During my last week in Arizona, I was at a small party where the Americans were complaining that there were a lot of jobs that just weren’t getting done. I spoke up loudly (OK too loudly) that the problem with the United States was that it needed more immigrants.  Everyone was quiet. I think I was right. 

The position of Trump and Miller on immigration was wrong-headed, because it was motivated by resentment against immigrants rather than an honest evaluation of the role they have played in the American economy. As Paul Krugman explained,

…negative views of the economics of immigration are all wrong. Far from taking jobs away, foreign-born workers have played a key role in America’s recent success at combining fast growth with a rapid decline in inflation. And foreign-born workers will also be crucial to the effort to deal with our country’s longer-term problems.

Many Americans don’t realize how well the United States has done at recovering from the pandemic. The Republicans in particular blame Biden, when really they should be acknowledging that in many respects he was right about how to deal with the consequences of the pandemic. Even though they spent an enormous amount of money trying to recover from the pandemic, the US has managed to stand-out compared to other western countries because it has combined disinflation with remarkably vigorous economic growth. According to Krugman, a stellar economist, the problem is that there has been an extraordinary growth in the American labor force. And where did that growth come from? It came from Immigrants!

This is what Paul Krugman said,

“How much of that growth was due to foreign-born workers? All of it. The native-born labor force declined slightly over the past four years, reflecting an aging population, while we added three million foreign-born workers.

Did those foreign-born workers take jobs away from Americans — in particular, native-born Americans? No. America in early 2024 has full employment, with consumers who say that jobs are “plentiful,” outnumbering those saying jobs are “hard to get,” by almost five to one. The unemployment rate among native-born workers averaged just under 3.7 percent in 2023, as low as it’s been since the government began collecting the data.

In fact, I’d argue that the influx of foreign-born workers has helped the native born. There’s a large research literature on the economic impact of immigration, which consistently fails to find the often predicted negative effects on employment and wages. Instead, immigrant workers often turn out to be complementary to the native-born work force, bringing different skills that, in effect, help avoid supply bottlenecks and allow faster job creation. Silicon Valley, for instance, hires a lot of foreign-born engineers because they bring something additional to the table; the same is true for workers in many less-glamorous occupations.”

There is no doubt that the pandemic produced enormous stresses on the economy and immigrant workers have helped to resolve those disruptions. This is how

Krugman put it this way:

 “Foreign-born workers are crucial to America’s fiscal future. To a first approximation, the federal government is a system that collects taxes from working-age adults and spends much of the proceeds on programs that help seniors, such as Medicare and Social Security. Cut off the flow of immigrants, who are largely working-age adults, our system would become much less sustainable.

So while the mess at the border needs to be fixed — and could be fixed if Republicans would help solve the problem instead of exploiting it for political advantage — don’t let that mess obscure the larger reality that immigration is one of America’s great sources of power and prosperity.”

 

Americans should stop scapegoating immigrants for their imaginary problems and should instead be embracing them for helping Americans get through the pandemic and the economic problems it created. As Krugman said in another Times article:

“There is “growing evidence that immigration is helping the U.S. economy — indeed, that it may be a major reason for our surprising economic success.”

America needs immigrants and benefits tremendously from them. Republicans don’t like that message, but it is true.

The fact is that Donald Trump and those he surrounds himself with, like Steven Miller, who drafts most of his immigration policies, such as the “Muslim ban,”  actually don’t like any kind of immigration at all. Or at least any immigration other than immigrants with extraordinary qualification. As economist Paul Krugman said,

“Trump and those around him are profoundly hostile to immigration in general. Partly this is xenophobia, if not outright racism. If you repeatedly declare, as Trump has, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” you don’t really care if they came here legally, you’re all but saying that what matters is whether they’re white.”

But there is more to it than that. Trump and his minions don’t understand how immigration affects employment and the economy. Neither did I until I read Krugman.  This is what he said, “People close to Trump have a zero-sum view of the economy, in which every job taken by someone born outside the United States is a job taken away from someone born here.” They don’t realize that the work of one immigrant worker can add to the work needed of other Americans.

But Trump and his fellows believe that work done by one immigrant always take away jobs from other Americans. The architect of Trump’s policies, Here is how Trump and Miller screwed things up:

“Back in 2020, Stephen Miller, one of the architects of Trump’s immigration policies, told Trump supporters that one of the goals was to “turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor.” Remarkably, Trump issued an executive order meant to deny visas to highly skilled foreigners, many working in the tech sector. Miller and his boss apparently believed that this would mean more plum jobs for Americans, when what it would actually do was undermine American competitiveness in advanced technology.”

America needs a lot of those workers it is trying to keep out of the country.By relentlessly attacking immigrants, Trump was making things worse for American workers!