Immigrants a force in Georgia

By Tammy Joyner and Michael E. Kanell

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

While accurate numbers are hard to find, most estimates put the number of foreign-born residents in Georgia at nearly 1 million — the ninth-largest immigrant segment in the United States.

Perhaps half of those, various estimates say, are here illegally — more than the total number in Arizona, where a new state law aimed at reducing the number of illegal immigrants is set to take effect today.

While most illegal immigrants live and work under the radar in Georgia, they have created an indelible economic footprint here, according to a number of experts:

● They account for about $9.4 billion in a state economy of roughly $320 billion.

● They contribute between $215 million and $253 million to state coffers in the form of sales, income and property taxes.

● They account for 6.3 percent of Georgia’s work force, but in some industries they are the lion’s share of workers. Experts estimate that 40 percent to 50 percent of the workers in agriculture — the state’s largest industry — are illegal.

Others point out that the influx of illegal immigrants to Georgia and elsewhere in recent years has also had a major impact on social services including education, welfare and health care, and meant fewer jobs and lower wages for some workers.

While the issue of legal status has prompted most of the immigration debate, those impacts, too, have helped generate the sort of resentment that helped spark the new Arizona law. Among other things, the measure would have allowed police to make a warrantless arrest of anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, but a federal judge Wednesday blocked that and other portions of the law from taking effect.

In Georgia, the issue of illegal immigrants has become a debating point in the gubernatorial race. And a recent poll by the Georgia Newspaper Partnership, which includes the AJC, showed most Georgia voters would support an Arizona-style law.

Economy drew many

For decades, it was border states like Arizona or ports of entry like New York that drew most immigrants. But since 2000, Georgia’s foreign-born population has surged by 58 percent — the second-fastest growth in the United States.

The flow began accelerating as the 1996 Olympics gave Georgia a global stage and the economy boomed. They came in unprecedented numbers, often undertaking 18-hour trips from Texas border towns to harvest Vidalia onions on South Georgia farms, work in poultry plants and carpet factories in North Georgia and build thousands of “McMansions” in metro Atlanta.

Two years of recession seem to have tempered the flow, but only a smattering of the newcomers have left Georgia, according to estimates.

“It used to be six states and you could tell the immigration story. You can’t do that anymore,” said James Smith, senior economist at the Rand Corp. and author of “The New Americans: The Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Impacts of Immigration.”

“About 10 years ago, they started spreading out to the rest of the country,” Smith said.

For most of the past two decades, Georgia was one of the country’s most vibrant economies, with urgent demand for workers to staff restaurants, hotels and factories, to carry lumber or hammer nails in a near-frenzy of home building.

At the same time, workers facing shrinking opportunities were abandoning the farms of Mexico, the villages of Guatemala and even the cities and vineyards of California for better opportunities.

“The reason why we have a sizeable undocumented population when the economy was booming is because we had jobs and we had people looking for jobs,” said Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration at the National Council of La Raza in Washington, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization.

And while laborers immigrating illegally from Latin America drew the most notice, others became illegal only after arriving. Many came as students, employees and tourists — then stayed after their visas expired.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates, in fact, that nearly 45 percent of the nation’s illegal residents had legal status when they arrived. Estimates for Georgia are similar.

Those immigrants tend to have higher income and more education, since they were vetted at least once by the government. That may partially explain why immigrants in Georgia are, on average, slightly poorer than other residents, but better off than immigrants in border states.

Moreover, the income gap between immigrants and native-born residents is much smaller here than in Arizona: The average household of illegal immigrants in Georgia, for instance, has an income of $55,230 — 10 percent below the rest of the population, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit research group in Washington.

In contrast, the average income of illegal immigrant households in Arizona is barely half that of other residents.

Pluses and minuses

Two decades of immigration — authorized and otherwise — has reshaped Georgia, burdening the state’s economy in some ways and lifting it in others.

About 40 percent of the state’s illegal immigrants benefit from a major welfare program. About half of all members of illegal immigrant families have no health insurance — which drives up health costs through use of emergency rooms.

But the heaviest “taxpayer effect” added by immigrants is the stress on the school system, economist Smith said.

“The taxpayer effect will be negative when the income of the immigrant is lower and when the immigrants are young with kids in school,” he explained.

The proportion is not huge, although it is more heavily concentrated in some areas of the state.

Illegal immigrants account for 2.8 percent of the school-age (5 to 17) population, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Add in children born to illegal residents, who are citizens under the U.S. Constitution, and the number becomes 6.2 percent of the state’s school-age population.

“The direct effect on the economy is always positive,” Smith said. “They enhance the productive capacity of the economy. Even though there are distribution effects — they lower some other wages.”

But for those people whose wages are lowered, the pain is quite real, said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The job competition issue is a big one,” he said. “Immigrants compete with less-educated workers and teenagers. [Those groups’] unemployment rates were awful even before the recession. It’s a long-term issue.”

Up to half of teenage unemployment can be pegged to the impact of immigration, he said.

A major impact

Yet the economic impact — including that of illegal residents — is a plus overall, according to a study released Wednesday by the Immigration Policy Center, a nonpartisan, Washington-based research group that often provides information to Congress. While they take jobs, the study shows, their presence and their spending expands the economy and makes jobs.

Remove all the illegal immigrants from the state and Georgia would lose $21.3 billion in economic activity, which would cost the state an additional 132,460 jobs, according to study done for Americans for Immigration Reform, a Houston-based, business-sponsored group that supports changes to current immigration law.

It is hard to separate any analysis from its authors, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group.

“Organizations that tend to favor immigration and immigrants emphasize the positive contributions,” he said. “Those that are opposed to immigration tend to emphasize the cost and overstate them.”

What is clear is the magnitude of the immigrant presence, said Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, a group with 200 members and 7,000 citizens statewide. Any measure that might spur an immigrant exodus from Georgia, he said, would have “very severe” economic consequences.

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State comparisons

As of 2008, there were 11.9 million illegal immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. The vast majority come from Latin American countries. Here’s how Georgia stacks up against Arizona and California, the latter of which is home to the largest population of illegal immigrants.

	Georgia	Arizona	California
Illegal immigrants (Total population)	480,000 (9.83 million)	460,000 (6.59 million)	2.6 million (36.96 million)
Percent increase of immigrant workers 2000-2008	77	73	33.5
Origins of largest group of foreign-born workers	Latin America	Latin America	Latin America

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Check our sources

• Immigration Policy Center (www.immigrationpolicy.org) is a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. research grou that often provides data to Congress.
• The Pew Hispanic Center (www.pewhispanic.org). Founded in 2001, the nonpartisan research center chronicles Latinos’ impact on the nation. It is a project of the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center.
• The Migration Policy Institute (www.migrationpolicy.org) is a Washington, D.C.-based independent, nonpartisan think tank that tracks the movement of people worldwide.
• Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, (www.gbpi.org) is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit group.
• The Perryman Group, (www.perrymangroup.com) is an economic and financial analysis firm in Waco, Texas.