Immigration Law: The Ultimate Guide

Immigration law is the set of national laws, rules, and legal decisions that govern who can move into and out of a country. Strictly speaking, it is different from things like naturalization and citizenship, but sometimes people mix them up.

Countries often have laws that govern both the right to enter and the right to leave, as well as rights inside the country, like the length of stay, freedom of movement, and the right to take part in business or government.

Immigration laws change all over the world and throughout history based on the social and political climate of the place and time. This is because attitudes toward immigrants range from being very open to being very nationalist and closed off.

International law controls how each country's laws work when it comes to its citizens leaving the country. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights from the United Nations says that all countries must let their people in.

Why do we need Immigration Laws?

Immigration law is made up of rules and regulations about how people can come to countries like the U.S. (which has been used as a standard example here.) This kind of law makes sure that the different parts of Immigration do their jobs the way the law says they should. Immigration law says who can come to a country and who can stay here. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act is mostly in charge of it.

The following parts of immigration law are in charge of making decisions and putting the law into action. Each group is responsible for its things and is expected to act fairly.

Board of Immigration and Refugees

The U.S. Border Services Agency

Immigration and Citizenship Minister

Officers of ImmigrationThe U.S. Citizenship and Immigration

Positive Impacts of LEGAL Immigration on a Country

Some of the biggest positive impacts of immigration break the myths. The list speaks below:

Effects on Population

From 2010 to 2020, the U.S. population grew at its slowest rate since the 1930s. In the past few years, there have been fewer babies born. The number of immigrants has also gone down. Future immigration is needed to increase the size of the U.S. population as a whole and to keep the ratio of seniors to people who can work at a level that will help the U.S. economy grow.

FWD.us says that the U.S. should double the number of immigrants if it wants to keep up with other economies and keep programs like Social Security strong. Most of the population growth that is expected in the U.S. is because of immigration.

If people stopped coming to the U.S., the number of people living there would be about the same in 2050 as it is today.

Immigrants strengthen the American Workforce

Immigrants are very business-minded. They start new businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans and create a lot of jobs in the process. All of this makes it easier for native-born Americans to find jobs, raises wages, and helps the middle class.

As the U.S. economy starts to get back on its feet, job creators will be crucial to helping communities all over the country get back on their feet. Research shows that immigrants usually add to the work of Americans rather than taking their jobs. This is because immigrants have different skills and educational backgrounds than Americans.

The U.S. economy is dynamic and doesn't work on a "zero-sum" basis. When one person gets a job, it doesn't mean that someone else loses a job. Immigrants help the economy grow because they fill jobs, buy goods, and pay taxes.

When more people are working, more gets done. And as more Americans retire in the coming years, immigrants will help fill the need for workers and keep the social safety net in place.

Economic Impact

The U.S. needs immigrants to stay competitive and grow its economy. As the U.S starts to recover, people who create jobs are especially important to recovery. Immigrants come up with new ideas, create jobs, and buy things. They have a lot of money to spend, which drives our economy and creates jobs for all Americans.

In 2016, immigrants added $2 trillion to the U.S. economy and paid $458.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. After immigrants paid billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes in 2018, they had $1.2 trillion left to spend. They used this money to buy goods and services, which helped local businesses.

Proposed cuts to the legal immigration system would be terrible for the economy. Over twenty years, GDP would drop by 2%, growth would slow by 12.5%, and 4.6 million jobs would be lost. Rust Belt states would be hit especially hard because their economies and populations depend on immigration.

Educational Impact

Most immigrants are smart and skilled in their fields. 43 percent of newly arrived family and diversity-based immigrants have college degrees, while only 29 percent of native-born Americans have college degrees.

More than half of the STEM degrees given out by U.S. universities go to international students, and about half of the people who apply for H-1B, temporary work visas have a Master's degree or higher from a U.S. university. Even though immigrants only make up 13% of the population, they start 30% of new businesses.

This keeps the workforce flexible, helps companies grow faster, and makes American workers more productive by bringing in people with different skills and new ideas. Immigrants and their children started 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies, which now employ more than 10 million people around the world.

Taxes and Services That People Need

Immigrants contribute a lot to the U.S. economy in almost every way, including paying taxes. In 2018, they paid $458.7 billion in state, local, and federal taxes. This includes undocumented immigrants, who pay about $11.74 billion in state and local taxes each year.

This includes more than $7 billion in sales and excise taxes, $3.6 billion in property taxes, and $1.1 billion in personal income taxes. U.S. schools, hospitals, highways, and other important services are paid for by these billions of tax dollars.

If undocumented immigrants were given legal status as part of a plan to fix immigration, these incomes would go up by $2.18 billion a year. Also, immigrants pay a huge amount of money into Social Security. If there were half as many legal immigrants as there are now, Social Security would lose $1.5 trillion over the next 75 years.

Levels of immigration per year

Americans don't want less immigration, they want more. Over 75% of Americans are against cutting back on legal immigration, and 75% of Americans think immigration is good for the U.S. As people in the U.S. get older, immigrants and their families are becoming more and more important to our economy.

The number of people 65 and older will almost double by 2050, according to the Census Bureau. This will mean that fewer people will be working. On the other hand, 79 percent of immigrants in the U.S. are of working age, while only 61 percent of people born in the U.S. are of working age.

Immigration based on skills

Many U.S. companies hire foreign-born professionals to add to their workforce. They use a mix of permanent, employment-based immigration visas (called "green cards") and temporary visas, like the H-2A visa for agricultural workers or the H-1B visa for highly skilled specialty workers.

For temporary jobs, employers must show that they will pay their new hires at least the average wage paid to workers in the same position. For permanent immigration programs, employers must go through a rigorous labor certification process to show that no qualified Americans are available to fill the role.

Research shows that the wages of native-born workers are not hurt by immigrant workers. On the contrary, they are helped by them. Employment-based immigrants are very important to the U.S. economy because they fill the temporary and permanent needs of U.S. employers in many different industries.

Students from other countries

International students bring a lot to campuses all over the United States. Their entrepreneurial spirit, skills for coming up with new ideas, and spending power all help the American economy. They spend billions of dollars as consumers and often pay higher tuition rates, which help lower tuition costs for American students.

They also help local businesses and have started companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Trulia, which employ hundreds of thousands of Americans. During the 2018-2019 school year, international students studying in the U.S. added $41 billion to the economy and kept 458,290 jobs going.

International students are getting degrees in a wide range of fields, including STEM fields like science, technology, engineering, and math.

Pathway to Citizenship

About 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. Giving them a way to become citizens would raise their wages and spending power, which would add $1.2 trillion to the U.S. GDP over 10 years.

If the U.S. made it easier for undocumented immigrants to get permanent residency and citizenship, it would raise Americans' income by $791 billion, bring in $184 billion more in state, local, and federal taxes, and add more than 200,000 jobs to the economy each year.

Millions of undocumented immigrants are doing important work on the front lines right now. About 48 percent of agricultural workers are immigrants, and they keep the food supply chain safe and put food on American tables.

People who dream and the economy

Dreamers have built their lives in the U.S., they are Americans in every way except on paper. They also make huge economic contributions to the U.S. More than 89 percent of people with DACA are either working or paying taxes, which helps the economy of the United States.

In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, nearly 200,000 DACA recipients are working in important front-line jobs, including nearly 40,000 healthcare workers. Deporting Dreamers would break up families and cost even more lives.

If Congress doesn't protect these young people, the U.S. economy could lose $460 billion over the next ten years. But if Dreamers were given legal status and a way to become citizens, that could add as much as $1 trillion to the GDP over ten years.

Humanitarian Protection

Since a long time ago, the United States has been a safe place for people who have been forced to leave their homes and are running away from violence, extreme poverty, or persecution, and this has made our country so much better.

Refugees are important to the U.S. economy, and spending just one dollar to help them get settled can bring in almost twice as much money in just 5 years. More than 70% of refugees are of working age, which is more than the percentage of people born in the U.S.

In 2015, refugees paid $20.9 billion in taxes and had $56.3 billion in spending power. Refugees are more likely to start their businesses than native-born Americans. In 2015, 13% of refugees were entrepreneurs, which helped create long-term jobs.

Mass Deportation

Apart from the huge moral costs and long-lasting trauma of tearing apart millions of American families, for instance, deporting 11 million people would make many American families poor and cause a lot of social problems. The same applies pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Mass deportation would hurt the economy by almost $8 trillion over the next 14 years and put our housing market at risk. Also, it would take 20 years and cost $400 to $600 billion from U.S. taxpayers – the effects will be much worse for less rich countries!

Negative Effects of ILLEGAL Immigration

[Negative effects of illegal immigration]( https://vittana.org/21-big-pros-and-cons-of-immigration) are the following:

Immigration can lead to problems with overpopulation.

Most people want to move to the world's richest countries because they have a lot of money. This means that rich countries can have problems with having too many people, while poor countries can start to have problems with not having enough people.

When there is an imbalance in population levels, it can make it hard for people to get to local resources in places where there is a lot of immigration.

It makes it easier for diseases to spread.

Because people move to new places, they bring with them many diseases. There is a lot of evidence that smallpox was very bad for the native people of North America.

When immigrants cross borders, they bring disease-causing agents with them, which can hurt the local population, which may not be used to certain conditions. Some of these effects can be lessened by screening, but there is always a chance that something will get through.

Immigration can cause differences in wages.

When immigrants from the developing world move to the developed world, they may be willing to take jobs that pay much less than what a local person would be willing to accept.

If enough people are willing to work for less money, it can lead to a wage gap in the area, which can slow the growth of jobs. When people have less money to spend, they have less money to spend on jobs that help them.

It puts pressure on resources for education and health.

People come to America to start a new life. There's no question that many people help their local economies. Communities must make an initial investment, though, to help these families get started. Children need to be taught.

There must be access to health care. There is no guarantee that immigrant families will stay in those communities, which means that the investments being made may never pay off.

Immigration makes it harder for a country to grow.

When a developing country's smartest and most talented people move to a developed country, they lose a chance to get ahead. When people bring their skills to a country, especially a poor one, it makes the country stronger.

This strength is given to other countries that might not need it. Immigrants do get the chance to make plans for a better life for themselves, but it costs their home country.

It is easier to use immigrants for money.

Immigration practices have changed, but the laws about work have not kept up. Even if someone is allowed to be in a new country, it is easier to report them to the police as a possible illegal immigrant than for them to do what they are supposed to do.

False charges, not paying wages owed, and even physical abuse are more common among immigrants than among people who were born in the country.

The Mercury News looked at union elections and found that at least half of the time, threats were made to call immigration over unionizing activities when most of the workers were undocumented.

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