Tom Saler: Immigrant workers fill a crucial role and keep the U.S. economy humming

"All good people agree / And all good people say / All nice people, like Us, are We / And everyone else is They"

The “They” cited in a quatrain of “Them,” a poem by Rudyard Kipling, could describe the immigrant workers — all from countries south of the U.S. border — who plunged to their deaths in the Papapsco River while repairing a bridge vital to the American economy, in the wee hours of a cold Baltimore morning while we slept.

The tragedy put eight human faces on an overlooked aspect of immigration: that immigrants often work at jobs that other Americans won’t do, and that they are keeping the economy growing by plugging a gap between the number of workers that employers need and what native-born workers can provide. Though immigrants represent 18.6% of the U.S. labor force, the native-born unemployment rate, at 3.2%, is the lowest on record.

Jay Timmons, chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers, told Bloomberg that he “can’t have a conversation with any business owner that doesn’t revolve around the fact that they simply cannot find the skilled workforce they need.” The labor shortage is only going to get worse as the native population ages and COVID-related retirements become permanent.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell recently testified that “it is just reporting the facts to say that immigration and labor force participation both contributed to the very strong economic output growth that we had last year.” Importantly, the labor participation rate of foreign-born workers is about five percentage points higher than for their native-born counterparts. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, immigration is projected to add $7 trillion of economic output over the next decade.

A home where the buffalo roam

Migration has been a constant component of human life since the first Homo sapiens left Africa 60,000 years ago. According to a United Nations report, an estimated 281 million people now live outside their country of origin. At 3.6% per 1,000 population, the U.S. currently ranks 41st out of 231 nations in the number of people entering the country compared to those leaving. For all the political hand-wringing over America’s broken immigration system, Ireland, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands all have higher net immigration rates than does the United States.

People leave home for a variety of “push factors,” including political violence, economic deprivation, famine, and drought. What migrants endure on their journeys — braving the Darién Gap or surviving the heaving waters of the Adriatic Sea, with children in tow — is testament to humankind’s powerful will to survive and to provide better lives for their families.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, was unwilling to deny those urges, questioning why a person would “feel any obligation to die by disease or famine in one country, rather than go to another where he can live.” Every human being, Jefferson wrote in 1816, is equally entitled “to live on the outside of an artificial geographical line as…to live within it.”

Economic collaborators, not competitors

No one should question that securing a 1,951 mile land border, through which passes enough fentanyl each day to kill thousands of Americans, is anything less than a serious national security issue. Much of that passage is via tunnels. Substituting benign neglect for cruelty is not a comprehensive solution.

A trio of U.S. Senators, including Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and James Lankford of Oklahoma — the latter considered one of the most conservative voices in the Senate — worked daily for five months to produce the most thorough immigration reform legislation in decades.

“We delivered,” Sinema declared on the Senate floor with barely concealed fury. “Our bill overhauls the broken system, stops the misuse of parole, and closes the border during surges, ensuring the quick detention and deportation of migrants who don’t have a legal right to be here. We end catch and release. We add more detention beds. We increase deportation flights. We quickly decide asylum claims. We put border patrol back in the desert catching bad guys and drugs. That’s why the National Border Patrol Council endorses this bill...We produced a bill that finally, after decades of all talk and no action, secures the border and solves the border crisis.”

Despite widespread bipartisan support, the bill never made to the House floor after Donald Trump voiced his opposition. If reelected president, Trump has promised mass deportation of undocumented migrants, a move that, besides being a humanitarian nightmare, could remove up to nine million workers from the labor force. Fewer workers means less output, slower growth, and higher inflation as the cost of labor increases, especially in service-based sectors.

Maybe what we all need now is an attitude adjustment about the nature of We and They.

“People are the ultimate resource,” David Bier, of the libertarian Cato Institute told Congress. “Immigrants are workers, inventors, investors, and entrepreneurs. Immigrants increase the supply of labor, which increases the supply of goods and services that people need; their consumption, entrepreneurship, and investment also increases the demand for labor, creating better-paying jobs for Americans elsewhere in the economy. Fundamentally, immigrants aren’t competitors. They are collaborators.”

They also are our forbearers.

As Kipling concludes in his poem:

"if you cross over the sea / Instead of over our way / You may end by looking on We / As only a sort of They!"

Tom Saler is an author and freelance journalist in Madison. He can be reached at tomsaler.com

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Tom Saler: Immigration is crucial to economy, yet a political football