The recent Congressional push for new immigration legislation has garnered widespread media attention, and yesterday, students and activists nationwide protested current guest worker program proposals. Apart from students, however, Stanford faculty have played a leading role in the discussion. Last week, Dan Siciliano, executive director of the Program in Law, Economics and Business at the Law School, joined a Senate Judiciary Committee panel to discuss the economic impacts of immigration.

Siciliano argued that immigrants have a net positive impact on the economy. He says that a fiscal view of immigration, which takes into account tax dollars only, holds that immigrants are a net loss to the economy. However, according to Siciliano, this view fails to consider other contributions that immigrants make to the economy.

“The fiscal issue is about taxes — how much you collect and how much you pay — but it doesn’t necessarily describe what economic contributions someone makes to the economy overall,” he said. “If they are part of a business that makes profits, then they are growing national income. They may enable other individuals to generate personal income, and those individuals may in fact pay taxes which they may not have otherwise paid.”

Immigrants help the economy by filling important low-wage, unskilled jobs that are left vacant by native-born workers in a fast-growing economy. These jobs are essential for supporting higher-wage jobs that require more skill, Siciliano said.

“Immigrants fill very critical jobs for which there just aren’t enough people,” he said. “For example, there is a tremendous boom in new house building. Roofing is a critical component of this, and roofers are having trouble finding people to fill those jobs. We have architects, real-estate developers and advanced craftsmen who can’t get their job done unless they have someone to roof.”

Furthermore, immigrants fit the profile of such jobs well, since many are young and less-educated. Returning to the construction example, Siciliano explained that roofing pays good wages, but the jobs are hard to fill because they are labor intensive. Increasing numbers of native born high-school graduates are unlikely to try roofing — or analogous jobs in fields like elderly health care and fast-food retail.

“It’s kind of a young person’s game,” he said.

Countering Harvard economist George Borjas’ frequently-cited statistic, that immigrants depress unskilled workers’ wages by 8 percent, Siciliano cited a recent paper published by Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri. Peri and Peri assert that by filling low-wage, unskilled jobs, immigrants in fact help economic growth. According to Siciliano, the labor provided by immigrants allows small-to-medium businesspeople — who are centers of innovation and growth — to invest capital and create new jobs.

“Most recent studies show that immigrants enable the economy to do things it couldn’t do before — they enable it to grow,” he said. “Regardless of what immigrants cost, 91 percent of people are better off.” The remaining 9 percent are victims primarily of disappearing manufacturing jobs due to globalization — not immigration, he said.

As far as immigration policy solutions, Siciliano said that guest worker programs make the same false assumptions from an exclusively fiscal perspective — that immigrants must be bad for the economy if they amount to a negative in tax dollars. Thus, guest worker programs try to supply a labor need with immigrants, but without immediately incorporating them as citizens.

“Guest worker programs seem like a tidy way to have your cake and eat it too,” he said. “The guest worker programs as proposed don’t really solve a lot of the problems and have a lot of very fundamental drawbacks.”

Siciliano would support a bill that grants legal status to undocumented immigrants already in this country, and cites the McCain and Kennedy proposal as the “most thoughtful” so far.

“A compromise bill that comes closest to solving a lot of the problems would address the issue of what to do with people who are already here — they’re the most important in the economic component,” he said.

At the Law School, Siciliano lectures in corporate governance and finance. Outside of his research on these topics, he is a research fellow with the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) at the American Immigration Law Foundation. He testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce as part of a similar panel last fall.

Siciliano acknowledges that the immigration debate transcends economic analysis.

“The politics of this issue are very complicated, and it’s difficult because it’s an emotional issue,” he said.

“The impressive thing about the proposed legislation is that there is a pathway to legalization,” said Assistant Law Prof. Jayashri Srikantiah. “It’s a real acknowledgement of who’s doing a lot of the work here. However, there are lots of really harsh provisions that are being overlooked — provisions that would increase number of noncitizens who are detained and expand the grounds on which they can be deported.

“We have to think about what is fair and what is just for these people, who in many cases have worked here for most of their lives and are just as much a part of our national fabric as other immigrants with legal status,” Srikantiah added.