. economy, enhance public safety and reinforce American values of hard work, family unity and entrepreneurship. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified to how legalizing undocumented immigrants would boost economic conditions for everyone, while Thomas Manger, Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief and Chairman of the legislative committee for the Major Cities Chiefs’ Association, testified that legalization would improve relationships between local communities and police officers and help law enforcement do its job.

But one witness, Joel Hunter, a church pastor who spoke eloquently of the humanitarian need for immigration reform, alluded to the dark side of the debate that could ultimately torpedo the reform effort: “A broken [immigration] system tempts many to predatory practices,” he said, including “the talk show hosts that increase their fame and fortune by picturing those without the proper papers only as conniving and dangerous parasites…”

The swine flu crisis this week played perfectly into the hands of those Hunter described.

When it comes to immigration, the facts often don’t seem to matter. Whether it’s a struggling economy or the threat of a pandemic, the crisis of the day becomes fodder for restrictionist activists to claim that immigration reform – particularly if it involves legalization, or what they derisively call “amnesty” – will only exacerbate the United States’ problems.

As Media Matters documented, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage led the pack last Friday, saying: “Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico.”

Never mind that the first reported cases in the United States came from schoolchildren at a New York City Catholic School who’d traveled to Mexico for spring break. “If we lived in saner times, the borders would be closed immediately,” insisted Savage, who went on to ask, “could this be a terrorist attack through Mexico? Could our dear friends in the radical Islamic countries have concocted this virus and planted it in Mexico knowing that you, [Homeland Security Secretary] Janet Napolitano, would do nothing to stop the flow of human traffic from Mexico?”

Immigration restrictionists unabashedly argue that the crisis of the day — whatever it may be — is the fault of illegal immigrants.

As the fear of swine flue spread on Monday, Fox News anchor Glenn Beck asked on his radio show: “Gee, it would be nice if we had border security now, wouldn’t it?” He went on: “But if you are a family and you’re down in Mexico and you’re dying and those in America are not, why wouldn’t you flood this border? Why wouldn’t you come across this border? It’s exactly what I warned of — different scenario, different reason of — I was talking about economic collapse. People start to come and rush this border, then what happens?”

William Gheen, head of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, on Monday blamed the Obama administration for risking American lives by its “failure to secure our borders.” In a press release issued Tuesday, he called on Congress to “demand that the southern border be closed to all non-essential traffic and that military troops are deployed to stop the nightly flow of thousands of illegal immigrants into America.”

Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) soon chimed in, insisting that the U.S. government close the U.S.-Mexico border until the threat is resolved: “The epicenter of this outbreak is still in Mexico and while we now have several confirmed cases in the United States, we must consider all options to help reduce the number of new cases entering our nation,” said Massa. “I’m glad that the White House has issued a travel advisory and is conducting passive screening at the border, but I think we should consider stronger measures at the border. I am in favor of using all tools available to reduce the spread of Swine Flu.”

Then on Wednesday, The Washington Times, under the banner “Border Still Open,” opened their story on the swine flu outbreak saying, “U.S. officials say traffic across the southern border will not be interrupted by the swine flu outbreak, despite rising numbers of Mexican-origin infections in the U.S. and a warning that the number of infections could reach international pandemic levels.”

And Greta Van Sustren’s show on Fox News yesterday ran with the headline: “Seal the Border?”

Even The Los Angeles Times ran the headline: Swine flu: Time to close the U.S.-Mexico border?

In fact, experts on infectious diseases say that closing down the legal U.S.-Mexico border — even if it were possible — would only exacerbate the problem. “There is no connection between the severity of a pandemic and border crossings,” Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a longtime adviser to the U.S. government on public health told the Public Radio International show “The World” on Tuesday.

Closing the border could actually inhibit the United States’ ability to obtain what it needs to treat patients and stop the swine flu’s spread. “Few people realize how many of the medical products we use in this country are made outside of the country,” Osterholm said. These products include the circuits for mechanical ventilators that help people breathe in a severe case of the flu. “One of largest producers of circuits in the world is in Mexico,” said Osterholm. “So if we suddenly shut down the border we’d limit how many ventilators we could provide.” Despite those ranting to the contrary, “Border closings in and of themselves do not accomplish walling yourself off from that virus.”  As President Obama said at his press conference on Wednesday, closing the border now would be “akin to closing the barn door after the horses are out, because we already have cases here in the United States.”

Still, it’s difficult to convince border restrictionists and their high-pitched advocates that anything but sealing the U.S.-Mexico border is the solution, whether the problem is a flu pandemic, drug-related violence or high unemployment.

At the Senate hearing on Thursday, although different witnesses emphasized different aspects of immigration reform, seven of eight witnesses, representing a broad range of interests, from labor to law enforcement to civil rights and business, supported some form of comprehensive reform that would provide a path to legalization for many of the nation’s current undocumented immigrants. To be sure, there are policy differences, particularly regarding how many temporary “guest” workers should be allowed, for example — businesses want more, unions want fewer — but there appears to be, at least among most serious advocates, legislators and policymakers, consensus about the need for comprehensive reform.

The biggest hurdle may be getting such sober, rational policy arguments heard above the alarmist.

Michelle Malkin writes, “hey maybe we’ll finally get serious about borders now,” adding that she’s “blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration,” but “open-borders ideologues” would never listen. “Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools will.”

William Gheen, meanwhile, head of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, on Monday blamed the Obama administration for putting American lives at risk due to its “failure to secure our borders.” In a press release issued Tuesday, he called on Congress to “demand that the southern border be closed to all non essential traffic and that military troops are deployed to stop the nightly flow of thousands of illegal immigrants into America.”

Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) has jumped on the train, too. Yesterday, he called on the U.S. government to close the U.S.-Mexico border until the threat is resolved:

The epicenter of this outbreak is still in Mexico and while we now have several confirmed cases in the United States, we must consider all options to help reduce the number of new cases entering our nation. I’m glad that the White House has issued a travel advisory and is conducting passive screening at the border, but I think we should consider stronger measures at the border. I am in favor of using all tools available to reduce the spread of Swine Flu.

Other restrictionist bloggers are picking up on the theme, citing “illegal immigration” as the source of the flu: “Are we all going to die in the name of political correctness?” asks iReport.

Meanwhile, the latest reports suggest, as I wrote earlier, that the disease didn’t spread from illegal immigrants crossing the border, but from mounds of uncontrolled porcine fecal matter at a Mexican subsidiary of a U.S.-based pork processor.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

Last week, a senior aide to President Obama told The New York Times that the White House plans to support a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would offer a path to legalization for undocumented workers. But will Obama be willing to invest the political capital needed to pass such a bill during an economic crisis – when anti-immigrant sentiment is generally at its peak? After all, President George W. Bush couldn’t get Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill during his presidency even during an economic bubble; he faced too much opposition from within his own party.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

This time, advocates for comprehensive immigration reform that includes legalization for some undocumented workers – what restrictionists derisively call “amnesty” – are making the case that it isn’t just about being sympathetic towards foreign workers. It’s about improving the American economy, and raising wages and conditions for legal U.S. workers, they say — and it’s won support from the U.S. labor movement on a reform package. And though these calculations are always heavily debated, it does appear that this time, the advocates for immigrants have the data on their side.

Yesterday, the Immigration Policy Center (the research arm of the American Immigration Law Foundation) released a new report , “The Economics of Immigration Reform: What Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants Would Mean for the U.S. Economy.” The report is chock full of facts and figures showing that legalizing undocumented workers would “improve wages and working conditions for all workers, and increase tax revenues for cash-strapped federal, state and local governments.” Comprehensive immigration reform legislation would “pay for itself through the increased tax revenue it generates,” and newly legalized workers would be better positioned to move into higher paying jobs, pay higher taxes, and spend more on goods and services – all of which would serve as an economic stimulus to the economy.

The logic is simple. Legal workers earn on average 15 percent more than their illegal counterparts doing the same job, concludes a report done for the Department of Labor. Raising immigrants’ wages means they pay more in taxes, and have more money to spend in the economy. It also reduces the downward pressure on wages that’s long been exerted by the underground economy, where employers can skirt minimum wage and safety laws — which is why labor unions now support legalization, too.

Other studies of undocumented workers suggest similar gains. The Fiscal Policy Institute, for example, studying the construction industry in New York City, found that nearly one in four workers were working “off the books.” As a result, the federal government lost about $272 million in 2005 because employers didn’t pay Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance, and another $70 million lost in personal income taxes. Although most studies have found that more than half of undocumented immigrants work on the books and pay federal and state income, social security and Medicare taxes, about half of them don’t. Legalization would collect taxes from everyone.

The impact on the cost of government services, however, is more controversial, with immigration restrictionists citing the heavy burdens that new immigrants place on social services systems. Still, most studies show that immigration ultimately leads to an overall increase in government revenue.

A study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, estimated that the cost of the immigration reform bill proposed in 2006 would have been more than offset by the benefits. Legalization would have generated $66 billion over ten years from income and payroll taxes, which would have more than paid for the $54 billion in spending on refundable tax credits, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and food stamps that the groups estimated the government would spend on newly eligible immigrants and their families.

Restrictionist groups, meanwhile, often cite an older study, from 1997, by the National Academy of Sciences that found that immigrants with no more than a high school education would initially cost the government more than they add in revenue. “If we’re talking about people in the [United States] illegally, we’re talking about people largely without more than a high school education,” said Steven Camarota, Director of Research for the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies. The NAS study, he said, finds that an immigrant who comes to the United States without a high school education creates a net fiscal drain in his lifetime of $89,000, meaning he used that much more in services than he paid in taxes. If he has a high school education, the drain was lower, around $39,000. Those with more than a high school education, on the other hand, had a positive fiscal effect. According to a Pew Hispanic Center study released today, about 25 percent of undocumented immigrants fall into that category.

Nevertheless, a closer look at the National Academy of Sciences’ study shows a different picture. The study itself emphasizes the importance of taking a long-range view of immigration, rather than a one-year snapshot. Taking into account all of the various effects of immigration on the economy, including the effect on wages, demand, taxes and social services, the NAS actually found that immigration yields a gain in the overall economy – “on the order of $1 billion to $10 billion a year. Although this gain may be modest relative to the size of the U.S. economy, it remains a significant positive gain in absolute terms.”

That’s because over time, legal immigrants tend to work hard, get an education and advance themselves and their families economically. And that has a positive ripple effect throughout the economy.

“The U.S. economy is not a fixed pie,” said Dan Siciliano, Executive Director of the Program in Law, Economics and Business at Stanford Law School. “It is a dynamic economy that grows and shrinks depending on what’s going on.” Much of what drives growth has to do with the middle class, said Siciliano, who participated in a conference call of experts arranged by the Immigration Policy Center in conjunction with the release of its new report.

A path to legalization for undocumented workers also serves as a path to enter the middle class. “This is critical,” he said.

The problem with the current economy is the overall uncertainty, which decreases investment. “These problems are exaggerated and made worse if you’re undocumented,” said Siciliano. “Enfranchised consumers who are part of the above-ground economy are better consumers. You’re more willing to buy a home if you have certainty about your ability to stay in a community,” explained Siciliano. Immigrants are also more likely to invest in their own education and advancement, and that of their children, if they know they can stay and work where they are.

In addition to the fixed-pie perspective, opponents of legalization often assume that if the government does not legalize their status, immigrants will leave.

“What you sometimes hear is a kind of wishful thinking,” said David Kallick, a senior fellow at the Fiscal Policy Institute who also participated in the IPC conference call. “If undocumented immigrants just vanished, wouldn’t that mean there would be jobs freed up for US workers? But people don’t just vanish.” What’s more, if they did, it would “cause tremendous disruption in US businesses” which would “lead to fewer jobs to go around,” he said. “Mass deportation would be terrible for the economy. And it’s not real. It’s not going to happen.”

Not that mass deportation would be economical, either: the left-leaning Center for American Progress has found that deporting all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. would cost $41 billion a year.

Heavy spending on border enforcement alone also hasn’t kept people out. Even though spending on immigration enforcement more than tripled between 1993 and 2006, so has the number of undocumented immigrants in this country, notes the Immigration Policy Center in its report.

Administration officials say that ultimately, any comprehensive immigration reform package President Obama supports would include not only a path to legalization, but improved enforcement at the border and development of an improved national computer database that would allow employers to check the work eligibility of new job applicants. (The current system, called E-Verify, is not widely used and has been criticized as unreliable and inefficient.)

Still, Republican opponents of legalization, such as Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), have vowed to fight any such bill, arguing that this is no time to increase competition for legal U.S. workers for scarce jobs. “In our current economic crisis, Americans cannot afford to lose more jobs to illegal workers,” King told the New York Times. “American workers are depending on President Obama to protect their jobs from those in America illegally.”

That labor unions, which have in the past expressed the same concerns, are now coming around to the immigration advocates’ side suggests a major shift in perspective about the potential impact of immigration reform on U.S. workers during a recession. We need an immigration system that is part of a national economic recovery program,” said Esther Lopez, Director of Civil Rights for the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union.

Gerald Jaynes, a professor of Economics and African-American Studies at Yale, has also come around to supporting immigration reform, after years of resisting due to concern about the impact on low-wage workers.

“Several years ago I was convinced that immigration significantly lowered native wages and employment,” he said at the IPC conference, but added that “subsequently, my statistical analyses forced me to conclude otherwise.” (Here is Jaynes’ testimony to Congress on the subject in 2007.) Although undocumented immigration has a slightly negative effect on native-born low-wage workers, he said, “the effects are relatively small, and in any event secondary to other causes of less educated workers’ dismal employment and wage experiences.” And because the work of immigrants often complements that of U.S.-born workers, “immigration can actually create jobs.”

Immigration reform that includes a path to legalization for undocumented workers, then, “is likely to improve conditions” of the overall workforce, he said, echoing one of the major themes that immigrants’ advocates are using to promote a reform package expected to be introduced this year. “One of the major problems for native workers of low education and skills is that they are competing against undocumented workers who employers are taking advantage of,” said Jaynes. “So to eliminate exploitation for the undocumented in effect eliminates or minimizes exploitation in American labor markets for all of the participants.”