Immigration to America Isn’t Just Good for the Immigrants
Yet another caravan of migrants recently tried to march north to the United States border, driven by violence and crushing poverty in their Latin American homeland. Most of the 8,000-odd women, men and children from Honduras didn’t even make it far into neighboring Guatemala, however, before they were loaded onto buses by troops and sent back home. Even had they managed to get across, another military cordon awaited them at the Mexican border. It seems few if any of them had a realistic chance of ever entering the United States.
That’s not only a tragic outcome for the migrants, however, but a missed opportunity for the United States. America and the rest of the wealthy world should swing open the door to the 21st century equivalent of the huddled masses not simply because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s also, in the long run, the smart, self-interested thing to do.
Throughout its history the United States has seen wave after wave of immigration, and pretty much as often has seen a corresponding nativist backlash. But though the national origins of the main groups of arrivals have changed over the last 170 years, the complaints against them have stayed remarkably the same. Many “real” Americans in the 1850s were horrified for a variety of reasons as the Irish poured into U.S. cities: because they were impoverished, because they were seen as dirty, because they were regarded as especially prone to crime, because they seemed simply too alien to fit into mainstream society — the vast majority of Americans at the time were Protestant Christians, while the families streaming out of the Irish countryside were largely Roman Catholic. Bigots also believed the Irish were a net drain on the economy, the low-skilled work they performed hardly offsetting the burden they were perceived to place on what scant social-safety net existed at the time.
Sound familiar? Virulent anti-Catholic prejudice directed against the Irish in the mid-19th century does bear more than a passing similarity to the anti-Semitism faced by the Jews escaping the schletls of Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, which in turn sounds a lot like the antipathy towards Muslims today. And there’s every reason to believe that the Muslim religious faith will one day enjoy something like widespread acceptance, as Catholicism and Judaism have since become mainstreamed. Indeed, a strange inversion occurs as the descendants of immigrants are integrated ever more tightly into American society: many of these second- and third-generation Americans will often use the kind of harsh nativist rhetoric once directed at their forebears in describing the current batch of migrants to make it to U.S. soil.
Alongside Muslims from the Middle East and Africa, as well as other immigrants from Asia, the downtrodden of today also come from Central and South America, together energizing a modern political movement defining itself as a bulwark against what prejudiced Americans see as foreigners bringing destructive societal change. While the supporters of former president Donald Trump had a range of reasons for flocking to his banner, the appeal for many lay with his stated goals of banning Muslims, building a “wall” to keep out migrants from Mexico and points south, and in general barring anyone from a so-called “shithole” country (Trump didn’t count Norway, whose population is almost entirely white, in his vulgar assessment of undesirable nations).
The pretense many Trumpist supporters maintain to justify their opposition to immigration centers on self-contradictory economic arguments: “Mexicans” were both freeloading off the nation’s ludicrously generous welfare state (not true) and they were also stealing jobs. The irony is that there is a powerful economic case to be made in favor of immigration, as there has always been in the United States. Generations of immigration helped make the United States the wealthiest country on the planet, and immigration helps explain why other settler countries, like Australia and Canada, tend to be very rich too.
But in addition to its traditional benefits, immigration can help the United States as it grapples with novel challenges unique to our century: a population that’s rapidly aging, and a world that’s rapidly warming.
An unmistakable dynamic has emerged over the last several decades: as populations have gotten wealthier, individuals within them tend to form smaller families. The average age of women when they first give birth rises, as does the number of childless adults, to the point where the mean fertility rate falls below the so-called replacement rate of about 2.1 children born per woman. This is the number of births needed to keep a population stable; fall below that line, and the population begins to shrink.
In the United States and across much of the rest of the developed world, the fertility rate of the native-born population has fallen below this replacement rate for a variety of reasons. Births to non-natives have been the main driver of population growth since 1965, when changes to the law greatly expanded immigration to the United States. Had it not been for these massive waves of immigration, the United States might have found itself with a rapidly aging, rapidly shrinking population, as Japan is experiencing today. By 2050, the median age there is expected to be just under 55 and its population overall will be about 20 percent lower than it is today (even as the global population rises).
The implications for the economy in nations with declining populations (and it’s not just Japan) are troubling. It’s difficult to sustain growth in the economy if the market, in the form of consumers, isn’t growing too. Entrepreneurs and innovators tend to skew young, so another vector for economic expansion is diminished. Parents of young children also tend to be a company’s more motivated employees, versus workers with no mouths to feed but their own, so a comparative shortage of moms and dads in the workforce may serve as another hidden drag on the economy.
But perhaps the most significant impact of an aging workforce is on retirement systems, like America’s Social Security system, which become difficult to sustain without enough younger workers paying in, meaning that retirement ages will have to rise significantly. Some workers may even have to forego any kind of retirement altogether, bringing us back to the bad old days when a huge percentage of seniors lived in poverty.
Immigrants serve aging populations in other ways too, for example in healthcare. In the United States, the foreign-born are overrepresented as a share of all healthcare workers, from nurses and doctors to home-health aides (many of whom tend to elderly patients). Put simply, America is going to need a lot more people willing and able to assist 85-year-olds bathe and dress in the coming decades.
If America’s need to sustain a relatively young workforce can be thought of as the pull towards this country, then the effects of climate change can be thought of as the push. Global heating, though largely caused by the rich countries of the Northern Hemisphere, will likely be most disruptive in the nations of the global South, particularly the poorer nations straddling the Equator. There are many reasons why, but one primary cause for such dramatic disruption is due to the narrow band of temperature natural to such nations as Chad, Haiti and the Philippines. Ecosystems that developed over eons within this range may not be able to adapt if temperatures routinely rise beyond current normal highs.
The result, experts predict, will be mass migration. More caravans of increasingly desperate people will head towards the United States on foot, and as their circumstances become more and more precarious, it will become increasingly difficult to deter them. The 8,000 stopped at the Guatemalan border recently were not a harbinger of things to come, but evidence of a phenomenon already under way. According to some estimates, in 50 years nearly one person in five on the planet will live in a region rendered barely habitable due to climate change.
The nativists in Europe, the United States and other parts of the rich world now balking at letting in mere handfuls undoubtedly would flatly reject the idea of welcoming immigrants in numbers greater by orders of magnitude. But when the desperate souls are counted in the billions, then their problems become everyone’s problems, otherwise it will become impossible to sustain any kind of stable global order at all. Even if one were willing to consider committing genocide on a nightmarish, unprecedented scale, the ensuing maelstrom of horror would almost certainly consume the aggressor nations too. Our various weapons of mass destruction are already fairly easy to obtain and can’t be confined for use by just the wealthiest countries.
Far better, instead, for all of humanity to confront a problem affecting all humanity, remembering that culture — particularly in America, a land of immigrants — has never been this precious, static thing to be protected from hordes of foreigners. American culture, instead, has always been the ever-changing product of a dialogue between the newest newcomers and those who got here somewhat sooner.
Consider, once again, the Irish. Once despised in many quarters, the culture of Eire (or at least an ersatz version of it) is now so firmly embedded in the American soul that St. Patrick’s Day, a celebration of a saint in the formerly reviled Catholic Church, is practically a national holiday. The growing popularity of Cinco de Mayo observance in the United States portends a similar level of acceptance for Mexican tradition, eventually. If we are to have a future at all, it will have to be a vibrantly diverse one — which won’t fundamentally be all that different from the America we live in now.
