Trump says that immigration is not "good for our country" because it is "changing the culture. These comments fit the worldview that Trump has articulated since campaigning for office — one in which immigrants are a menace.
Countries, especially the United States, have long benefited from immigration and diversity. Here are just five reasons why immigration is a good thing. Image: Abdul El-Sayed. Technically, they do.
But so does the passage of time, new technology, social media, a native-born population, and much more. In reality, immigrants change culture for the better by introducing new ideas, expertise, customs, cuisines, and art.
Far from erasing the existing culture, they expand it. Nowhere is this more clear than in the United States, where hundreds of different ethnic groups live in harmony under the banner of the American flag building a collective culture. Immigrants have brought blue jeans, Google, tacos, Apple, hip-hop, and way too many other things to the US than we can list here. Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan also testified that the legislation would have significantly increased border security and helped to address some of the challenges that the administration is now dealing with along the border.
Earlier this month, the U. House of Representatives passed with bipartisan support H. The legislation would offer protection to people such as Donaldo Posadas Caceres, a Honduran TPS holder and member of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, who has worked for the past 20 years on some of the tallest bridges in the country, making needed repairs and hanging larger-than-life American flags.
Although the legislation would directly affect up to 2. What gives me hope that we may find our way back to those conversations in the years ahead is that the American public is having a visceral, negative reaction to the relentless, daily attacks on immigrants and refugees that we are now experiencing. According to Gallup polling, a record-high three-quarters of all Americans now say that immigration is a good thing for the country—the highest level of support in decades. Put simply, Americans want real solutions, and they want an immigration system that actually works and that works as designed.
Moreover, we will have positioned the country to truly harness the enormous positive economic benefits that immigration holds. Silva Mathema. Philip E. Americans want real solutions, and they want an immigration system that actually works and that works as designed. Robert W. Indian computer programmers who come to the United States on H-1B guest worker visas, for example, see their earnings increase by a factor of five or six.
Computer programming work, after all, can in principle be done remotely. Clemens finds that less skilled workers can obtain wage gains of tenfold or more by moving from poor countries to rich ones. These enormous benefits matter in part because foreigners are still human beings whose lives and interests ought to count for something in our calculus.
The benefits to immigrants are also relevant because the economy is not a fixed pie. If an Indian-born computer programmer moves to the United States and quintuples his income, he is much more likely to buy an American-made car than if he were stuck in Asia earning a dramatically lower income.
Growing exports of American manufactured goods has become an obsession, but increasing domestic sales has the exact same benefits. Bringing the customers to our shores makes them easier to reach, and massively increasing their incomes massively increases their ability to buy things. In per capita income terms, the United States has, by most measures, been overtaken by Switzerland.
The Netherlands is relatively close behind, and when you consider inequality and quality of public services, the typical Dutch person may well enjoy a higher standard of living than the typical American. This kind of thing matters. But at the same time, there is a reason that when Americans feel anxiety about national decline, they tend to think of China and not Switzerland.
If Americans had listened to the counsel of the Know-Nothing movement in the s and drastically curtailed immigration from outside of Protestant Europe, it would probably still be a rich country today. But it would be a very different kind of rich country from the one we know — one with fewer, smaller cities mainly focused on exporting agricultural goods and other natural resources to the wider world.
A place more like Canada or a supersize version of New Zealand, rather than an industrial and technological powerhouse that intervened decisively in two world wars and anchored a coalition of liberal states to defeat communism.
A declining working-age population, seen already in Japan and some southern European countries, poses some serious challenges to a national economy. It tends to push interest rates down to an incredibly low level, making it difficult for central banks to respond to a recession.
It also makes it more difficult to sustain public sector retirement programs and elder care more generally. There are some offsetting upsides less strain on transportation infrastructure, for example , and, like anything else, the problems are solvable. Fundamentally, however, an America that is shrinking is a country that is going to be a lesser force in the world than an America that is growing. That the more homogeneous America will be not just smaller and weaker but also poorer on a per capita basis only underscores what folly it would be to embrace the narrow vision.
That hundreds of millions of people around the world would like to move to our shores — and that America has a long tradition of assimilating foreigners and a political mythos and civil culture that is conducive to doing so — is an enormous source of national strength. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Immigration makes America great. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Immigration bolsters the federal budget Immigration skeptics often pivot from the basic terrain of labor market economics to the notion that immigrants — especially the dreaded illegal ones — are a drain on public resources. Pew Pew Research Center But as Bianca Bersani of the University of Massachusetts has shown , on a year-by-year basis, young immigrants are much less likely to be involved in criminal activity.
Immigration-skeptical experts are rare and eccentric No issue in economics is entirely unanimous, and because immigration is a contentious issue in partisan politics, it sometimes leads the media to overplay the extent of expert disagreement about the economics of immigration.
Immigration enriches culture and expands options Wages are easy to measure, so many studies focus on them for the sake of methodological simplicity. For that same period, the children of immigrants had a more favorable net impact on government revenue than either first-generation immigrants or the rest of the native-born population. This is chiefly because of higher education and higher income, which caused them to pay more in taxes than the other two groups. Immigrants may also offer a way to slightly slow the rising age distribution of the American population.
Scholars have expressed concern over the low fertility rate and the rising age of the American population, which they say could strain government budgets in the coming decades as the number of people who pay into public-sector benefits, such as Social Security and Medicare, falls in comparison to the number of people collecting those benefits. An aging population would also require more medical care. Analysis of Social Security Administration projections indicates that the number of workers paying into Social Security per Social Security beneficiary will be roughly 2.
Fertility rates in the country have been generally below the "replacement rate," the fertility rate necessary for a population to maintain itself 2. Centers for Disease Control. Immigrants tend to be younger than the populations of their receiving country with a larger proportion of them being of working age, which has led economists to argue that net immigration represents a means of stabilizing the aging populations of economies in the global North in general.
An increase in immigration to the economies of the global North is desirable from a demographic point of view, Giovanni Peri, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, has argued. From a policy standpoint, this means increasing the number of immigrants allowed, reducing other constraints on immigration and planning for future inflows," he said.
One additional point: An aging society needs healthcare workers. Previous studies have also suggested that immigrants often work in medicine-related fields. During the Trump administration, the U.
The Biden Administration has reversed some of these policies, even walking back some of the core commitments of the Trump presidency to restrict immigration flows. A report from the U. They also suffered from the economic impact of business closures because they work predominantly in industries impacted by them. About one in five immigrant workers lost their jobs between February and April alone, the report said. The Brookings Institution. Accessed May 30, IZA World of Labor. Economic Policy Institute.
National Bureau of Economic Research. The White House. Pew Research Center. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.
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