From the ashes of the recent tragedy in Denison, the age-old debate about immigration policy has again sprung to life with new vigor. As with every other incarnation of the debate, politicians and demagogues alike have seized upon the debate to haul out the same myths and half-truths about immigration for the purposes of advancing a narrow agenda which has existed long before any of the events of today.

Myth #1: Immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime. While perhaps one of the oldest arguments used to restrict immigration, the very opposite is true: According to the Center for Immigration Studies, immigrants show both a lower rate of incarceration than the general population (in 1985, 19 percent of all arrests were of foreign-born individuals while they constituted 19.6 percent of the population) while also showing a drastically lower rate of recidivism (repeat offense) than the average American rate — approximately 37 percent as compared to 66 percent, based on numbers taken from the INS. While foreign-born populations in America have reached record levels in recent years (with the 2000 census revealing approximately 30.1 million foreign-born individuals residing in the United States), these numbers do not as a whole account for any increases in crime that have occurred.

Myth #2: Immigrants are contributing to overcrowding. According to the 2000 census, annual population growth in the United States was a scant 1 percent (down from the peak rate of 1.7 percent during the ’50s and ’60s and well below the average rate of 1.3 percent for the last century), with 22 percent of U.S. counties losing population. Furthermore is the issue of the “graying” of the population, as members of the baby boom generation begin to enter retirement. In this time, a historically small number of young workers will be supporting a large elderly population, putting great strain on both the social services and health-care industries. Without a healthy influx of new workers (and thus new taxpayers), the system faces inevitable collapse.

Furthermore, the rate of immigrants coming into America as of the last decade, while historically high in numbers, pales in comparison to the peak rates during the “Great Migration” at the turn of the 20th century. According to Daniel T. Griswold of the Cato Institute, during the 1990s the annual rate of immigration was approximately 4 immigrants per year per 1,000 in population, compared to about 10 immigrants per year per 1,000 in population from 1900-1914. In fact, according to an analysis of U.S. census data by the Urban Institute, the percentage of foreign-born individuals as of 2000 in the United States was a mere 10.9 percent, far below the peak level of 14.8 percent at the turn of the century.

Myth #3: Immigrants take jobs from Americans and depress wages. This notion flies in the face of the economic success of the 1990s, where immigration sharply peaked, yet the national unemployment rate bottomed out at a vanishing 4 percent with real gains in wages across the board. Furthermore is the issue of what jobs immigrants take — many are in jobs that America has been unable to fill fast enough (such as in scientific and medical fields, where America does not produce enough graduates to meet demand) whereas others are in jobs that Americans simply don’t want. Yet without able bodies to perform these jobs, they would go unfilled given the ready availability of higher-paying jobs, leaving inventories to languish — after all, avocados are worthless if they cannot be picked, shipped and sold, with effects that cascade throughout the economy.

Further bolstering this argument was the “Vedder-Gallaway-Moore Historical and Cross-Sectional Study” (1994) which “found no statistically reliable correlation between the percentage of the population that was foreign born and the national unemployment rate over the period 1900-1989, or for just the postwar era (1947-89).”

Myth #4: Immigrants are a net drain upon social services. According to a 1997 National Academy of Sciences study, the average immigrant will pay a net $80,000 in taxes more than they receive in government services, a trend that continues to grow contingent upon how young the immigrants are when they enter America. Furthermore, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 drastically cut the amount of social services available to immigrants, causing the number of immigrants on welfare to decline over the past five years.

Myth #5: Legal immigration to the United States is a simple and expedient process. Currently, the INS is sitting upon a backlog of over 5 million petitions with average processing times for a permanent resident ranging from 8 months to two years for some locations, according the INS Web site. Yet while the INS buries itself in paperwork, American businesses are suffering from a record shortage of low-skilled workers while willing migrant workers are hunted down by an average of one border agent for every five miles of the Mexican border, over ten times the number of agents posted on the Canadian border.

Naturally, critics of immigration will still persist in spite of the facts, yet their case is remarkably weaker in the face of such. What should be remembered is that America is a nation of immigrants — after all, outside of a select subset of Americans, almost all of our ancestors came to this country from somewhere else as well.

Steve Skutnik

is a graduate student in nuclear physics from Ames.