New Column: Immigration Reform, Dual Language Learners, and GDP

It would be nice if political arguments stood or fell based on the moral justice of the claims involved. But that’s not how our world works. So advocates for the underserved often make recourse to economic arguments. This should be familiar turf to early education advocates, who have taken to arguing that investing in high-quality pre-K to children from low-income families will lead to large cost savings and other returns for the community.

Something similar is brewing in the dual language learner advocacy community. A new book, edited by UCLA’s Patricia Gándara and the University of Texas-Austin’s Rebecca M. Callahan, touts evidence that immigrant children who grow up to be bilingual may do better in the marketplace than those who become monolingual English speakers. This is critical information for the country’s burgeoning, blistering immigration reform debate, so I wrote a column for Talking Points Memo:

Deep down, though, I think that this round of American immigration debates are really driven by competing visions of what America is — and ought to be. To put a sharper point on it, there’s a tension etched into the national seal on those dollar bills in your wallet. Each American’s ideological mileage on immigration varies according to which end of the “e pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”) equation pulls strongest on their heartstrings. Either we’re a country primarily constituted by our breadth of diversity (‘plures’), or an ‘unum’ nation that constitutes a common cultural, racial, ethnic, and linguistic whole.

The bad news: these are deep, intuitive, core convictions. They’re thickly infused with morality. It’s very difficult to persuade someone to see the promise of the American national project in new terms. But it’s not impossible. Especially in uncertain times, nothing has the same rhetorical juice as an economic argument.

So here’s one: native-born Americans simply aren’t having enough kids

http://newamerica.net/events/2013/an_america_with_fewer_children

to sustain our social contract, especially promises we’ve made to older Americans. We’re barely replacing ourselves. Several years ago, the Urban Institute found that “children of immigrants accounted for the entire growth in the number of young children in the United States between 1990 and 2008.” These children will make up an increasing percentage of tomorrow’s workforce — and tax revenue from their earnings will help support American retirements. Given the looming wave of retiring Baby Boomers, it’s time to see these kids as worthy investments. We need more or less as many as we can get.

Click here to read the rest.