Immigrants as problem, immigrants as solution

They complete us

Jim Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

My argument here (from America’s New Map) is simple: immigrants keep America economically strong by doing three things:

1. They buttress our demographic profile, “thickening” our working-age middle and only marginally burdening us with dependents (kids, elders). Amazingly, despite our standing as an advanced economy, we still roughly approximate a demographic dividend-like shape (thinner at top and bottom, thicker in middle).

   

   Juraj Mihalik and Tom Zorc data visualization from “America’s New Map”

2. Once inside, immigrants procreate above the replacement level, outperforming native-born by a stretch. That boost doesn’t last long, just a generation or two, but it helps keep us young.

Since the average immigrant is about 30-31 years old, and America’s median age is around 38-39 now, our willingness to take in immigrants slows our aging process relative to the rest of the world. It also hardly burdens us with some imagined invading army of young thugs.

Juraj Mihalik and Tom Zorc data visualization from “America’s New Map”

Those three reasons alone justify a vigorous immigrant inflow, in my opinion. America possesses the single largest immigrant population in the world at roughly 50 million, which equates to about 15% of our total population.

So, yeah, it strikes me as weird to have the GOP base its case for the presidency largely on demonizing immigration and immigrants.

Do immigrants “steal jobs”?

Here’s what I wrote in America’s New Map:

In the previous [turn of the 20th century] wave, European immigrant laborers competed directly with native-born workers then aspiring to join the middle class. In contrast, today’s heterogeneous immigrant mix complements America’s middle class by being split between high- and low-tech workers. Thus, economic “replacement” is an illusion because today’s immigrants cluster in professions where jobs would otherwise go unfilled for being too high-skilled or too low-paying and thus undesired by the native-born.

What we know from economic analyses is this:

• Immigrants are 80% more likely to start new businesses than the native born.

• Immigrants add to our consumption, triggering jobs for people and growing our economy

A recent “surge” of immigrants to the U.S. is expected to add $8.9 trillion (or 3.2%) to the nation’s GDP over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan scorekeeper for Congress.

• When our labor markets tighten, immigrants fill that space, preventing or dampening inflationary pressures. This is especially true in the leisure and hospitality industries, which otherwise would see their service capacity shrink as prices rise.

• To the extent that immigrants pressure the wages of others already here, the pool they most impinge upon are actually previous immigrants, which may explain why already-here immigrants are often more than happy to dump on those just arriving as “the problem!”

Native U.S. workers and immigrants, even those with similar educational backgrounds, tend to complement each other via their skills, making each other more productive and in essence jointly creating each other’s jobs …

For example, in a restaurant, a native worker with better command of spoken English might be a waiter, while an immigrant might do kitchen-prep work or wash dishes, tasks that don’t require such language dexterity. On farms, native workers might be supervisors or run high-tech equipment while immigrants handpick crops …

Research by Peri and Alessandro Caiumi of the University of California, Davis, finds that factors like “occupational upgrading” generally lead native workers who initially compete with immigrants for jobs to earn higher wages in the future.

In effect, then, zero out immigration and we’d lose economic capacity because of too few native-born workers entering the force (basically, the squeeze that China and other rapidly-aging advanced Asian economies are facing). You can complain about Whites not having enough babies all you want, but stemming the flow of immigrants is not an alternative when it comes to fostering long-term economic growth.

So, yeah, we hear so much about Springfield (just next door to my Yellow Springs in Ohio), but not enough about Dayton (just west of here): Dayton, with its low cost of living and abundance of jobs, is attracting immigrants in big numbers.

The foreign-born population in Dayton, like Ohio as a whole, is still relatively small — about 5%, compared to a national average of nearly 14%. But Dayton's immigrant community has grown large enough to be noticeable in some areas.

At Kiser Elementary School, for example, 40% of students now speak a native language other than English. Instructions on the walls are printed in Spanish, Turkish and the central African language of Kinyarwanda.

City Commissioner Joseph acknowledges there are costs associated with providing services to the new arrivals, and he wishes his city had more control over things like work permits.

On the whole, though, Joseph says Dayton has prospered by reaching out to immigrants rather than turning them away.

“This is the best the city has done in 50 years — since before I was born," Joseph says. And welcoming immigrants, welcoming everyone, has played a role in that.”

The same arguments hold for Springfield; the town just hasn’t matched Dayton’s efforts to process the influx. But, like the commissioner says, it’s worth it.

As for the notion that JD Vance tried to sell in the veep debate: that all these immigrants are somehow causing a housing crisis, that’s just pure BS. That’s the equivalent of blaming immigrants for a farming crisis:

As the country deals with an affordable housing crisis, a study by the Associated Builders and Contractors recently found that the construction industry could face a shortfall of 500,000 construction workers as early as next year. And the agricultural sector will continue to rely upon immigrant labor, as today over 25 percent of agricultural workers and 54.3 percent of graders and sorters of agricultural products are immigrants.

As a retired Catholic cardinal argued in a recent op-ed:

To be clear, Americans have every right to be concerned about the U.S. immigration system and the need to repair it, including reworking how the nation’s borders are managed. As a moral issue, however, we cannot continue to accept the hard labor and taxes of immigrants while also exploiting them and blaming them for our problems.

Amen, Father.

It is thus kind of nutty that we’re spending this election arguing about how much immigration “damages” America. As a staff writer for the Atlantic put it recently: