More immigrants, fewer race baiters

White Americans who worry about being replaced by immigrants and other people of color need to get a grip on reality. The “great replacement theory” and general immigrant anxiety not only perpetuate racist paranoia, but works against our nation’s economic health.

If you don’t care about the former — the paranoia that leads to hate crimes like the May 14 massacre in Buffalo — then maybe you care about the latter: how hysteria about immigrants hurts the economy and likely contributes to inflation.

I first took a dive into this subject several years ago, when the complaints about immigrants were mostly economic — that they were taking jobs away from American citizens.

We’ve all heard claims that U.S.born workers were being displaced by immigrants. For years, conservatives growled about it, and the subject was part of the regular agenda on AM talk radio. Anecdotes are swell for scoring points in a debate, but they do not necessarily reflect reality.

So I looked for studies about immigration’s effect on labor markets and found one, by an economist named Giovanni Peri, that specifically addressed the issue of displacement. I go back to it today because the issue of displacement sits right next to the racist theory of replacement that is said to have motivated the suspected killer in Buffalo.

Peri, a professor at the University of California at Davis, was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco at the time of his study. His data dive was 50 years deep, back to the 1960s, and covered several regional labor markets.

Peri found no evidence that immigrants pushed U.S.-born workers out of jobs in either the short term or long run. The reality was much closer to what was described in the recent story about crab pickers in Maryland by Sun reporter Christina Tkacik: Immigrants took jobs Americans no longer wanted while Americans moved into jobs with better pay and benefits.

That led to a higher standard of living for Americans and their children. Peri estimated that the flow of immigrants into the country for one period, 1990 to 2007, resulted in a general increase of yearly worker income by close to 10%.

I asked how that happened, and

Peri gave the example of a construction company that employs immigrant laborers. With a stable and productive workforce, the company finds more opportunities to expand its business and that, in turn, increases the demand for supervisors, coordinators, and other higher-skill positions.

Many leading economists believe we need more immigrants, not fewer. In fact, Peri recently estimated that the country is running at an immigrant worker deficit of 2 million, a labor shortage that is likely contributing to inflation.

Despite that, too many Americans continue to see immigrants as a threat. Those fears were exploited by Donald Trump when he ran for president and, after taking office, when his administration implemented harsh policies on immigrants and even born-in-the-USA children of immigrants.

Illegal border crossings are a problem and a legitimate concern. But shameless race-baiters in politics and media have poured the border issue into the toxic soup of replacement theory and immigrant paranoia, and they do this for votes and ratings. That’s the sad, unproductive, and dangerous reality, and the more Americans get a grip on that, the better.