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One of the many cliches of politics is that you should never let a crisis go to waste. President Donald Trump is trying not to, by signing an executive order Monday that temporarily bars foreigners from entering the U.S. on work visas. The order includes H-1B for high-skilled workers who are so often in demand.
The White House says the move is needed to protect Americans who have lost jobs during the current economic downturn, and who should be given first priority when hiring resumes.
Also read:This one sector will be the hardest hit by Trump’s suspension of H-1B work visas
Not only is this reasonable — Americans should be hired first, if they have the needed skills, that is — but it’s also good politics for the president, who sees the order as red meat to be tossed to his base in a difficult election year. With November four months away, there’s no question that Trump has suffered from perceptions that he has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic (which sparked the economic meltdown), recent riots, and more.
Convenient excuses
He needs a secure base, because he has almost no one else.
But the downturn is just a convenient excuse. Keeping foreigners out has always been a central pillar of Trump’s presidency. Two-thirds of registered voters who backed Trump four years ago called immigration a “very big problem;” only 17% of Hillary Clinton’s backers agreed.
“I love immigrants,” Trump has said. He’s married two of them, after all. Yet he has spent his presidency portraying immigrants as not even human (”animals”) and “invaders.”
In 2017, 2018, and 2019 B.C. (Before Coronavirus), when unemployment was at a 50-year low and there were millions of job openings in the United States, Trump was still scheming to keep these “animals” out. The past three-and-a-half years have featured fights with Congress and the courts over travel bans, the maligning of assorted ethnic groups, and the labeling of entire countries as “shitholes.”
Also read:Trump says he’ll try again to rescind DACA protections for ‘Dreamers’ after Supreme Court setback
Then there is the wall he promised to build along the Mexican border, and have Mexico pay for it. Fact check: not only did Mexico not pay, neither did Republicans, who controlled both the House and Senate during Trump’s first two years in office. The result: the Customs and Border Protection said last month that in three-plus years, only three totally new miles of wall have been built (178 miles of wall built during prior administrations have been beefed up). But just three new brand miles of wall.
The president visited an Arizona stretch of the border Tuesday and exaggerated about this, of course.
Immigrants boost the economy
Trump’s base loves his long-term antipathy towards foreigners, but from an economic standpoint, there’s plenty of data to suggest that shutting the door to immigrants can inflict long-term harm on the U.S. economy.
The president thinks that immigrants are a drain on public resources. This depends on your time frame. A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that first-generation immigrants do indeed cost more than native-born Americans, as they assimilate to life in the U.S. But their offspring more than make up for this: Second-generation immigrants are “among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.,” the report found. They contribute “more in tax revenues than they cost in terms of program expenditures.”
In other words, immigrants wind up giving more than they take.
And talk about giving more than they take: Immigrants are about 13% of the U.S. population today, but, notes the Harvard Business Review, are about 27% of all entrepreneurs.
“Immigrants aren’t just creating more businesses,” the HBR notes, “they’re creating more successful ones.” It adds “immigrant-founded companies perform better in terms of employment growth over three- and six-year time horizons” and are likelier to survive longer than native-led companies are.
There’s more: You might in fact owe your job to an immigrant. Almost half of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by American immigrants or their children, a separate Brookings study says. That includes 43% of the top 100, 52% of the top 25 and 30% of the top 10.
Idea: Before complaining that immigrants are “stealing jobs,” you might want to see who created yours.
It isn’t so
One of the president’s other anti-immigrant themes is that immigrants — particularly undocumented (or “illegal”) immigrants — are associated with higher crime rates. It’s certainly no problem for Trump to latch onto the occasional crime committed by a gang member who shouldn’t be here. But to blow this up into a broader claim that crime is higher isn’t so.
A landmark study released by the Marshall Foundation last fall found that between 2007-2016 there was no correlation in either violent crime or property crime in areas where there were more undocumented immigrants.
No doubt immigration opponents can scour the dark reaches of the internet and find data that’s more suitable to their own narrative. But while they’re doing so, chances are pretty good that the immigrants they love to hate are out working their rear ends off, taking risks, starting companies, building wealth, and fueling innovation and economic growth.
So Mr. Trump — the son, and grandson, of immigrants (none of his grandparents and only one of his parents, was born in the United States or spoke English as their mother tongue)—can keep others out if he wishes. But if he truly wants to make America great like he claims, he should stop blaming foreigners for our ills and let them in.
