Senior fellow Michael Clemens was mentioned in a Huffington Post article on the benefits of immigration to the U.S. economy.
From the ArticleThe biggest misconception about immigration is that it is a zero-sum game--that there is a finite number of jobs which immigrants "take" from the native-born and that immigrants consume social services without paying anything in. Several state governments--including Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina, and others--have bought into this myth, enacting measures to address what they perceive as problems arising from undocumented immigration. Yet anti-immigration laws hurt not only immigrants, but native-born Americans as well.
Alabama's new immigration law HB 56 clearly hurts employers. Section 15 of the law punishes employers who knowingly or intentionally hire undocumented immigrants. The punishments escalate for each offense. A first offense results in the firing of all undocumented workers, business licenses suspension for 10 working days, and administrative penalties. For a second offense, the Alabama state government will revoke all of the business' licenses and permits for the location where the offense took place. For a third offense, the government permanently revokes all of the business' licenses from all of its locations in the entire state - destroying the business. (That section of HB 56 is called the business death penalty and is based on a similar section of Arizona's anti-immigration law SB 1070 and Legal Arizona Workers Act).
Laws like HB 56 also hurt farmers. Undocumented immigrants are a major source of labor for Alabama's farming industry, which adds more than $5 billion annually to the state GDP. In neighboring Georgia, where lawmakers recently passed a law similar to HB 56, farmers now face severe labor shortages, putting $300 million of planted fruits and vegetables at risk, according to the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. Without access to low-skilled labor, many farmers will stop planting altogether, decrease the acreage under cultivation, or start planting less profitable crops that can be harvested by expensive machinery.