The United States benefits from immigrants

With things so polarized these days, speaking for immigrants is like defending poison oak. So if Christian charity, which many wrongly claim starts at home, does not have much traction, let’s look at it economically.

We need immigrants. The U.S. birthrate is barely replacing population, something economists tell us we need if we are to enjoy prosperity. We have to have more and younger buyers and sellers and workers. While nativists usually argue that immigrants take jobs, let’s look at which ones they mean. Low-paying jobs with few chances of advancement, such as stoop labor, are shunned by most who make this argument. Yet they would be the first to complain if a pint of strawberries cost $50, as it would if native-born Americans decided to work in the sunny outdoors harvesting crops that grow close to the ground. These would not accept the criminally unfair wages currently given to field workers. Immigrants without the proper papers cannot unionize. So growers abuse them illegally.

Most waves of immigration were greeted with the gripe that foreigners are taking our scarce jobs.  In an era when U.S. manufacturers have little compunction and less government regulation concerning the exporting of jobs, this rattles some. But consider what features characterize most waves of immigration, using my own ancestry as an example. Between 1880, when the U.S. opened its doors to foreigners, and 1924, when it closed them, 4.5 million Italians streamed ashore. The poverty in the south following the unification of Italy under Garibaldi in 1870 became extreme as wealthy northerners assumed control of the new country and proceeded to crush their countrymen to the south worse than had the Spanish and French imperialists before this.

Never wanting to leave so beautiful a land but desperate to feed themselves, they boarded steamer ships in search of the golden opportunity they heard America held. Unknown to natives in the U.S., the Italian arrivals had little intention of staying, much less living on any kind of welfare. Their whole idea was to come here, work hard and make the kind of money possible then for hard work, and then return to their beloved Italy where, with some financial stability, they could live out their lives where they began them, speaking the language they knew best. That is why, of the 4.5 million Italians who came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1924, more than half returned to Italy. It was not because they were dissatisfied with America. And even more would have repatriated if their children had not objected. This comes as news to most nativists.

So it should come as news that most Latinos who immigrate here have the same intention: come to the land of opportunity, legally if possible, make a sizable stash, and return to where people respect them, speak their language and have much in common with them. Further, while here, many Latinos send money home to relatives. This helps the U.S. as it tries to sell goods abroad for its own livelihood. Those overseas now have some resources to buy our exports.

It will also come as news to nativists here that this sending of money to foreign relatives is many times the U.S. foreign aid they think is being wasted overseas when we have so many problems and needs here at home. Besides, they are unaware that most U.S. foreign aid consists of coupons that nations abroad may only use to buy U.S. weapons.  It is not cash given to poor people in distant lands.  Not Haiti or Sierra Leone or Chad but Israel is traditionally the biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.  And about 20 other nations outrank us proportionately for percentage of budget given to foreign aid.

Tea party people are quick to condemn immigrants whom economists say we need, even for selfish reasons. They pass over the inconsistency of their wanting fewer regulations while they want to multiply them against newcomers. Big Government is a menace to them, but they never object to the monstrously Big Military. They reject ill-defined “socialism” as they dutifully cash their Social Security checks. They defend Big Insurance as it cancels them for pre-existing conditions. And of course they do not want the 12 million immigrants without papers to enjoy health-insurance reform while they do. On behalf of my ancestors and those of everyone else, I call for a more humane treatment of immigrants