The state of Georgia recently passed strict new requirements for immigrant farm workers. Immigration Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh looks at the results of a new report released by the state. Workers are fleeing to other states, causing a labor shortage. Some farmers find they lose less money by actually letting their crops rot in the fields rather than comply with state and federal rules.

Have a listen here.

Immigration Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh tells Jakadrien Turner‘s story and explains what it means for the immigration reform debate. Turner is a 14-year old girl from Texas who was mistakenly deported to Colombia. Turner is not Hispanic, does not speak Spanish, and has no connections to Colombia whatsoever. It took six months of pleading and legal maneuvering before authorities allowed her to return home. This was not an isolated incident. The way to prevent future cases like this, Nowrasteh argues, is radically simplifying our overly complex immigration and citizenship laws.

American immigration restrictions have a long history, but they have never been a good idea. Economist Thomas Leonard documents how even some Progressive Era economists supported immigration restrictions and minimum wages because they wanted to shut members of what they called “low-wage races” out of the American labor market…

Fears that immigrants will wreck our economy are probably the biggest reason substantial barriers to legal immigration remain on the books. But immigrants don’t take our jobs, lower our wages or depress the American economy.

Virtually all economists who study immigration find that it provides a small but positive impact on the economy. It should be obvious that immigrants don’t steal jobs from the native-born. Since 1950, the labor force has more than doubled but long-run unemployment is essentially unchanged. As we’ve added more workers, we’ve added more jobs.

Read the whole thing here.

A widely cited study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform claims that undocumented immigrants cost taxpayers $113 billion per year. Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh, author of the new CEI Web Memo “A FAIR Criticism: A Critique of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s ‘The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers.’” finds that the study counts costs but ignores benefits, uses shoddy data, and is harmful to the ongoing immigration debate.

“With Rick Perry suddenly pushing a flat tax and Herman Cain substantively revising his 9-9-9 revenue plan, GOP candidates may finally relinquish their feverish immigration obsession — one that’s destructive, distracting, demented, and downright dumb. Why spend a wildly disproportionate amount of energy exploring an issue that few voters consider a top priority, and where all Republican candidates fundamentally agree, rather than emphasizing real differences on the economic problems that will decide the election?

“Listening to the toxic trash talk at the Las Vegas debate, or watching attack ads that are already polluting the Internet, one might assume that the public viewed illegal immigration as the greatest challenge facing our civilization and believed the fate of the republic hinged on Mitt Romney’s past reliance on a lawn-service company that hired undocumented workers.

“Actually, no major poll of the last year — no, not one of them — showed robust public interest in immigration. This month, CBS News asked respondents to name ‘the most important problem facing this country today.’ Less than 2 percent came up with ‘illegal immigration,’ while a dozen other concerns, led by ‘the economy and jobs,’ of course, finished higher on the list. Over the summer, surveys from Bloomberg and Fox News found 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively, who identified immigration as a priority, with gas prices, the war in Afghanistan, health care, the deficit, education, and even nebulous concerns like ‘partisan politics’ and ‘moral values’ more frequently mentioned by the public” — syndicated columnist Michael Medved writing at thedailybeast.com on Oct. 24.

Republicans are even worse than Democrats on immigration issues. Medved is right. It would be nice if the GOP candidates would just stop talking about it. I don’t care if doing so would help them at the polls or not; I just think that economically illiterate anti-foreign bias is an ugly thing to behold.

E-Verify is a program that checks the immigration status of new hires. The House is expected to vote on legislation that would make E-Verify mandatory nationwide. Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh thinks E-Verify should be scrapped altogether. Not only does it make it more expensive for companies to hire people, it misses over half of the undocumented immigrants it is supposed to identify.

SB 1070 proponents claim that it decreased the unauthorized population in the state, and they’re probably right. But for that “achievement,” SB 1070 likely slowed Arizona’s recovery by increasing the regulatory burden for business and raising the cost of hiring all workers in Arizona.

Read the whole thing here.

President Obama made a speech on immigration reform this week. He is looking for a dance partner in Congress to ease restrictions on the immigrant-dependent high-tech sector. Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh points out that there are several bills already in Congress that would do just that, including the STAPLE Act and the DREAM Act.

Don’t buy into this baseless propaganda – it is straight from Adolf Hilter’s playbook

As he concludes, “whatever your position on immigration was before, if one of these three myths was holding you back, this should push you more on the margin toward wanting more open borders, not less.”