Looking for a low-cost solution to many of our most intractable problems in the United States?  Maybe you’d like to see urban neighborhoods prosper, and watch the working poor find better jobs, buy homes and invest in their own education?  On top of all that, just maybe you’d like to see those benefits spread across society by breaking barriers that separate the haves and the have-nots.

   Interested? 

   It’s cheaper than you realize, faster than you know, better than you’d expect and – here’s the kicker – we know how to do it because we’ve done it before.

   It’s called L-E-G-A-L-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N.  Not hard to spell, pronounce or remember, and it should flow trippingly from the tongue when someone asks you for ways to improve the economy.

   Before I do the numbers, as they say, let’s go over the basics of why the U.S. economy should benefit from the legalization of undocumented immigrants.  The immigrants themselves would find better jobs, have access to credit, lending and saving, and finally obtain professional licenses now denied to them in many locales.  They will take off economically.

   The general public shares in the prosperity, getting more taxpayers, more business creation, and a leveled playing field with no one working for artificially low wages.  Along with that, the nagging fact of life – social disparities between rich and poor -- should ease somewhat when we all play on the same field.

   If only we could demonstrate these things with numbers it would be so helpful. 

   As it turns out, we can. 

   Using data representing immigrants who went through the legalization program of the late 1980s and early 1990s, my colleagues and I asked the question of whether the legalized immigrants improved their own economic situation and whether they began to catch up with the rest of society.

   Our research – published recently by the American Immigration Council -- suggests strongly that legalized immigrants lowered their poverty rate, raised their wages and purchased homes in a remarkable way. 

   For example: groups with poverty rates nearing 30 percent saw their poverty level fall by half.  Their hourly wages rose by 70 percent.  Their home ownership rate almost quintupled.

   Much of the legalized immigrants’ progress seems to have come with the added benefit of narrowing at least some of the gap between them and the rest of society.  The immigrants’ poverty rate edged much closer to that of the general population.  Their property ownership level made them almost indistinguishable from the rest of us.

   So while our nation’s economic mandarins seek ways to turn the U.S. economy around, let’s begin talking about immigration reform as a way to contribute toward that goal.  As economist Sherrie Kossoudji of the University of Michigan says, noting the price that undocumented families pay for their lack of legal status, “legalization would be the cheapest federal workforce development and anti-poverty program for children in history.”  

   It’s time to use findings such as these to reframe the discussion on undocumented immigration.  The twelve million are not a problem but a potential.  Immigration reform isn’t something you do in spite of the economy; it’s something you do for the economy.

   (Rob Paral is Principal of Rob Paral and Associates, a consulting firm in Chicago.  He is also a Fellow with the American Immigration Council in Washington, D.C., and the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.)

   ©2009