Putting Americans First: A Statistical Case for Encouraging Rather than Impeding and Devaluing US Citizenship

Introduction

Immigration status influences — for better or worse — immigrant integration in all of its dimensions, including political participation, access to government benefits, work, health care, housing, and education (NAS 2015, 118). In its exhaustive 2015 report on integration of immigrants in the United States, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that lawful permanent resident (LPR) status has “a positive effect on integration, but temporary, discretionary, and especially undocumented status negatively affects integration” (NAS 2015, 148).

When immigrants gain status and graduate to more permanent and secure statuses, they benefit, as do their families, communities, and nation. As a case in point, the legalization program of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) led to wage increases and advancement in the workplace (Hinojosa-Ojeda 2010; Orrenius and Zavodny 2012), as well as increased investment by its beneficiaries in education, job training, and English language acquisition (DOL 1996).

Legal status also has cross-generational repercussions. A parent’s lack of status, for example, “can have negative effects on children’s socioeconomic outcomes, cognitive development, and mental health” (NAS 2015, 149). It can also destabilize their households and families, and negatively affect educational attainment (ibid., 122).

The strong consensus on how a fair and generous path to naturalization contributes to immigrant integration and facilitates the contributions of immigrants to their new communities finds support in the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM). ³ The GCM affirms that migration constitutes “a source of prosperity, innovation and sustainable development.” Moreover, it seeks to realize migration’s development potential by stressing the need for safe, orderly, and regular (legal) migration; for “migrants to become full members” of their communities; and for immigrant participation, inclusion, and integration (GCM 2018, §§ 8 and 13).

The Trump administration purports to favor “an immigration system that enhances the vibrancy, the unity, the togetherness, and the strength of our society” (Miroff and Dawsey 2019). Yet it has steadfastly opposed the legalization of any US immigrant populations; has sought to strip legal status from certain populations; has made US mixed-status families — those with US citizen and undocumented members — less secure; has championed large cuts in legal admission; has raised administrative barriers to LPR status; has made it far more difficult to naturalize; and has prioritized denaturalization. In addition, its enforcement policies have rendered citizenship status — a marker of equality under the law — a less valuable status for certain disfavored groups, particularly the US citizen children of undocumented residents. In short, its policies have undermined the ability of immigrants to contribute to the nation’s life and have torn the social fabric by creating two tiers of US citizens. The first tier enjoys the rights, entitlements, and benefits of full membership, while millions of second-tier citizens are denied secure and stable lives, ⁴ access to federal benefits, the right to family unity, and even the ability to remain in the country.

Characteristics of the Population by Legal Status

The detailed estimates of the populations described here — native-born, naturalized, legal noncitizens, and undocumented — were compiled from data collected in the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). ⁵ A detailed description of the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) procedures for estimating the undocumented population, including the assurance of privacy of survey respondents, was published in 2014 (Warren 2014). The estimates shown in Table 1 and in the appendix are based on 2017 ACS data provided by Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA. ⁶

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Table 1.

Selected Characteristics of the Native-Born, Legal Foreign-Born, and Undocumented Population, 2017.

Characteristic of the Population	Native-Born	Legal Foreign-Born Population			Undoc. Population
		Natural-ized	Total	Noncitizens
	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5)
Total population (millions)	276.1	21.8	34.5	12.6*	10.7
Education and language
Some college or BA or higher, age 18 and older	62%	59%	55%	48%	32%
BA or higher, age 18 and older	29%	35%	33%	30%	17%
High school, age 18 and older	29%	22%	22%	22%	27%
Less than high school, age 18 and older	9%	19%	23%	29%	41%
Speak English well, very well, or only English,age 5 and older	100%	84%	78%	67%	58%
Employment, income, and skill level
Employed, age 16 and older	95%	96%	96%	94%	95%
Self-employed, age 16 and older 7	9%	12%	11%	10%	11%
Average personal income	$40,600	$45,600	$40,200	$30,500	$26,600
Employed in skilled occupations, age 16 and older	43%	44%	42%	37%	18%
Management, business, and financial	12%	12%	11%	9%	4%
Computer, math, engineering, and sciences	5%	8%	8%	9%	5%
Educational occupations	6%	5%	5%	5%	1%
Health care providers, techs, and support	8%	11%	10%	6%	3%
Other skilled occupations	11%	9%	8%	7%	4%
Other characteristics
Health insurance coverage	93%	92%	89%	82%	51%
Above federal poverty threshold	87%	90%	87%	84%	78%
Homeowners: mortgages, or mortgage paid off	65%	68%	58%	42%	35%

 * This figure exceeds the total eligible-to-naturalize population of 8.4 million by more than 4 million because it includes almost 2 million legal temporary residents and more than 2 million lawful permanent residents (LPRs) who arrived from 2012 to 2017 but were not eligible to naturalize.

Source: Center for Migration Studies (CMS). CMS estimates are derived from American Community Survey (ACS) data. See text.

Naturalization is the final legal stage in the migration process, when immigrants merge with the native-born population to become full-fledged US citizens. As Table 1 shows, the naturalized population equals or exceeds the native-born population by several important metrics, ⁸ including (naturalized shown first): college degrees (35 vs. 29 percent), percentage employed (96 vs. 95 percent), self-employed (12 vs. 9 percent), average personal income ($45,600 vs. $40,600), percentage higher than the poverty level (90 vs. 87 percent), employed in skilled occupations (44 vs. 43 percent), health insurance coverage (92 vs. 93 percent), and percentage of homeowners (68 vs. 65 percent).

The figures in Table 1 also demonstrate the importance of moving from legal noncitizen status (column 4) to naturalized (column 2). The naturalized population has a higher percentage (than legal noncitizens) that has a college degree (35 vs. 30 percent); speaks English well, very well, or only English (84 vs. 67 percent); works in skilled occupations (44 vs. 37 percent); has health care (92 vs. 82 percent); exceeds the poverty level (90 vs. 84 percent); and owns their homes (68 vs. 42 percent).

The data in Table 1 demonstrate the benefits — to the United States and to immigrants — of “moving up” in legal status. On most of the measures in Table 1, legal noncitizens are better off than undocumented, and the naturalized population is on an equal footing with native-born citizens. Moreover, the US immigration system — which prioritizes the admission of certain nuclear family members of US citizens and LPRs — yields new citizens that have occupational skills equal to those of the native-born, as well as higher personal incomes and lower poverty rates. The legal foreign-born population in 24 US states and Washington, DC, and those from 94 source countries, have higher percentages of skilled workers than the US native-born population (Tables A1 and A2). These findings suggest that adjustment to LPR status and naturalization enhance the ability of the foreign-born to contribute to their communities and should be facilitated, rather than discouraged or prevented.

One point of consensus in the poisonous US immigration debate has been the importance of reducing the unauthorized population. This shared goal can be achieved, in part, through the existing legal immigration system. An estimated 8.4 million legal residents were eligible to naturalize in 2017 based on their time in LPR status. About 1.2 million undocumented residents live with 1.1 million eligible-to-naturalize relatives. In addition to the benefits described above, naturalization would enable this population to petition for immigrant (permanent) visas for certain undocumented family members in their households and to expedite the admission and adjustment of 890,000 of their “immediate relatives.” ⁹ In other words, naturalization of the 1.1 million legal residents could put 11 percent of the US undocumented population on a path to permanent residency.

The advantages of legal residence are demonstrated in Table A3, which compares the eligible-to-naturalize population with undocumented persons living with eligible-to-naturalize relatives who could petition for them. The legal residents are better off than the undocumented in all seven categories of well-being shown in Table A3. Yet, as described below, the administration seeks to block the path to permanent residency and citizenship for hundreds of thousands of persons each year, and to make this path far more difficult to navigate for others.

Foreclosing the Possibility of Legal Status and Revoking Status

The president has repeatedly expressed support for a “happy” resolution for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and other undocumented residents brought to the United States as children. On January 25, 2017, the new president touted his own “big heart” and “promised to take care of everybody” (ABC News 2017). Yet on September 5, 2017, Attorney General Sessions announced DACA’s termination, triggering a legal battle that the US Supreme Court has taken up in its current term. On the day of the attorney general’s announcement, the president again declared his “great love” and “great heart” for DACA recipients and his hope that Congress would “work something out that will make people happy and proud” (Reilly 2017). On the eve of the Supreme Court argument on DACA, the president tweeted that he would make “a deal” with Congress to allow DACA recipients “to stay,” but also claimed that some DACA beneficiaries were “tough, hardened criminals” (Rupar 2019). Based on this record, the president’s stated commitment to resolve the predicament he created does not seem credible.

In fact, the administration has mostly used the “dreamers” as a political pawn in an effort to extract funding for construction of the 2,000-mile US–Mexico border wall. For example, in February 2018, it opposed a bipartisan legislative proposal that would have:

Authorized $25 billion for the US–Mexico border wall;

In a case study of the politicization of US immigration agencies, the US Department of Homeland (DHS) issued a press release on February 15, 2018, which argued, as its title put it, that the bill would destroy the “Ability of DHS to Enforce Immigration Laws, Creating a Mass Amnesty for Over 10 Million Illegal Aliens, Including Criminals” (DHS 2018). Yet establishing rational enforcement priorities does not preclude immigration enforcement in nonpriority cases, much less prevent DHS from enforcing the law at all. Moreover, a 12-year path to citizenship for a fraction of the undocumented population hardly constitutes a “mass amnesty.”

Building a 2,000-mile wall between the United States and Mexico has been the Trump administration’s top enforcement priority, even though it would do nothing to stop those who have contributed the most to the US undocumented population over many years (i.e., noncitizens who enter legally and overstay their nonimmigrant [temporary] visas; Warren and Kerwin 2017a). Beyond funding for the wall, the bill would have eliminated a family-based visa preference category that the administration wants eliminated and would have prevented the parents of program beneficiaries from securing status, which the administration supports. In short, the administration opposed a bill in the most intemperate and dishonest terms that would have accomplished many of its objectives and, in doing so, turned DHS into its politically partisan mouthpiece. ¹⁰ In the circumstances, it would be difficult to imagine any bipartisan agreement on legalization and enforcement to which the administration would agree.

Besides the 2.9 million undocumented residents brought to the United States as children (Warren and Kerwin 2017b, 4), one could envision a number of other populations — both undocumented and temporary residents — that might be offered a path to citizenship, including the:

3.7 million intending immigrants waiting in family-based visa backlogs that in many cases exceed their life expectancies (Kerwin and Warren 2019).

The administration has not, however, pursued a legalization bill or administrative measures that would address the situation of any of these populations, short of removing them. It has opposed legislation to legalize DACA, TPS, and Deferred Enforced Departure recipients (Lind 2019). ¹² It has attempted to terminate the DACA program and rescind TPS for more than 90 percent of its beneficiaries. ¹³ It terminated the Central American Minors (CAM) program, a modest initiative that allowed children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala who qualified for admission as refugees or parolees (i.e., whose entry furthered a “significant public benefit”) to join their lawfully present parents in the United States. ¹⁴ As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump regularly accused President Obama of executive overreach in creating the DACA program. As these examples and those in subsequent sections illustrate, however, President Trump has wielded his authority on immigration in the absence of congressional action far more aggressively than President Obama did.

Regulatory and Administrative Barriers to Legal Status and Permanent Residence

The administration purports to favor highly skilled over family-based migration (White House 2019). ¹⁵ Yet the current immigration system, which prioritizes the admission of certain nuclear family members of US citizens and LPRs, has produced a legally resident population with the same percentage of skilled workers as the native-born population ¹⁶ (see Table 1). In addition, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has sought to admit “as few highly skilled people as possible” in the Trump era (Anderson 2019). Denial rates for H-1B petitions, ¹⁷ for example, have increased significantly.

On October 4, 2019, the president issued a “Proclamation” that would suspend and limit legal immigration by noncitizens who may “financially burden the United States healthcare system” unless such persons “will be covered by approved health insurance…within 30 days” of entry or possess “the financial resources to pay for reasonably foreseeable medical costs,” although it is not clear how the latter would be determined (Trump 2019). ¹⁸ CMS estimates that the health insurance requirement, which has been temporarily enjoined in federal court (Associated Press 2019), would not be met by more than one-half of US undocumented residents, blocking them from permanent residency, as they progress to adjustment of status in the United States or consular processing abroad.

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) — reviewing ACS Census data from 2014 to 2016 — found that 65 percent of green card recipients lacked qualifying health insurance as the proclamation defines it (Gelatt and Greenberg 2019). As a result, MPI estimates that this measure could deny “the entry of roughly 375,000 immigrants annually — mainly family-based immigrants” (ibid.). In effect, the proclamation represents a backhanded attempt to reduce legal immigration absent legislation, ¹⁹ with deleterious consequences for US families into perpetuity. Moreover, in a classic Catch-22, the administration seeks to prevent noncitizens without health insurance from graduating to LPR status and naturalization, which correlates with far higher rates of health insurance coverage (Table 1). If the undocumented could advance in status, the overwhelming majority would obtain healthcare coverage, but under the proclamation they could not secure permanent residency because they lack health insurance.

Moreover, this measure is inequitable, because lack of health insurance has far more to do with the structure of the US economy than it does with the ambition or attributes of immigrants. The proclamation criticizes those who “have not demonstrated any ability to pay for their health care costs.” Yet the inability to secure health insurance is not due to “any inherent or detectable deficiency in prospective legal immigrants, but in the sectors of the economy that typically employ them” (Wasem 2019). Essentially, the proclamation punishes low-income immigrants — whose low wages decrease the costs of goods and services for all Americans — for a condition they did not create and cannot control. The administration, of course, could work to expand health insurance to low-wage workers, but its immigration policies and harsh, anti-immigrant rhetoric seem to be the primary cause of the decline in health insurance coverage for the first time in a decade (Galewitz 2019).

In addition, like many of the administration’s decisions, the health insurance proclamation came without the opportunity for public notice and comment, and it faces a rocky legal path. At this writing, the proclamation’s implementation has been enjoined nationally (Ortiz 2019). In the meantime, however, it will certainly instill fear in immigrant communities and prevent many additional persons from seeking to adjust to LPR status.

The Presidential Proclamation follows DHS’s release on August 14, 2019, of its final rule on the “public charge” grounds of inadmissibility, which was temporarily enjoined on October 11, just four days before going into effect. The rule would also negatively affect persons seeking admission as immigrants (permanent residents) or adjustment to LPR status. Like the health insurance requirement, this rule would significantly cut legal immigration, particularly of lower-income persons with strong work histories. In fact, this seems to be its purpose. Stephen Miller, the administration’s most influential immigration restrictionist, reportedly views the public charge rule as a way to “weed out hundreds of thousands of applicants” for legal admission and adjustment to LPR status each year (Miroff and Dawsey 2018).

The rule is also redundant. Since passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, ²⁰ US citizens and LPRs who petition for their family members have been required to demonstrate that they can support the intending immigants at an income of at least 125 percent of the federal poverty guidelines until they become naturalized citizens or complete 40 qualifying quarters of work (Kerwin 2018). ²¹

The rule defines a likely public charge more expansively than the previous rule, as a person likely to receive a designated public benefit (or benefits) for more than 12 months in any 36-month period. It allows cash benefits and, in a departure from the past, noncash benefits — such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP), most forms of Medicaid, and subsidized housing programs like Section 8 Housing Assistance — to be considered in public charge determinations.

The CMS found that 2.25 million undocumented immigrants live with US citizen or LPR family members who could petition for a visa for them (Kerwin, Warren, and Nicholson 2018). Members of this group would need to overcome the public charge ground of inadmissibility at the time of their interviews — either in the United States or at the US consulate abroad — to determine if they would be granted permanent residency. CMS found that a large percentage of this population could be found inadmissible under the proposed rule because they possess characteristics — such as low incomes and low levels of education — that would count against them in a “totality of the circumstances” determination. Yet such persons are overwhelmingly employed and self-sufficient (Table 1). ²² The 2.25 million directly affected by the rule live with an additional 5.32 million persons who could be indirectly affected by it.

MPI examined green card recipients from 2012 to 2016 who had been in the United States for less than five years (Capps et al. 2018). ²³ It found high percentages possessed factors that would count against them, such as the following:

Lack of employment or school enrollment (43 percent);

Moreover, 69 percent had at least one negative factor and 43 percent at least two negative factors that would be weighed against them in a public charge determination, while only 39 percent had the heavily weighed positive factor of income at or greater than 250 percent of the federal poverty line (ibid.). MPI concluded that the proposed rule could “impose the kind of steep” legal immigration cuts championed by the administration (ibid., 3).

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that the rule would “likely lead” to diminished participation by immigrant families in Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and other programs, with the risk of decreased enrollment for the 7.6 million children living in a household with at least one noncitizen (KFF 2019). It concluded that decreased participation in these programs would “increase the uninsured rate among immigrant families,” and “negatively affect the health and stability” of these families and the “growth and development of their children” (ibid.)

Finally, the administration would also require persons seeking permanent residency to “first pass” a civics test and demonstrate English language proficiency (White House 2019), which are naturalization requirements under current law. Moving these requirements to an earlier stage in the legal immigration process would necessarily permit fewer noncitizens to secure LPR status, including highly skilled immigrants.

Making It More Difficult to Naturalize, Making Citizenship Less Secure, and Denying the Rights, Entitlements, and Benefits of Citizenship to Select Citizens

All citizens should enjoy the same rights, entitlements, and benefits, including the right to vote, to work in federal jobs previously foreclosed to them, to access public benefits, to expedited family reunification under US immigration law, and to immunity from deportation. Yet not all citizens can access the full rights and benefits of citizenship.

In a useful typology of citizenship denials, Emily Ryo and Ian Peacock identify both formal denials (denials of naturalization applications and loss of citizenship through denaturalization) and “effective denials,” which occur when state actions “curtail, derogate, or interfere with the exercise of full citizenship rights by certain segments of the US population” (Ryo and Peacock 2019, 10). They identify two categories of citizens that are “effectively denied” full citizenship rights: (1) US citizen children with detained or deported parents; and (2) US citizens who have been unlawfully detained or deported (ibid.). Indeed, even when their undocumented parents have not been detained or deported, US citizen children in mixed-status families do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship (Kerwin, Alulema, and Nicholson 2018). ²⁴ Unlike other citizens, they live in constant fear of family separation, and their parents often do not enroll them in benefit programs for which they are eligible (KFF 2019).

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has sought to expand both formal and effective citizenship “denials.” Under its stewardship, naturalization has become a more difficult and protracted process, and citizenship a less secure and less valuable status.

Recommendations and Conclusion

This article raises several technical problems and challenges related to the administration of the US immigration system. To address these problems:

USCIS should decrease naturalization and adjustment-related fees, withdraw its proposed rule, and abandon its plans to revise the fee waiver process.

Overall, the article documents and critiques the administration’s misguided policies — which seek to prevent any undocumented persons from gaining status, to divest documented persons of status, to cut legal admissions by decree, to create new barriers to LPR status and naturalization, and to make citizenship a less valuable and less secure status. The article recommends that these policies be reversed and replaced by policies that promote a fair and generous path to legal status, permanent residency, and naturalization; meaningful enforcement priorities; and integration policies that promote the full participation of immigrants in the nation’s life. It argues for policies that extend the full rights, entitlements, and benefits of citizenship to all the nation’s citizens. It also makes a strong statistical case that advancing in legal status improves the well-being of immigrants and their families, and benefits the nation.