Immigration fuels the economy. When immigrants enter the labor force, they increase the productive capacity of the economy, raising GDP. Their incomes rise, but so do those of natives, a phenomenon called the “immigration surplus”. While a small share of additional GDP accrues to natives, this surplus still amounts to $36 to $72 billion per year.
In fact, immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy in many ways. They work at high rates and make up more than a third of the workforce in some industries. Their geographic mobility helps local economies respond to worker shortages, smoothing out bumps that could otherwise weaken the economy.
Immigrants tend to be exceptionally mobile workers, often quicker to move around the country in response to these shortages appearing in local labor markets than their native counterparts. This helps native-born workers by filling gaps that could otherwise make their jobs impossible or reduce productivity, subsequently lowering wages. By relieving these bottlenecks to expansion, growth accelerates, slack falls, and there is improved allocation of resources in the economy.
In addition, the rise in high-skilled immigration has been linked to innovation. Forty-four percent of medical scientists are foreign-born, for example, as are forty-two percent of software developers. Immigrant workers are also over-represented amongst college professors, engineers, mathematicians, nurses, doctors, and dentists. Immigrants also continue to be nearly twice as likely as native-born people to start a business. In addition to the benefits and creation of jobs, these are often businesses that represent the life and vitality of local communities.
Immigrants bolster the national birth rate, which has the potential to drop among the native-born population. Without immigrants, there would be fewer working-age adults and workers and they would make up a smaller proportion of the total population.
Studies have long found that the children of immigrants tend to attain more education, have higher earnings, and work in higher-paying occupations than their parents. Second-generation members of most contemporary immigrant groups (children of foreign-born parents) meet or exceed the schooling level of the general population of later generations of native-born Americans.
Put simply, immigrants are not only helping to build a more dynamic economy, but we are counting on them to help ensure continued shared prosperity in the years ahead.
It is more important in today’s changing climate than ever for you and your family to have adequate representation. Call Roberson Law Toady for a consultation.
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