Corporate titan has right idea on immigration

The U.S. immigration system is broken. Voices on all sides of this debate can agree on that, if not where to cast the blame.

But our need for economic growth still dictates that migration at the sort of levels we’re seeing now must continue in order to keep the U.S. population rising enough to provide the labor we need and keep the economy healthy.

The Congressional Budget Office is projecting $7 trillion of additional economic growth over the coming decade thanks to the net influx of migrants.

This country’s native population is aging, and the workforce is suffering. Thanks mostly to net immigration gains, CBO projects the U.S. labor force will add 5.2 million workers by 2033. Shut off that source of growth, as some extremists are urging, and our labor force won’t be sufficient. Still, statistical findings from a federal agency rarely command immediate attention.

That why we were struck when we heard the same message with our own ears recently from Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, the nation’s second-largest bank. Moynihan met with the Tribune Editorial Board to discuss a wide variety of issues, but the one that lingered the most with us was his message on immigration.

“It’s a shame we can’t fix it,” Moynihan said of our lousy system. And he had some very good reasons for saying so.

U.S. population growth without the influx is only around 0.5% annually. It needs to be more like 1.5% to keep the economy healthy, and to meet our health care and retirement obligations to our growing senior citizen population.

As head of a national banking franchise, Moynihan sees more real-time data on the economy and consumer behavior than most. We should listen to him — and other business figures who’ve long advocated for more immigrants.

Many see Americans’ worries about the chaos at the southern border as a political issue to be exploited rather than a problem to be solved. We saw the pitiful results of this in February when a comprehensive border-security bill failed to proceed even to a debate in the U.S. Senate. That legislation would have given the executive branch more legal tools. That, in turn, could have helped bolster public confidence that the U.S. government can better control who enters this country and ensure existing laws are enforced.

Increased public confidence is necessary to transform immigration from something scary and negative to what it should be — a critical part of keeping this improbable economic expansion going.

It’s not just in the halls of Congress where the words of Moynihan and other business leaders ought to be better appreciated. Those in municipal offices should do so as well. We thought about this as we digested the depressing but unsurprising news that the population of Cook County, Ill., where Chicago is located, fell by an estimated 24,000 in 2023, according to new U.S. Census Bureau estimates — and that was despite tens of thousands of migrant arrivals.

The migrant surge in Chicago — a product mainly of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s desire to score political points at others’ expense — has largely been viewed as a crisis that strained city resources. For more diplomatic voices, it has been an an unwelcome distraction. For our most myopic, it has been an invasion of undesirable outsiders.

Buses transporting mostly impoverished people from other countries, many of whom don’t speak English, at times and to places that are unpredictable is costly and challenging to manage. Our local leadership has more than struggled to do so. And it’s understandable that some residents worry about the impact on their own kids in school and/or feel that resources have been diverted away from their own, very real needs. We’d also note that most countries pay more attention to immigrants’ skill levels, insuring an influx of people who can do the jobs America needs doing the most.

But when the dust settles and we move on to other crises — that could be well into the future, we acknowledge — it is our hope that asylum-seeking newcomers will be viewed as an influx of productive residents and an economic shot in the arm.

Brian Moynihan got us thinking about taking the longer view: More workers. More cultural contributions. More taxpayers sharing our burdens.