Immigrants Create Jobs for American Workers, Boosting the U.S. Employment Rate

Written by Walter Ewing 

When immigrants bring their skills to the U.S. labor market, everyone—immigrants and native-born workers alike—benefit from their company. Research has repeatedly shown that native-born workers are advantaged by the presence of immigrant workers in the labor market. 

A new report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) adds to this growing body of research. Specifically, the report finds that immigrants have no negative effect on the unemployment rate or labor force participation rate of native-born Americans. 

The presence of more immigrants in the labor force is associated with a small but undeniable increase in the labor force participation rate of natives, NFAP concludes. Likewise, more immigrant workers correspond with a small decline in the unemployment rate of the native-born. 

Even less-educated native-born workers are not harmed by immigration, while the labor force participation rate of more-educated native-born workers increases as immigration rises. 

These outcomes are sometimes lost in the midst of structural changes in the U.S. economy which are brought about by many factors—of which immigration is but one. 

For instance, unemployment skyrocketed during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and bounced back slowly. Meanwhile, labor force participation has been declining for years—a trend that accelerated with the recession and has yet to reverse. 

These trends are often analyzed in a vacuum, as if immigration was the only relevant variable affecting complex economic phenomena. But the U.S. economy isn’t that simple. 

In addition to quantifying the beneficial impact of immigration on natives, NFAP presents additional reasons why the outcomes of immigration are positive for most American workers. 

Immigrants generally do not compete directly with U.S. natives for jobs to begin with, because they work in different sectors of the economy and live in different parts of the country. Even if they do find themselves in the same place and the same industry, they are likely to perform different kinds of tasks. For instance, natives—for whom English is the native language—get more of the “communications-intensive” jobs, while immigrants who are not native speakers of English are more likely to work in jobs that require physical strength or exertion. 

It is important to keep in mind that the impact of immigrants on the U.S. economy in general and native-born workers in particular goes far beyond employment and wages. Immigrant-led households across the United States contribute hundreds of billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes each year. Residents of immigrant-led households wield nearly a trillion dollars in collective spending power (after-tax income). And millions of immigrant business owners account for one-in-five of all self-employed U.S. residents and generate tens of billions of dollars in business income each year. 

Taken as a group, immigrants don’t consume jobs; they generate them.

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com
http://inmigracionyvisas.com/a3807-Immigrants-Create-Jobs-for-American-Workers.html

Immigrants and Their Children Founded More Than Two-Fifths of All Fortune 500 Companies

Written by Walter Ewing - Business & the Workforce. 

The modern U.S. economy owes much of its success to the contributions of immigrants and their children. Among these contributions, it would be difficult to overstate the value of entrepreneurship. For instance, a new report from the Center for American Entrepreneurship (CAE) analyzes the role of immigrants and their children in 2017’s list of Fortune 500 companies. 

Companies founded by immigrants include AT&T; Verizon; Procter & Gamble; PepsiCo; Pfizer; Goldman Sachs; and Facebook. Those founded by the children of immigrants include Apple; Ford Motor; Home Depot; Boeing; IBM; McDonald’s; and Staples. In total, 43 percent of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. 

These companies—which span numerous industries, from high-tech to retail to healthcare—wouldn’t exist if not for immigrants and their children. 

CAE’s findings highlight just how critical immigrants are to the success of these powerhouse companies. Fortune 500 firms created by immigrants or the children of immigrants “are headquartered in 33 of the 50 states, employ 12.8 million people worldwide, and accounted for $5.3 trillion in global revenue in 2016,” according to the report. 

Immigrants and their children are most prevalent among the biggest of the Fortune 500 companies, comprising 52 percent of the top 25 firms and 57 percent of the top 35. More precisely, 18.4 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by at least one immigrant, and an additional 24.8 percent were founded by the child of an immigrant. 

Yet immigrant entrepreneurs are not only found at the upper reaches of the business hierarchy. According to an analysis of Census data by the American Immigration Council, immigrants also accounted for 20.3 percent of all self-employed U.S. residents in 2015 and generated $72.3 billion in business income. Immigrants also accounted for 21.9 percent of all business owners in 50 of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas in 2015. 

The authors of the CAE report conclude that its findings “demonstrate the remarkable and persistent importance of immigrants to the creation and growth of America’s largest, most successful, and most valuable companies.” 

Yet it’s important to keep in mind that entrepreneurship is but one way in which immigrants and children of immigrants add value to the U.S. economy. They are also workers, consumers, and taxpayers who contribute to economic growth and job creation in myriad ways.

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 
http://inmigracionyvisas.com/a3730-Immigrants-and-Their-Children-Founded-Companies.html 

It’s Not up for Debate: Immigrants Invigorate the Economy

Written by Walter Ewing MARCH 30, 2017 in Immigration 

As any reputable economist will tell you, immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy in many ways. Yet the often subtle complexities of immigration economics are largely absent from a March 24 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal authored by Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies. 

To begin with, immigrants are responsible for most labor force growth in this country now that the Baby Boom generation is aging into retirement. And immigrants add value to the economy through the goods and services which they produce through their labor. Immigrants (and their families) also spend money in U.S. businesses, which creates jobs for the people who work in those businesses. In addition, they also pay taxes to federal, state, and local governments, funding essential services and sustaining the salaries of government employees. Moreover, the businesses that immigrants so often create sustain the jobs of even more workers. 

However, Krikorian negates the economic contributions of less-skilled, lower-paid immigrant workers. Specifically, he states that the notion of immigrants “doing jobs Americans won’t do” is false because, even in less-skilled occupations, at least half of all workers are native-born. 

He fails to address the economic value of immigrant workers in those occupations. It would be more accurate to say that immigrants do jobs for which too few native-born workers are available. In other words, immigrant workers supplement the native-born workforce, expanding the labor force in certain occupations to a level it would otherwise be unable to attain. 

Consider healthcare. Demand for workers is strong at both the high-skilled and less-skilled ends of the occupational spectrum. Immigrants comprise 25 percent of all medical doctors and 20 percent of home health aides in the United States. These shares are even higher in some rural parts of the country where native-born healthcare workers are particularly scarce. And demand is set to grow even higher as the native-born population ages and needs more and more medical care. Immigrants will inevitably play even more important roles in all sorts of healthcare occupations in the coming years. 

More than just supplementing the native-born workforce, immigrants also “complement” native-born workers. For one thing, they bring their own special skill sets derived from work they did in their home countries—skill sets which don’t simply duplicate the skills of natives, but add something new. In addition, new immigrants are likely to fill different kinds of jobs than natives because they are not yet proficient in English. This, in turn, leaves natives to fill those jobs that do require mastery of English. The point is, immigrants and natives don’t simply substitute for one another. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Krikorian’s analysis, since he often conflates the two. 

Krikorian also mischaracterizes the forces that drive migration. His analysis suggests that half the world is poised to migrate to the United States and would do so if U.S. immigration limits were lifted, flooding the country with mostly less-skilled immigrants who would steal American jobs, drive down wages, and bankrupt the welfare state. What this demographic doomsday scenario overlooks is the crucial role played by labor demand in drawing immigrants to the United States. When the economy is booming, more immigrants come. When the economy slips into recession, fewer come. People tend not to migrate solely because they are dissatisfied with their home countries, but because the economic prospects of another are reasonably good. 

Perhaps Krikorian’s selective economics is a product of the ideological lens through which he views immigrants. Krikorian ultimately veers into xenophobic terrain when he states that we need more stringent limits on immigration to slow the growth of groups that do not sufficiently “assimilate” into American society —like those immigrants and children of immigrants who identify with “pan-racial” terms such as “Hispanic” or “Asian.” But who gets to define what it means to be “American”? Krikorian does not address that thorny issue. 

At the end of his piece, Krikorian reveals what is perhaps his biggest fear when it comes to immigration: a fear of “ethnic diversity” that might “overload” U.S. society. However, the United States has survived for centuries with very high levels of diversity. It has also survived periodic revivals of nativism in which some native-born Americans reject anyone who looks or sounds different than they do. 

Source: http://immigrationimpact.com 
http://inmigracionyvisas.com/a3578-Immigrants-reinvigorate-economy.html

Nazis Once Published List of Jewish Crimes, Trump Now Pushing to Do the Same for Immigrant Crimes

The Trump administration has announced plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants living in so-called sanctuary cities, where local officials and law enforcement are refusing to comply with federal immigration authorities’ efforts to speed up deportations. The plans for the weekly list, to be published by the Department of Homeland Security, were included in Trump’s executive orders signed last week. We speak to Andrea Pitzer. Her upcoming book is called "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps." 

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. 

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what President Trump has said he’s going to do: keep a list of, quote, "immigrant crimes"?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, this weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it. When he—I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has been a theme throughout. And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called—a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews. 

So this preoccupation with focusing in on one subset of the population’s crimes and then depicting that as somehow depraved and abnormal from the main population is something we’ve seen quite a bit in the past, even in the U.S. Before Japanese-American internment, you had newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle running about the unassimilability of the Japanese immigrants and also the crime tendencies and depravities they had, which were distinguished from the main American population. 

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, this flies in the face of all studies that have shown that the crime rate among immigrant populations in the United States is actually lower than it is among ordinary American citizens, but yet this is attempting to take isolated incidents or particular crimes and sort of raise them to the level of a general trend, isn’t it? 

ANDREA PITZER: It is. And I think it’s part of a disturbing narrative in which you strip out the broader context and the specificity of actions like this, and you try to weave them into this preset narrative of good and evil somehow, that really ends up being simple and dishonest and very counterproductive for the society as a whole. But yes, in general, these groups would want to keep a lower profile. They would want to stay off law enforcement’s radar. And so, this is one of the reasons that’s been suspected that it’s actually a lower crime rate. But if you get a few dramatic images—and don’t forget now, this won’t be coming out—you know, Breitbart has had this "black crimes" tag that they’ve used to try to do a similar thing in the past. And now we have Bannon in the White House. And it’s sort of a scaling-up and doing this with a different minority group, and you’ll have these, what will no doubt be, very dramatic narratives that will come forward that will eclipse the larger picture. And they’re going to have the imprimatur of a government report, which I think is another disturbing aspect. 

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Andrea Pitzer, about the White House considering a plan to make visitors reveal cellphone, internet data. Describe the role mass surveillance plays in authoritarian societies. 

ANDREA PITZER: Well, over time, we’ve seen that it’s very hard to have an authoritarian or a totalitarian society, a state that runs, without a secret police. And you can’t—what you need the secret police for is to gather information secretly. The surveillance techniques and abilities that we have today are really unparalleled in history. And while we can’t yet be sure what the Trump administration’s motives are, what they have at their disposal is far greater than what was had in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany. I’m thinking in particular of Himmler complaining that he had trouble keeping track of all the people he needed to, because he needed so many agents. But when you have the kind of technology that we do, you don’t need as many people, if you have the right tools to use. And so, the ability to gather that kind of information and then potentially use it, domestically or on foreigners who happen to be here, I think is something that’s worth paying attention to and to be concerned about. 

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author who writes about lost and forgotten history. Her upcoming book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Stay with us. 

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