Immigration impact on Ohio
- Ohio was home to more than 450,000 immigrants in 2011, which is more than the total population of Atlanta, Ga. That accounts for about 4 percent of the state’s population. About half of the foreign-born residents are naturalized U.S. citizens eligible to vote.
- Immigrants and the children of immigrants account for 3.1 percent of all registered voters in the state, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Rob Paral & Associates.
- Latinos and Asians (both foreign-born and native-born) account for 1 in 20 Ohioans and wield nearly $18 billion in consumer purchasing power, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia..
- Ohio was also home to the nation’s second largest Somali population as of 2009, according to SomaliCAN, a Columbus-based community outreach organization. As of 2009, Central Ohio was home to more than 45,000 Somali Americans.
- Unauthorized immigrants comprised 1.2 percent of the state’s workforce (or 70,000 workers) in 2010, according to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center.
- Unauthorized immigrants in Ohio paid $103.9 million in state and local taxes in 2010, according to data from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. That includes $7.5 million in property taxes; $71.3 million in sales taxes and $25.1 million in personal income tax.
Source: Immigration Policy Center
Ohio is thousands of miles from America’s southern border, but as the Senate this week continues work on long-anticipated immigration legislation, many say the outcome will have a tremendous impact on the state’s economy and on the lives of those who have moved here from abroad.
According to the United States Census, about 4 percent of Ohio’s population is foreign born, with half of that naturalized and eligible to vote.
But there’s evidence that it’s a growing population: In 2011, Dayton launched the “Welcome Dayton” program, which encourages immigrants to live in that city.
Nearly everyone is a critic of the current system, which was last reformed in 1986. But that’s where the agreement ends. Among the biggest issues: Whether or not to give the roughly 11 million undocumented residents who came here illegally a path to citizenship.
Ohio’s two senators say they see the need to reform the current system. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said he’d vote for a measure being debated that would provide a path to citizenship after those here illegally pay a fine, back taxes and go to the back of the line. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, still has reservations.
He is primarily concerned about the bill’s provisions on employment verification, saying he believes the bill does not do enough to bar employers from hiring undocumented workers. “Whatever reform we may adopt in this Congress will fail in the long run if we do not eliminate the enticement to come to our country to work illegally,” he said.
The bill the Senate is debating would create a path to legal citizenship, but only after the person applying for citizenship has paid back taxes, fines, and gotten to the end of the line behind those already waiting. That process could take 13 years. It would also add $6.5 billion to secure the nation’s southwest border with Mexico, allow more high-tech and lower-skilled workers to come to the country on short-term visas, and require all U.S. business owners to check the immigration status of hires.
Proponents say the issue is a moral and economic imperative.
On the economic end, they argue that immigrants have helped Ohio, and that creating a path to citizenship would bring undocumented workers out of the shadows and allow them to become taxpayers. One study, by economic and financial analysis company the Perryman Group, found that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from the state, the state would lose $4 billion in economic activity, $1.8 billion in gross state product and 25,019 jobs.
The economic imperative has spurred some cities within the state to welcome immigrants with open arms. Jan Lepore-Jentleson, executive director of East End Community Services in Dayton, said in recent years the city has seen a thriving Latino and Russian-Turk population. In spots of Dayton that had once been dilapidated, new businesses are opening up. Many immigrants are buying foreclosed houses and remodeling them.
The program, she said, “is exactly what we all had hoped for.”
Others worry that giving undocumented residents a path to citizenship is unfair to those who try to use the existing immigration system. They worry that the undocumented drive down wages and provide cheap competition to unskilled U.S. citizens looking for work.
“It doesn’t make sense to say everyone here illegally gets to stay,” said Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates a “low-immigration” approach to U.S. immigration policy. He cites statistics indicating there are enough unskilled Americans who need jobs that the United States shouldn’t have to allow more immigrants in to fill them.
But proponents also argue there’s a moral end of the equation.
Yassir Al-Mubaslat, 45, a Palestinian Muslim who came to the United States from the Israeli West Bank on a six-month visitor visa in 1993, is one of those “good people” who became ensnared in the immigration system, said his lawyer, E. Dennis Muchnicki.
He took a job as a cook at a Columbus restaurant and overstayed his visa. After what Muchnicki described as a miscommunication with his previous lawyer in the late ‘90s, Yassir missed a hearing on his status, making him subject to deportation.
In 1999, he met Jacquetta, a divorced mother of two. They married two years later. Afterward, the Department of Homeland Security granted Yassir a spousal immigrant visa, making him eligible for a green card based on his marriage to an American citizen.
Jacquetta got a job with the state and Yassir was hired as a chef. The two children, Olivia and Sean, now 21 and 19, respectively, grew close to Yassir. “He was their emotional support,” Muchnicki said.
On Sept. 29, 2006, Yassir was instructed to meet with immigration officials on his request to reopen and adjust the deportation order from missing the hearing years before. At that meeting, he was arrested and held for 90 days in the Seneca County Jail in Tiffin, where illegal immigrants were housed.
On Jan. 3, 2007, immigration officials flew Yassir to Jordan and left him on a tarmac. “He was scared, he was really scared because he didn’t know what was going on,” Jacquetta said.
She has spent the last six years trying to get him back.
In some pockets of Ohio not thought to be heavy with immigrants, residents see the population growing.
Muchnicki said there never has been evidence that Yassir is anything but peaceful man, and immigration officials have acknowledged that he is legally married to an American citizen. Yassir was cleared by the U.S. Consulate in Athens to return. Then came a letter from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem stating it would need another 6 to 12 weeks to process Yassir’s visa.
Muchnicki said the system is “in total chaos.”
“We’ve followed the rules and we’ve won,’ he said. “But still, it’s taken all this time and Yassir still is not here with his family.”
Carl Ruby of South Charleston, near Springfield, said he thought he lived in a community with a low percentage of immigrants. But then he realized the degree to which they helped the local dairy industry. His religious faith, he said, drove him to become involved with the issue. Last week, he and a coalition of five religious and business leaders went to Washington, D.C. to lobby for immigration reform.
The former Cedarville college administrator compares the efforts to the civil rights movement. “People who are not directly affected by it need to step up and support it, he said. “I want to be on the right side of history, and I view immigration reform as an issue like that.”
Joe Hallett of the Columbus Dispatch contributed to this article
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