But her message fell flat, as voters across the country doubted her resolve, associated her with the Biden administration’s failures at the border or were simply won over by Mr. Trump’s starkly xenophobic rhetoric.Most of Trump’s political comments around immigration related to his assertion that immigrants were “stealing” jobs from U.S. citizens. However, labor economists pushed back against his sentiments by explaining how immigrants are beneficial to the U.S. labor market and economy:
Immigrants take jobs but they also create new ones by spending in local economies and by starting businesses, economists said. One 2020 research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found immigrants are 80% more likely to become entrepreneurs than native workers.Currently, the manufacturing and agriculture sectors are experiencing labor shortages, and the problem can be especially acute in rural areas, where populations are declining. Immigration can be a solution to this labor shortage. Specifically, the U.S. should increase opportunities for employment-based visas for skilled and unskilled workers.
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.
The largest immigration raid in U.S. history in Postville, Iowa should educate us about the importance of the immigrant workforce and the impact of I.C.E. raids on host communities. The Postville raid resulted in 389 arrests in a town with just about 2,500 residents. In the wake of the raid, however, another 1,000 immigrants either fled the town or left to follow family members who were detained. As a result, the county lost seven percent of its workforce, and the factory soon went bankrupt. A different company bought the factory and hired immigrants from the Pacific island of Palau to work at the factory.
Thus, the void left by the detained immigrants was filled by another immigrant workforce.
Immigrants not only fill labor shortages in rural America, but they also bring an entrepreneurial spirit. Immigrants are eighty percent more likely to start a business compared to native-born Americans. This law review article by Professor Amarante documented the extent to which Hispanics and Latinos own small businesses even in rural places. He wrote in particular of Morristown, Tennessee:
But before I got to Morristown’s main street, I was shocked to see three tacquerias, a tortilleria, and a panaderia. I hadn’t seen signs in Spanish since I left Nevada and it felt a little surreal to see a traditional Mexican bakery on a main thoroughfare in a small town in East Tennessee.As the country moves into an uncertain future under a second Trump administration, it is more crucial than ever that conversations around labor shortages help change the current political rhetoric around immigration.
To read more about immigrants in rural America, see These boots were made for immigrants and Addressing the rural lawyer shortage has never been more important.
5 comments:
This is what rural areas voted for. They opted for racism over economic well being. Hard working immigrants deserve better than the towns they were saving.
I completely agree with you that a lot of the national rhetoric on immigration is completely antithetical to what the data shows. It is universally shown that immigration is good for the economy. I think the statistic you included about how immigrants are 80 percent more likely to become business owners is a perfect example.
Your post reminded me about a Senate hearing that I attended about mass deportations in DC. In the hearing, one of the speakers, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, opined on how immigrants make positive impacts on the workforce. Talking about how immigrants fill labor shortages AND bring in entrepreneurial spirit is so incredibly important, especially these days. I think this is definitely something we need to talk about more often because politics fail to talk about the personal stories that immigrants have and how they benefit the community.
This article also made me think of something a teaching assistant said in a college class I took on International Law. It was several years ago, and I might botch what he said slightly, but he essentially explained that Germany calculates the number of immigrants it needs each year to improve economically and accepts many people in on that basis. Here’s an article I found that provides more detail on the subject: https://govassist.com/blog/germany-2024-a-new-era-for-immigration-balancing-asylum-and-skilled-worker-policies. I think this example highlights that running a campaign based on both mass deportations and “the economy” is nonsense, which many people are just starting to realize now that seem to be headed towards a recession.
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