218 - Immigrants Need Not be Repulsed: We Need Workers

            Voters everywhere want to feel safe and secure.  Whether or not, objectively, crime rates are rising, the perception that crime is increasing naturally motivates voters to opt for candidates at every level of decision-making who promise to keep citizens safe – who declare that they will be “tough” on criminals. Voters associate immigrants with crime, and also fear others – newcomers or peoples of a different color or background – getting something that they feel they are owed, and cannot get.

            Immigrants suffer from the same stigma as burglars and murderers -- even though, statistically, new immigrants engage in many fewer criminal acts than do settled citizens. There also is no statistical accuracy to the charge that immigrants take jobs away from legitimate folk. They do not depress wages or lower native-born incomes. Nor do they sponge on welfare, depriving citizens of their rightful places at the trough of governmental largesse.

            But many immigrants (in the American case) speak little English; in Europe, they arrive with limited knowledge of spoken German or Italian, and their French (depending on their places of origin) is heavily accented. Syrians and Afghans may indeed speak no European languages. Some Africans may only communicate in an indigenous language.

            But what is striking is that whatever their backgrounds and no matter how poorly schooled and financially impoverished immigrants are, when finally allowed to work in their adopted countries they hustle. They take menial jobs and work their way up; they add measurably, so economists say, to overall national productivity (falling just now in the United States and Britain). Rather than being a nasty drag on economic performance and living in a bottomless welfare pit, immigrants often raise general living standards, improve the lives of civilians in their adopted countries, become (if permitted) soldiers and sailors, and make sure that their sons and daughters accomplish the dreams of parents everywhere: to better themselves and to live in successful ways that do not demand another migration.

            Venezuelans take the arduous and unsafe overland route through the Darien Gap in Colombia and Panama, cross (recently with buses) through Costa Rica and Nicaragua and join hordes of Hondurans and Guatemalans escaping gang warfare, drug conflicts, and jobless environments.  Haitians flee their collapsed Caribbean state, without a functioning government and gang ridden since 2019, Haiti is unsafe. So, following the Darien path and joining Venezuelans and many other Spanish speaking would be residents of these United States, Haitians head north. 

A good number those choosing to immigrate along arduous pathways have relatives or acquaintances flourishing in North America; others simply know that American unemployment rates are at historically very low levels; if they can cross the border into the United States they will earn more in a week than they have ever earned in three months. And they will be freed from gang violence, from drug smuggling cartels, from despotic governments, and from – what else?  -- crime.

            Eritreans escape compulsory military service and the totalitarian control of their cruel ruling autocrat if they can somehow sneak over a state border into war-torn Sudan and make their way through harsh terrain, avoiding exploiting smugglers and others, to the Mediterranean Sea. There, assembled into precarious flotillas, Eritreans, Kenyans who have crossed two deserts, Somali fleeing endless combat with jihadists, Ugandans who are fed up with corruption and despotism, and even legions of Francophone personnel from Niger, the Central African Republic, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, try to cross the rough Mediterranean seas to Europe.  If they get into Europe they can seek a better life, and a safe one.

            But as much as many leaders of Europe fully understand both the pull and push of migrancy today and sympathize with what the young hustlers and victimized families are escaping when they try to enter Europe illegally, their constituents want none of it. Just like many inhabitants of the United States, established citizens want to bar the doors of entry. Texas governors, mayors of big cities across America, and legislators at all levels accumulate miles of voter favor if they campaign to erect high border fortifications, bus the immigrants to big northern cities, or try to push them back across the Mexican border from Arizona or Texas.

            Nevertheless, Britain’s prime minister this week sacked his rabidly anti-immigrant minister of home affairs for her intemperate pressing of the anti-foreigner case (albeit her parents are from Mauritius and Kenya).  Immediately afterwards, Britain’s Supreme Court said that her plan to deport illegal boat crossers of the English Channel to Rwanda (paying Rwanda in cash) was unlawful.  Yet it is a plan that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had also supported.

Closer to home, the orange-faced vituperative ex-president and possible felon gains popularity by shouting incendiary sentiments about undocumented immigrants. They are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he declared.  He also rants about those who let immigrants in: “We …will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin [a word Hitler used] within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.” He calls immigrants “rapists” and criminals, referred to them as “animals,” and promised to round them up and put them in giant transit camps.  Immigrants are “vermin,” too.

What is dangerously disturbing, and worrying for the White House, is that Trump preaches to a receptive choir. A percentage of the American electorate (and the rise of the right in Europe parallels our experience) absolutely embraces Trump’s trash talking. There is a fear out there of incomers taking the livelihoods and destroying the ways of life of the long settled industrial working classes, farming communities, and small-town merchandizers that are the supposed backbone of America.

But what is missing in these discussions both across Europe and North America (and in Japan, even China)), is that the long-settled nations are aging out. The median age in Europe is 45, in the U.S. 39. In sub-Saharan Africa, soon to comprise a full quarter of humanity (up from an eighth now), the median age is 19.

The United States is shrinking, too. Before the end of this century, our numbers will stop growing. Our total population will peak at 370 million in 2080, and then diminish to 366 million in 2100.  From now to the next century we are expected to increase our total size by less than 10 percent, a far lower percentage increase than any prior decade in history. Adding immigrants now will help let us continue to maintain our 370 million.  Indeed, according to one of America’s most well-respected demographers, “Immigration is absolutely essential to the nature’s future population growth.” William Frey of the Brookings Institution also says that immigration is needed to counter America’s extreme aging.

Europeans and Americans need workers, especially those willing to take low-skilled jobs, become carers, or take on the manufacturing or agricultural tasks that few Britons, few French, and few Americans want to perform.  Vermont, with a very low unemployment rate of 1.9 percent, are devoid of people to plant and harvest crops, serve customers in shops, and fill industrial vacancies.  We in the prosperous West are in fact desperate for new workers.  So why not let them in?  Why not accommodate at least some of the unskilled and undocumented people who crowd our shores and, if experience is any guide, will in a generation become hard-laboring, productive, aspiring Americans and Europeans.  Some will even run for president in the United States and serve as prime minister of Britain.

The irony is that in these United States we are all (bar Native Americans) descended from immigrants. The Irish and Italians who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to join descendants of the Mayflower voyage (and others) were initially described in the same derogatory manner that Trump now portrays huddled masses attempting to cross into the promised land. Even Germans, like Trump, were suspect along with the Jews escaping pogroms and fleeing to our early twentieth century cities.

Canada and Australia welcome skilled immigrants. And those with cash to invest.  We cannot even match Canada’s approach, for Canada at least recognizes the demographic truth: that it needs new peoples to populate the prairies and add vigor to its slim number of 40 million inhabitants.

Americans refuse to recognize the same verities and our politicians rarely say that these United States grew prosperous only on the backs of immigrant toil. George Washington and John Adams did not do it themselves.  Nor did their family descendants make it on their own.

The logic is obvious. But no matter how rational welcoming immigrants may be, President Biden knows that stopping them – at least through 2024 – is a surer path to electoral success.  Alternatively, he can explain why we should now be welcoming the persons who mow our lawns, blow our leaves, drive our buses, and eventually teach our children and run for public office.  It is a case that must be made both here and in Europe, if not immediately than certainly after the 2024 national election.