Immigration aids us

The United States, with 43.7 million foreigners, is home to the largest immigrant population in the world. Many people worry that immigrants take available jobs from Americans and they think the United States would be better off without them. However, it turns out that the United States and its economy benefit greatly from immigration.

First, foreign workers are a major driver of innovation and entrepreneurship. For instance, Silicon Valley now contains many of the world’s leading high-tech companies and is home to thousands of startups. About 43.9 percent of them were founded by at least one immigrant or immigrant’s child. Some examples are the co-founders of Google, and Amazon.

Immigrants bring their expertise and talent to the service of the nation. All those qualified workers create positive outcomes in several domains. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, immigrants represent at least 24 percent of engineers, mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists. Therefore, anti-immigrant sentiments and measures could affect important sectors of the economy. In the academic context, there are many foreign faculty members working in U.S. top universities. For example, about 20 percent of the presidents of universities that are members of the Association of American Universities are either foreign-born or have foreign-born parents.

The high percentage of international workers in fields such as technology or engineering is due to the lack of available qualified American-born workers. Without immigrants, many companies would outsource their work or move their operations overseas. Thus, immigration allows American companies to produce their goods in the U.S., which helps create jobs here.

Having no immigrants would be more of a handicap than a relief for the U.S. So far, immigration has led to significant outcomes such as differentiation of skills and innovation, and will continue to be important in the future. FOUGNIGUE SEFON Conway