235 - The Immigrant Achilles Heel: Bad News and Good

            The bad news is very real.  The massing of migrants from Central America, Venezuela, Haiti, and a host of African and even Middle Eastern countries on the southern border of the U. S. -- more than 3 million clamoring to be let in during 2023 -- could well sink President Biden's reelection chances. The migrant problem, no matter how over-hyped by opportunistic Republicans, plays extremely strongly in the NIMBY backyards of electorally essential southern and midwestern states, and even in liberal bastions like Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts. 

            Democratic strategists would absolutely love it if President Biden could just (until after the election) say "No More, we're full up."  That is what the liberal mayors of Boston, Chicago, and New York would prefer, and what might sell well in the depths of the American heartland. But Biden's liberal backers, especially those in Congress, would be enormously angry. To defeat his orange-scalped, womanizing, lustily lying likely opponent, he needs every potential voter to show up at the polls in November and cast their ballots enthusiastically for Biden.

            He could shift some independent voters into his column if he decisively closed all borders to incomers.  He might even garner some Republican support.  And, bar the hard-core populace deluded by Trump, by being hard-nosed and dramatic about curbing the migrant flow, Biden might thereby secure his re-election. It would show 80-year-old muscle, too. In theory, Biden could make the compelling case that immigrants are not popular, that he was merely hearing the voices of citizens (even African Americans and Latinos) who somehow believe (inaccurately) that American prosperity and their own individual livelihoods are terminally threatened by immigrants who take their jobs, sponge off the welfare payments that American taxes have provided, and bring       crime and diseases into our country.  That last is Trump's vermin siren song.

            None of it is true, as I have said before in this place. We are a nation of immigrants. We have been made strong and productive over centuries precisely because waves of poor, hungry, displaced immigrants have contributed to the overall betterment of their fellow Americans and, some as Nobel Prize winners, to improve the prospects of everyone on the globe.  (Trump is an heir of immigrants. So are Republican Congresspersons currently holding up assistance to Ukraine and Israel in order to register their vote-pulling anti-immigrant proclivities.)

            And the compelling irony is that these United States, with declining demographic projections and comparatively low birth rates among native born, desperately need immigrants, even those with minimal skills.  How many of the grandfathers or great-grandfathers of my readers arrived in his country with modest skill sets and became valued shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, inventors, industrialists, and true capitalists?  That, after all, is the American dream, oft realized.

            Neither President Biden nor many other politicians can sell the obvious:  Immigrants are not an enduring threat to these United States.  Yes, absorbing and educating them is costly and often cumbersome.  But, as Americans, we did so with successive waves of incomers, and it worked.  Indeed, even now, research shows that immigrants strive harder than their native counterparts, learn English rapidly, and proceed from low skill occupations up the laboring ladder to more remunerative occupations.  Today's landscape laborer becomes a contractor; a dishwasher becomes a restauranter; a home health aide gains control of a chain of nursing homes. Even so, in the short run of 2024, Biden only with extreme difficulty and decisive action is going to remove the ball and chain of immigration from around his ankles.

            The good news, in a sense, appeared in Friday headline in the state where Biden least needs help. The Boston Globe screamed "Migrant Workers Filling a Big Need." That article went on to say that employers in the Bay State are eager to lay their hands on new workers. Massachusetts has nearly 222,000 job vacancies, twice the number of unemployed persons in the state in early 2024. In the U.S. overall about 8.8 million job openings exist.

            Lower-wage positions are especially difficult to fill: Housekeepers, home health workers, carers for the developmentally challenged, cleaners of hospital rooms, packagers of all manner of difficult oils and materials. Many shoveled snow last week. Migrants, emphasizes the chief executive of a Waltham-based non-profit firm that deals with disabilities and the disabled, "are doing the jobs that Americans don't want to do."   (We could hear the same story in Britain, in France, in Spain, and in Italy. Germany has 630,000 unfilled jobs.)

            In order to shift new migrants from being burdens on the state to being employable contributors to its overall uplift, Massachusetts has smartly begun to provide skills training and English-language schooling for immigrants so that they can leave emergency shelters and become productive employees. Many, even most, immigrants "are motivated to work"-- to better themselves just as waves of immigrants in the 1860s and 1900s did so successfully.

            "These folks are very resourceful. If you give them an opportunity, they will find ways to make it happen," says the director of the MassHire North Central Career Center in Leominster. Governor Maura Healey's administration is also trying to nudge the Federal bureaucracy (something which could be massaged by Biden) to hasten giving migrants in shelters official work permits. Doing so would accelerate the process of moving immigrants out of shelters into the mainstream of employment. And then they could slide over the relief rolls.

            If Massachusetts fills long-term vacancies with recently arrived immigrants, and thus makes industries, hospitals, and other enterprises that much more productive, so can other states do the same. Thus, today's immigrant crisis could go away. But it would also help enormously if the Biden administration could gain funding from Republicans greatly to expand numbers of immigration service judges, of the social service workers who look after hordes of asylum seekers, and those many others who cope thanklessly with the waves of documented and undocumented multitudes who seek better and safer lives in our fortress America.

            Biden must either break the asylum logjam at the border or try vigorously to make the case that immigrants are what this nation needs.   Or -- preferably -- both.

Dear subscribers:  Starting tomorrow, I will be out of the U.S. without a computer until the second week of February.  But I will be back then, and writing. Thanks for reading throughout 2022 ands 2023. Much more will appear in your inboxes in 2024.