July 2026
By Thai V. Le, Manuel Pastor, Mary Lopez, Patrick Mason, Clara Alvarez Caraveo, Jeanine Erikat, and Uriel Serrano
While immigration is a central driver of U.S. economic growth, labor force expansion, and demographic sustainability, restrictive legal pathways and enforcement-centered policies prevent millions of workers from fully contributing to the economy. One reason for the policy stalemate is that immigration policy is not just economic. Rational debates about immigration’s positive or negative impacts are generally overwhelmed by a sense of anxiety about the changing nature of a host society. The current blockage on sensible immigration and immigrant policy – and the current regime of excess enforcement – is driven by xenophobia and racial unease, in part triggered by the fact that the U.S. is slated to become majority people of color by the middle of this century. Any policy must deal with these political and social dynamics as well as with the economic reality that the U.S. needs immigrants.
In our latest brief and paper, The Wealth of Welcome: Immigration Reform That Works for America, we argue that America’s enforcement-heavy immigration strategy is failing economically, fiscally, and morally. We lay out a three-part alternative: (1) a citizenship-centered regularization program for the nation’s 13 to 14 million undocumented residents; (2) expanded and legally durable pathways for future immigration, including recapturing millions of unused green cards and shielding refugee and asylum programs from political whiplash; and (3) federally funded and regionally coordinated Offices of Immigrant Inclusion to knit together the fragmented patchwork of local integration services and inclusion efforts.
Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America is a collaborative initiative bringing together leading economists, scholars, and policy experts to develop bold, research-backed ideas to build a stronger, fairer, greener, and more inclusive economy for all Americans. Through a series of policy briefs and supporting research papers, the project offers practical solutions to today’s biggest economic challenges while advancing a long-term vision of an economy that works for working people.
Read our other publications by research area
