Immigration, each legal and illegal, has been a contentious issue within the U.S. for greater than 100 years and now’s taking a very central role within the 2024 election.
This can be a complex economic issue that affects nearly everyone within the U.S., whether or not they realize it or not.
Effects are diverse. Many individuals’s lives could also be made higher by one effect of immigration and worse by one other — often at the identical time.
Immigration is vital at a macro level, affecting our nation’s economy as a complete. Yet for many individuals, the sharpest effects are microeconomic — affecting individual people, corporations or communities.
Taking a step back and considering basic facts and economic principles involved is useful.
Data from the federal government’s American Community Survey show that at the tip of 2022 there have been 46 million people within the U.S. who were born in other countries. This involves 14% of the full population. This was a rise from 36 million, or 12% of the population, in 2005. The annual average over those 17 years could be around 600,000, however the rate just isn’t stable. Some 1.2 million people entered in 2022 and the full for 2023 will probably be even higher.
We’ve had periods of very high immigration before, particularly between the tip of the Civil War in 1865 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The influx seen in eastern cities like Recent York and Philadelphia aside, more locally, that was also an era of European settlement in Minnesota, with high influxes from Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Germany and parts of the Austrian empire. Nearly all got here legally — and that was not hard due to our near complete openness in whom we admitted. As with today’s influx of East African and East Asian peoples in Minnesota, small numbers of immigrant settlers quickly became large and influential communities.
In absolute terms, we’re at a record variety of total foreign-born people within the U.S. population. As a percentage of the full, we remain a bit below the 15% of the Nineties. Since we hit 31 million foreign-born residents in 2000, numbers have increased again by half. Note that because some foreign-born people die every year, the number of recent immigrants over any period has to exceed the web change.
Our history of immigration as a political issue has almost all the time focused on ethnicities, and today it’s entirely on our southern border and on physically blocking movement across it. Nevertheless, that is barely one source of migrants. Perhaps surprising to many, people coming in legally by air after which simply “overstaying” their visas have outnumbered southern border crossers over a few years.
Our history of it as an economic issue has centered mostly about jobs, housing and welfare. More about that in a bit.
Also, we episodically admit large numbers of refugees. As noted above, the wave of individuals fleeing Vietnam and Laos in the last decade after 1975 modified the population, culture and cuisine of St. Paul tremendously.
Over 90,000 Afghan refugees have arrived for the reason that U.S. withdrawal there in 2021. That is tiny in comparison with the numbers who fled to adjoining countries like Pakistan. Since early 2022, we even have taken in over 30,000 Ukrainians. Most got in because they’d some family or other ties here, but several thousand gained individual refugee status. We even have arrange special categories for those fleeing female genital mutilation or violence due to their LGBTQ identities. Nevertheless it is difficult to find out on a case-by-case basis the degree to which their situation is true.
So political policy is bedeviled by establishing a distinction between people migrating to flee political, religious or sexual persecution, discrimination, or gang violence versus those migrating to earn extra money and have more prosperous lives. Here’s where the economics and politics collide, but the issue is that one cannot neatly divide people into these binary categories.
On paper, we’ve a legal commitment to offer applicants for asylum a full and fair hearing on their circumstances. But full due strategy of the veracity and severity of claimed persecution often requires more time and resources than overloaded U.S. immigration courts need to do the job. It would require foreign travel for the investigator or a military of contract investigators in myriad other countries, often ones during which poking into the facts of persecution would put the investigator into grave danger. So we’ve a backlog of over 1.6 million asylum applications pending resolution.
Most Americans don’t understand the problem of asylum seekers and, if questioned, may advocate simply revoking any special treatment for refugees. The catch is that we’ve signed international treaties during which we promise to follow certain rules. These were negotiated many years ago by past administration, primarily those of Truman and Eisenhower, and ratified by the Senate.
We could simply renege on such past guarantees. In spite of everything, that’s what Donald Trump did with past trade treaties. His de facto repudiation of past guarantees made by us have largely been continued by his successor, Joe Biden. Yes, there may be cynical opportunism in every country’s foreign policy sooner or later. But repudiating guarantees we made prior to now does undermine our credibility, and that may come home to roost eventually.
As for economic issues, considerations of supply and demand enter in. What aspects, apart from expected earnings, affect potential migrants’ willingness to make their often difficult treks? Consider the benefit of travel and communications. The wide-body jet has replaced the steerage ships of the last century, so, for instance, one can get from many countries in Africa or Asia to Central America in a single or two relatively low cost flights after which make one’s way on to the U.S. southern border. Adjusted for inflation, international air travel costs only a fraction of what it did 50 years ago.
Furthermore, the web and smartphones also facilitate many steps. It now is less complicated for smugglers and migrating customers to search out one another, particularly if one already has some relative or other contact already in the US.
Now consider the demand side — who wants these immigrants here? This issue also goes back centuries, including Irish men to work constructing canals and railroads before the Civil War, women from southern and eastern Europe for the burgeoning garment industry sweatshops of old Recent York, and Slavs from the identical regions for mines, steel mills and heavy manufacturing.
Today, hundreds of non-documented Hispanics work on large dairies within the upper Midwest. Many more work in meat-cutting plants, on farm fields picking fruit, or in hotels cleansing toilets. When a business owner needs one other employee, they don’t go to the car parking zone of a constructing products store to select up someone waiting for a job. As an alternative, they confer with their Mexico-born foreman about relatives or neighbors back home with skills and work attitude.
This demand side for employees is ignored in indignant calls to “control our borders,” at the same time as those self same people inadvertently profit from immigrant labor each day. While many Americans see migration as an invasion, many migrants see it as a job fair. A whole bunch of hundreds of U.S. employers don’t blink an eye fixed at hiring someone with dodgy papers, and yet a few of these same people may support a candidate due to their guarantees to curtail illegal immigration.
The hypocrisy cuts across all sectors — from large employers to households completely happy to search out a low-price, docile roofing or driveway contractor while tut-tutting about illegals. And to high-income, high-education white collar liberal “elites,” who sneer at xenophobic outcries against immigrants, knowing these immigrants won’t compete for his or her upper-class jobs or housing or go to the identical schools as their kids.
Way more could possibly be said. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman would scoff at our efforts to “control the border” without penalizing employers of non-legal employees. Other economists take a look at a rapidly aging population and plunging birthrates and warn of labor shortages not far into the longer term. More on all this in every week or two.
St. Paul economist and author Edward Lotterman could be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.