Here are question-and-answer interviews with three experts on immigration that Tribune-Review reporter Carl Prine did recently:

Madeline Zavodny, a professor of economics at Georgia’s Agnes Scott College, a liberal arts college for women.

Background: Her doctorate in economics is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her research spans a wide area, from American families and economic demography to immigration policy and its effects on U.S. commerce and taxpayers.

She cut her teeth as a highly-respected economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in both Atlanta and Dallas. She’s served as a researcher for both Germany’s Institute for the Study of Labor and the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. Her work also has helped to undergird the policy prescriptions from The Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonpartisan forum with more than 500 Republican, Democratic, and Independent mayors and business leaders who support immigration reform to spark jobs for Americans today.

Last year, she testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the complex issue of immigration, which is why I contacted her.

Prine: Thanks for helping me out, Professor Zavodny! I thought that today we would discuss the economics of immigration.

The Trib’s readers, like many across the country, are watching the humanitarian crisis that’s playing out along the U.S.-Mexican border, most especially the plight of tens of thousands of undocumented juveniles who have surrendered to authorities in a bid to gain sanctuary here. Most came from the crime-ravaged nations of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

The reality, however, is that very few of these kids have arrived either in Pennsylvania (about 500 minors) or Western Pennsylvania (perhaps only a couple of dozen) and our region doesn’t hold many Latin Americans.

Instead, our immigrant community is dominated by highly-skilled, well-educated and increasingly affluent workers drawn to our STEM industries, most especially our growing medical field. In fact, the largest numbers of foreign-born residents are found in our wealthiest suburbs.

When the Brookings Institution studied this phenomenon a few years ago, they determined that Pittsburgh has the highest disparity between those highly-skilled, well-educated immigrants and those who are low-skilled workers (about four to one). Only about 6.1 percent of our foreign-born workforce failed to earn a high school degree and most graduated from college.

Obviously, this makes Pittsburgh look more like Silicon Valley than El Paso, but many people here don’t seem to realize it.

Isn’t this the sort of immigrant population we want to attract? Shouldn’t area leaders be screaming for more immigration?

Zavodny: These are great questions. The immigrant population in Pittsburgh is pretty unique. As you point out, it’s very highly educated. The world-class education, high-tech and health care sectors in Pittsburgh attract a different type of immigrant than most of the rest of the country. Pittsburgh’s immigrants are not only much more likely to be college graduates than immigrants elsewhere but they’re also much more likely to be from Asia instead of from Latin America.

This is absolutely the group of immigrants that most benefit the economy. From an economic perspective, we benefit the most from immigrants who are most unlike us. Most Americans have graduated from high school, and many have attended college. The economy therefore benefits the most from inflows of immigrants with very little education or with lots of education, particularly graduate degrees. These immigrants fill gaps in the U.S. labor force.

But low-education immigrants tend to come with more social costs than highly educated immigrants. Highly-educated immigrants, especially those who work in scientific and technical fields, have sizable positive spillovers onto the rest of the economy.

My research for the Partnership for a New American Economy shows that every additional 100 foreign-born workers in STEM fields with advanced degrees from U.S. universities is associated with an additional 262 jobs among U.S. natives. Schools like Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh attract foreign students who create jobs if they stay here.

Prine: Local experts on immigration have told me that the region, like the rest of the U.S., is aging and that we have a relatively low birth rate. Without immigrants arriving here, our population likely would have plummeted more. Explain how this phenomenon is playing out and talk about how much the “immigration surplus� benefits, or harms, the local and national economies.

Zavodny: The aging of the population is a problem the U.S. as a whole is lucky to not yet face in a serious way, unlike Japan and much of Europe, but it is already an issue in some parts of the country.

Most immigrants are working age, which is when everyone makes their biggest economic contribution. But working-age immigrants tend to have children, which can put a strain on local schools and create tension in the short run. But we’re unquestionably better off if immigrants’ children receive a high-quality education since then they’ll contribute more to the economy in the long run.

Immigration alone isn’t going to “save Social Security.â€� Immigrants make up only about 13 percent of the U.S. population and 16 percent of the workforce—in Pittsburgh, those numbers are closer to 7 percent. We would have to have far more immigrants if we’re relying on immigration to reverse the aging of the U.S. population instead of just slowing it a bit. It’s clear from the reaction in much of the U.S. to the children coming here from Central America and the fact that Congress can’t pass any immigration-related legislation that we’re not ready for that.

Economists agree that overall immigration does increase U.S. income — what we call the “immigration surplus�— but we also agree that this surplus is small. It only adds about 0.1 percent to the economy, or around $17 billion a year, with immigration at its current levels.

Now, I personally wouldn’t sneeze at $17 billion, but that’s not much compared to the size of the deficit.

Julie A. Dowling, associate professor of Latina/Latino Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Background: You can tell a lot about a scholar by checking out how he or she edits a book, which is how I discovered Dowling, the co-editor of “Governing Immigration Through Crime: A Readerâ€� and author of the work’s very strong introduction.

It shouldn’t have surprised me. The more I read her peer-reviewed pieces on Latinos as varied as Afro-Cubans and Mexicans living along the Texas border, the more I understood how careful she was with numbers and the trickier sort of ethnographic research that too often policymakers overlook.

Armed with a doctorate in sociology from the University of Texas, Dowling is an associate professor of Latina/Latino Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she has produced groundbreaking scholarship on the nettlesome issue of how immigrants construct self-notions of race:

How does the federal government think of race? And how do Latino immigrants, when filling out the Census forms, make use of these labels?

Perhaps she feels this in her marrow. She’s the daughter of a Mexican-American mom from the Rio Grande Valley and an Irish-American father from the Midwest.

But these sorts of discussions are important because “Latinoâ€� and “Hispanicâ€� or “Chicanoâ€� don’t really describe someone’s pigmentation. When one thinks of Latin or Hispanic or Chicano culture, one is really talking about what’s often a mixture of European, African and aboriginal peoples, most often united merely by one of the Romance languages such as Spanish or Portuguese.

And that’s kind of misleading because if you look at Guatemala, one of the crime-ridden nations shedding tens of thousands of émigrés now rushing to the U.S. and other countries in the hemisphere, less than three out of every five adults there actually use Spanish as their primary tongue. The rest rely on Amerindian languages such as Xinca or K’iche.

As for language, Dowling also is a co-author of the 2012 article in Social Science Quarterly “Who Doesn’t Value English? Debunking Myths About Mexican Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward the English Language.â€�

Alongside Christopher G. Ellison and David L. Leal, Dowling found that the empirical evidence gleaned from the Survey of Texas Adults (SoTA) indicated that, as the title puts it, Mexican immigrants in that state want to learn and are using English, just like generations of earlier immigrants did after getting off the boat from Ireland or Italy or China.

Prine: In my interview with criminologist Jonathan Simon, he discussed how people too often “code� Latinos in racist language. Are you seeing this both in the many media and on Capitol Hill? And how is this “code� being used in the ongoing debate about immigration?

Dowling: I think that there are a lot of negative stereotypes that people have about immigrants. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Leo R. Chavez’s research on this? He has a book called “The Latino Threat.â€� It’s basically about the way Latinos are stigmatized.

First of all, they’re all described as “undocumented.â€� They’re all “freeloading on our country.â€� They’re all bringing with them a great deal of negativity to our country. But his research debunks all that. His research has found that immigration, overall, is very positive for our society.

So there’s continual social science that is coming out that shows the benefits of immigration for our aging society. We very much need their labor and we already benefit from undocumented labor in our country. It’s an asset for people in our country to have immigrants coming in and it would be even more of an asset if we could provide these immigrants with a pathway to citizenship so that they can become full members of our society.

And yet people still believe all this negative hype — often spread by the media — that all these undesirable people are coming. Another good book for people to look at is Otto Santa Ana’s “Brown Tide Rising.â€� It talks about how immigrants are portrayed in the media as a “tideâ€� or a “flow.â€� It really describes American fears that are rooted in the changing demographics of our country.

People shout, “They’re coming here and they’re illegal! That’s against the law!â€� What they really mean is “there are too many brown people comingâ€� and they’re not comfortable with that.

Ritu Sharma, co-founder and executive director of Women Thrive Worldwide

When I was working on some background information about the crisis of poverty and violence that’s causing tens of thousands of children and their families in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to flee to neighboring countries and the U.S., I stumbled across Sharma’s advocacy work.

Sharma studied international economics at Georgetown and then did her grad work at Johns Hopkins. At the ripe old age of 26, Sharma spearheaded a coalition of more than 100 nongovernmental organizations to help sway policymakers at the United Nations Summit on Social Development as an official delegate for the U.S. contingent.

Since then, she’s become known as a powerful voice for women in the developing world and, in 1998, co-founded with Elise Fiber Smith the nonprofit Women Thrive Worldwide. A key goal of the organization, of which she is executive director, has been to prod policymakers to prioritize gender issues when the U.S. doles out foreign aid.

One of her charity’s partners is COMUCAP — Coordinadora de Mujeres Campesinas de La Paz — a western Honduran collective of female farmers that’s trying to attack crime by rooting out poverty and educating the next generation of Hondurans.

Honduras is very poor – 1.3 million people there subsist on less than $1 per day, and it’s ravaged by crime, most especially from organized narcotics syndicates vying with the government for control of the nation.

So far, it’s been a success. The initiative has trained thousands of women in sustainable agriculture and all the children of the members go to school. Household violence has dwindled to almost nothing, according to the nonprofit.

COMUCAP is probably best known as a fair-market producer of commodities such as coffee and aloe, but I was more intrigued by another group Sharma has featured in her work — Mujeres Unidas en Acción, 21 women who like to say that they’ve been freed from the kitchen to become farmers.

With a boost from the World Food Program, they studied local agricultural markets and realized that the advice that they were getting from others – to grow bulk commodities like coffee – wasn’t nearly so financially lucrative as the cultivation and selling of corn and, especially, frijoles.

Along with their profits has come an initiative by Mujeres Unidas en Acción to train women on how to confront domestic abuse.

What I wonder about is whether these two planks — the empowerment of women to become business leaders and to take a stand against violence — could be part of a larger solution to tamp down the skyrocketing crime rate in Honduras and trim the number of refugees streaming to the U.S. and other nations in the region. Below, she suggests that COMUCAP might be a better example but we can learn from both organizations.

Prine: I’ve been talking lately with really smart people about U.S. immigration policy, the ongoing humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-Mexican border and how war often shapes the migration flows to America and, later, how these émigrés come to see themselves.

You’re a first-generation American originally from Punjab, an area that straddles India and Pakistan that’s long been roiled by violence, both between the nations and internally by various ethnic and religious groups.

How has your own immigrant experience informed the work that you do now?

Sharma: I understand the deep drive of people to leave their homeland with only the dream of making a life better than the one they would have by staying.

I thank God every day that my parents left India and raised me in America. If I had been born and raised in Punjab, I would have faced violence, daily discrimination, and a bombardment of messages that I’m a lesser being because I’m a girl. Even if my parents tried to shield me from all of that, they could never save me from the rest of India.

That’s a big reason I have chosen to work on making things better for women and girls, wherever they are now. So very few will be as lucky as I.

Prine: The reason why I reached out to you today is because of your championing of the eastern Honduran collective Mujeres Unidas en Acción in Santa María, specifically your call for reporters and policymakers to take a harder look at the root causes of the exodus of juveniles from Central America to our border.

Let’s talk about Honduras first. What’s driving so many kids to make the harrowing journey from Honduras to the U.S.? Why are they coming here? And how are women affected by this?

Sharma: I cannot imagine the pain of a mother saying goodbye to a daughter, a daughter who has survived a rape and wants to avoid another and another.

They may never see each other again. Her daughter may die along the way and she would never know. I can’t fathom a family having to make that choice.

People, especially children, do not make the dangerous journey north unless there is something more dangerous waiting to attack them at home — whether that’s hunger, violence, or destitution.

The kids fleeing Honduras for the United States are being driven out by violence — most certainly by gangs, by police, by men in the community. They are not safe anywhere anymore. Add to that an economy that is not creating enough jobs, combined with a farming sector that can’t compete with cheap imports From the United States. These kids have little hope of making a living in Honduras, even if they survive the violence.

Millions of women in Central America, including Honduras, have already become single parents because their partners have come to the U.S. to find work. Now their children are going too, leaving them to run households and communities on their own.

Groups like COMUCAP and Mujeres Unidas en Acción are laying the groundwork for a better life for their children, and especially daughters. I don’t see this as an intractable issue, but I do think the U.S. needs to commit to more concrete assistance to address the underlying poverty in Central America, challenge the cartels’ sway, make Central American governments more accountable to the people, and empower women and men in Honduras to take on the social structures that condone and perpetuate violence against women and girls.

Over the last 15 years, U.S. assistance to Central America has been slashed in favor of sending help to Africa. There’s no doubt Africa needs it, but given that we spend less than half of 1 percent of the U.S. budget on helping the poor abroad, I think increasing it for Central America is an investment in solving the long term challenges with immigration.

Prine: You spent time last year with the women of Mujeres Unidas en Acción to study how they had reduced violence in their community. What’s their secret? Is the collective an outlier or can it inform a larger strategy to eradicate poverty and tamp down crime?

Sharma: We saw this most clearly in northern Honduras with COMUCAP.

The women started by creating a safe space to connect. That support network has been essential for a lot of women and girls in the community who I talked with. But the leaders of the collective understood that they needed to go further in their efforts. They really worked to promote economic opportunity for women so that they had a greater sense of what they could do and more influence. Women Thrive and others worked to help link them to economic opportunities that in which they participated. And, from what we’ve seen on the ground, that goes a long way toward changing how men treat women at home.

What was really extraordinary about last year’s trip was the extent to which we saw men and boys in the community valuing the economic contributions of women. And working to protect them.

Prine: Looking beyond Central America itself, we now have tens of thousands of Central American children who have arrived in our country. What should we do with them? How should we handle this mass migration from Central America in the future?

Sharma: We’re a small organization with limited capacity, so I’m probably not the best person in Washington to ask about the domestic policy implications.

I will say that — as an American, a mother, a social justice advocate, and a daughter of immigrants — this is a call to our nation’s collective conscience. I believe we cannot force them to go home until home is safe — and that means we need to help make that happen. How we respond — whether we close our borders and shut our eyes to the terrible circumstances that are driving so many refugees to leave their homes and their families — is a real test of our nation’s character.