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Some lessons of last week’s border crisis-ette we already knew: President Donald Trump is a racist bully, and one with a glass jaw that showed when Trump backed down from not only his gimmick of deterring immigration to the U.S. by throwing toddlers into tent camps while their parents’ asylum claims are heard, but backing off the notion of prosecuting illegal entrants accompanying children entirely by late Thursday.
But I, at least, learned something totally new, and not very welcome: America is no longer a nation of immigrants, really. And that’s both a shame and a lost economic opportunity.
The latter comes courtesy of Adam Ozimek of Moody’s Analytics, whose counter-intuitive numbers should change your thinking about America’s 21st century immigration. Far from expanding immigration willy-nilly, as Trump says we’ve done, we’re taking far fewer immigrants than our population and prosperity say we could.
Think America takes more immigrants than any country in the world? You’re half-right (as was I). It does, because America is so large. But the number of immigrants America takes as a percentage of its population is only the 22nd highest among the world’s 195 countries, and 22nd among the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Germany — the very home of the lost racial purity that immigration radicals like Iowa Rep. Steve King and Trump aide Stephen Miller mourn — takes almost twice as many as we do.
And as everyone rebutting Trump points out, Germany has its lowest crime rate in decades and unemployment even lower than America’s.
But like me, you should’ve known it already — Ozimek’s research came out in 2012. All it did last week was resurface on social media.
The usual right-wing case against immigration — not “conservative,’’ since conservative hero Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty law for illegal immigrants — is a combination of arguing that too many newcomers spoil the economy and that they spoil the culture.
Both are wrong, but since economics is my thing, let’s talk about that. Whether you look at the very bottom of the U.S. economy or the very top, you’ll find immigrants contributing more than their share.
A 2017 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that, contrary to what nutjobs have told you since Pat Buchanan ran for president, immigrants work quite a bit more than the nation as a whole. Their workforce participation rate, of both legal and illegal migrants, is 66%, well above the 62.7% overall rate. The 27 million working immigrants are 17% of the workforce.
Immigrants are younger, work more and make less than the rest of us, BLS says. But black immigrants make just as much, per capita, as other black workers. Asian and white immigrants make more than native-born Asian-Americans and Caucasians.
The gap comes from less-educated Latinos’ willingness to do an outsized share of low-paying work. For all of the president’s twaddle about letting people in based on merit — read, coming from majority-white countries — the better argument has come from Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, a rancher’s son whose memories of his dad’s employees made him write this: “there must always be a place in America for those whose only initial credentials are a strong back and an eagerness to use it.”
Anyone who’s been to Silicon Valley knows immigrants create jobs. About half of U.S. startups worth $1 billion or more were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants, and 43% of the Fortune 500 were co-founded by an immigrant or the child of one.
At Alphabet , there’s Moscow-born Sergey Brin. Steve Jobs’s birth father was Syrian. Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s from Brazil. Intel’s Andy Grove was Hungarian. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is Indian-born, Elon Musk is South African. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s from — gasp! — Iran, a country whose U.S.-bound tourists Trump would bar.
If you see all that — and the transformation immigrants have wrought in cities as fancy as Washington (where the Adams Morgan neighborhood’s revival began with Ethiopian restaurants) and as down-at-the-heels as Paterson, N.J., which Arabs are revitalizing — and think America is losing its culture, or that “we can’t restore our civilization with other people’s babies,” to quote King — you’re not paying attention.
The numbers of the last week are shockingly ... small. The “crisis” is about 2,300 kids and their parents over a couple of months. Only 300,000 to 450,000 people a year get caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. In a country of 325 million people, those are drops in the bucket. And the illegal-migrant population hasn’t grown in a decade.
There is no border crisis. There never was.
Instead, immigrants are 27 million workers building American lives, in a country where slow population growth holds back our economy. Whatever being an American is, it includes having enough imagination to see how the new renews us.
Put the crying kids’ parents in jail? Nah. Give them jobs. Watch them make us better.