It is also a critical policy issue in the current debate over what is the "right number" of immigrants to admit to the United States each year. What is the fiscal and economic impact of immigrants on the cities where they live? This question goes to the heart of the controversy over America's ability to assimilate immigrants into our economy and social infrastructure without imposing an undue burden on U.S. cities in greatest despair today-Detroit, Saint Louis, Buffalo, Rochester, Gary-have virtually no immigrants. That assertion cannot be true because, with few exceptions, the U.S. But they do refute the assertion that the economic decline of central cities is caused by immigration. These findings do not answer the critical questions of whether the immigrants cause the better urban conditions or whether benign urban conditions attract the immigrants. Unemployment rates, however, were unusually large in high-immigrant cities. Compared with low-immigrant cities, high-immigrant cities had double the job creation rate, higher per capita incomes, lower poverty rates, and 20 percent less crime. cities over the period 1980–1994, my research indicates that those cities with heavy concentrations of immigrants outperformed cities with few immigrants. This article questions those findings.Įxamining a range of economic variables for the eighty-five largest U.S. Furthermore, a 1997 Rand study suggests that immigrants are now becoming an economic burden on the cities of California. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences study reports that "immigrants add as much as $10 billion to the national economy each year," but "in areas with high concentrations of low-skilled, low-paid immigrants," they impose net costs on U.S.-born workers.
A controversial issue is whether immigrants are a benefit or a burden to these areas. More than half of all immigrants in the United States reside in just seven cities: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Houston, and San Francisco.
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