Xenophobia Is More Closely Related To Outright Racism Than Has Been In The Past

Immigrants Help Drive Economic Growth, Innovation & Progressivism

From the American Enterprise Institute (very conservative)

It’s been almost 8 years since my treatment for a rare form of cancer ended. When the treatment started, virtually everyone who was diagnosed with it died in a year or two. The treatment at the time just prolonged your life for a year or two. But a doctor at City of Hope was working on an experimental project to allow patients to live their full lifespan. She’s been treating me. I started a DAF a few years back, a donor advised fund, and every December I make a distribution. And every December the distribution is for the same purpose: my doctor’s research at City of Hope. My doctor was born in China. Most of the nurses who took care of me when I was in the hospital are from the Philippines.

My friend Stephen’s mother had a prolonged illness before passing away. She lived in Florida and Stephen, who has no siblings, lives in New York. Stephen encouraged his mother to leave a considerable part of her fortune to the nurse who took care of her everyday for years. The nurse and her family, originally from Haiti, are all set now, living the American dream.

Reporting from Bismarck, North Dakota yesterday, Lisa Rein wrote about how the broken immigration system in keeping workers out of jobs the country can’t otherwise fill. Trained nurses the hospital was in touch with from the Philippines, Kenya and Nigeria, willing to settle in Bismarck, were being prevented from coming to the country. “It was,” wrote Rein, “one more gut punch from a broken immigration system untouched by Congress for 33 years and largely operating on a framework dating to 1965. As a record surge of unauthorized migrants enters the United States through its southern border, stoking political divisions and straining resources, the troubled system for those eligible to come here legally has buckled in the background. Congress splintered over the issue again this month, as Republicans resisted calls from the Biden administration for more aid to Ukraine unless it comes with more-stringent border policies. Since Congress last updated the number of new arrivals the country will admit each year— a tiny fraction of whom are allowed to come in permanently to work— the economy is more than twice as large. But despite growing demand to help fill 8.7 million open jobs with skilled and unskilled foreign-born workers, strict quotas keep out millions of qualified immigrants every year. Demand was so high this year that the State Department was forced to restrict many types of visas, including— for the first time in years— those for nurses.”

Getting a coveted pass to enter the United States means waiting in backlogs for years in a neglected bureaucracy of overlapping, resource-starved federal agencies. There are record delays at an obscure Labor Department office, a backed-up processing queue at a Homeland Security agency so overburdened that it has wasted thousands of untouched green card applications, and years-long waits for final interviews at some U.S. consulates.

…The Bismarck hospital’s stalled pursuit of foreign-born nurses underscores how the legal immigration system is failing a vital U.S. industry. Thousands of well-qualified workers overseas are ready to recharge a field decimated by pandemic burnout and retirements at a time when baby boomers are experiencing increasing health problems. But most can’t get here, even with a well-funded employer like Sanford spending millions— including $5,000 in immigration-related fees for each nurse— and employing a small army of immigration experts.

President Biden, shortly after winning office, pledged to reopen the country to more immigrants, reversing Trump administration policies that had slowed the flow of refugees, Muslims and others from overseas. Among Biden’s priorities was whittling away backlogs in the system.

But almost three years later, a Washington Post review of the federal agencies responsible for issuing immigrant visas found that bureaucratic delays remain a systemic issue, the result of staffing and budget shortfalls that worsened during the Trump era; a reliance on paper files; and long-outmoded rules.

…Only Congress can expand legal immigration. But year after year, legislation that would lift caps for work and family visas and other categories goes nowhere. Most Republican lawmakers have hardened in their view that border measures to stop the flow of illegal crossings must come ahead of any expansion of legal immigration. So far, Democratic opposition to many of those efforts— as the party tries to balance the humane treatment of migrants with the reduction of illegal immigration— has led to an impasse that has stretched for decades.

In North Dakota, population 780,000, where the nursing shortage is compounded by an unemployment rate of just 1.9 percent, Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer finds himself at odds with his party on raising the level of legal immigration.

“We’re at a point now where some of my very best right-wing friends, they just can’t even bring up legal immigration solutions,” said Cramer, who in November introduced a bill with Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) that would allow more nurses into the country. “The angst of illegal immigration has spilled over to the other side.”

… Nurses from the Philippines had patched holes in the U.S. health-care system since the 1960s. But almost none had reached rural America. They certainly had not reached conservative North Dakota, where the population is 83 percent White and the Great Plains winter is unrelentingly frigid.

…Congress amended the law in 1990, skewing visas away from unskilled jobs and boosting the cap for permanent workers to 140,000, most sponsored by U.S. employers.

But lawmakers kept a rule restricting a single country to 7 percent of the total employment-based green cards in a given year. For the Bismarck hospital, that meant nurses from populous nations like India would probably be out of the running; most Indians seeking visas must wait more than a decade to come.

For decades, foreign-born nurses had qualified for temporary visas that cleared a path for many of them to stay once they were here. But Congress let that program expire more than a decade ago.

With limited exceptions, nurses must now complete the immigration process entirely from abroad, with most competing for one of just 40,000 slots a year in a broad visa category known as EB-3, which grants permanent entry and a path to a green card. The category includes numerous occupations, including software developers, engineers, lawyers and home health aides. In recent years, U.S. employers have sponsored about twice as many visas as there are EB-3 slots available, and an applicant’s family members are also counted toward the cap. In most fiscal years, as few as 5,000 nurses make the cut.

… Numerous bills that would boost permanent immigration levels, including eliminating per-country visa limits, have been introduced in Congress in recent decades. But none has made it through the House and Senate.

Now lobbyists for Sanford and others have turned to the Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act, introduced by Cramer and Durbin, which would boost visas for immigrant nurses and physicians by allowing the State Department to issue thousands of green cards left on the table in previous years. The bill failed to find traction after it was first proposed in 2021, but the two lawmakers have reintroduced it.

Partisan pressure remains high. Back home, Cramer has been denounced by conservatives and right-wing media for bucking Republican orthodoxy on immigration.

“I get dragged through the mud on this issue,” the senator said in an interview.

He called efforts to expand legal immigration “low-hanging fruit” that would help his state, which struggles to attract U.S. workers to its economy, dependent on gas and oil extraction. In a less polarized Congress, such legislation should easily have made it to the floor, the senator said. But after 11 years in Congress, he says, he’s a realist: “I’ve learned that nothing is going to happen quickly in Washington.”

Some other conservatives say the real problem is that professions like nursing aren’t attracting enough Americans.

“If you’re paying lobbyists to change the rules, you’re not thinking outside the box about how to develop the talent pool of nurses,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restrictive immigration policies.

Sanford’s leaders are acutely aware of the political challenge. In Bismarck, they’re careful to call the new arrivals “internationally educated nurses,” a term popular with lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

“If we would have said ‘immigrants,’ the reaction in the community would have been different,” Campbell said.

Some bad apples get in

Thanks in great part to Trump and his MAGA movement, we happen to be in a xenophobic spike in this country right now. The U.S. has experienced these spikes from time to time. This one is especially bad as Trump has stoked economic hardship and uncertainty increases, while identifying immigrants as scapegoats, allowing his moron base to blame outsiders for their struggles, blaming immigrants for taking “their” jobs. Periods of rapid social change and cultural shifts, like this one, trigger anxieties about identity and belonging, fueling fears of immigrants for diluting or threatening existing cultural norms and traditions— and “polluting our blood”— leading to increased and more widely shared, socially acceptable xenophobia. This is Heaven-sent for a demagogic populist like Trump who has exploited existing anxieties and prejudices to garner support. His conscious use of inflammatory language and scapegoating rhetoric is normalizing and legitimizing xenophobic attitudes. Rolling Stone reported that a source close to Trump says “‘he’s going to keep doing it, he’s going to keep saying they’re poisoning the blood of the nation and destroying and killing the country… He says it’s a great line’… According to the second source, Trump said in recent days that he was being ‘too nice’ about the ‘animals’ and alleged gang members who cross the southern border, whom Trump routinely accuses of flooding the United States with drugs, diseases, and violent crime... It is no mystery why Trump’s hard-right, increasingly authoritarian rhetoric and policy promises have become a prime feature of his reelection bid. It’s not just music to the ears of various MAGAdonians, or the logical conclusion of his presidential campaign launch in 2015. It’s because there are more mainstream Republicans now— advising Trump, at influential think tanks and advocacy groups, or in positions of power in the House and Senate and elsewhere— openly embracing and encouraging his rhetoric.”

Historically, immigrants have provided a vital source of labor, filling critical workforce needs in various sectors, beyond just healthcare, like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and technology. On top of that, many immigrants come from entrepreneurial backgrounds and have established successful businesses, creating jobs and contributing to economic growth. Crucially for the U.S., immigrants have brought diverse skills, perspectives, and cultural knowledge, that have fostered innovation and driven the kind of advancements in various fields that has kept the U.S. as the top economic engine for the world. And immigrants have been a godsend for the tax based consumer base, keeping the economy growing instead of collapsing

The consequences of a significant slowdown in immigration will exacerbate an already tight labor market in various sectors. As we saw in Rein’s report from North Dakota, finding skilled and unskilled workers could become more challenging, potentially leading to higher wages in some sectors but also severely hindering economic growth. Let’s face it, the U.S. population is aging and birth rates are declining, a threat to the tax base, the consumer base and, of course, to the continued solvency of Social Security.

 Numerous academic studies, like this one, The Fiscal Costs And Benefits Of Immigration and this one, Immigrants Are Makers, Not Takers, by the Center foror American Progress, have shown that immigrants, on average, pay more in taxes than they receive in government benefits over their lifetimes. Even the right-wing CATO Institute points out— The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the United States— that data from across the US concludes that immigrants generate significant tax revenue that supports vital public services.

It’s crucial to remember that immigration has been the key driver of population growth and both workforce and consumer expansion. A slowdown would devastate the Social Security system, while putting a strain on healthcare and other social services. I also want to point out that highly skilled immigrants are often attracted to the U.S. due to its economic opportunities and research infrastructure. A slowdown would make it harder to attract and retain talent, impacting academic institutions and industries reliant on innovation. We’ve been traditionally seen as a welcoming nation for immigrants. A slowdown in immigration would damage our image as a beacon of freedom and opportunity, impacting our standing and relationships with other countries. If other developed countries loosen or even just maintain their immigration levels while the US doesn’t, they’ll attract a larger share of skilled workers, negatively impacting our competitive edge.

OK, so why bring this immigration stuff up again? A very specific reason this time. Start by looking at this map, which should terrify you:

It’s part of a piece about the next congressional reapportionment by Michael Li and Gina Feliz for the Brennan Center. They wrote that “New population estimates released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau suggest that the shifts in political power after the 2030 census could be among the most profound in the nation’s history. California and New York will lose a total of 7 seats, while Texas and Florida gain a total of 7. Right wing bastions like Utah, Idaho, Tennessee and South Carolina will also gain seats, while Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon and Pennsylvania will lose seats.

“The South,” they wrote, “has emerged as this decade’s growth engine, adding almost 3.9 million people and accounting for nearly all U.S. population gains since 2020… in particular Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. These rapidly growing states by themselves account for more than 90 percent of American population gains since the 2020 census, with Texas and Florida alone accounting for 70 percent of growth… These changes would solidify a shift in the regional balance of power. Whereas in 1960, the South, Midwest, and Northeast regions all had roughly the same population, by 2030, the South will be by far the country’s most populous region and home to nearly 4 in 10 Americans.”

Most of this growth is driven by people of color, including among immigrant populations. Are those increases in southern states going to mean fairer district maps? There’s no reason to believe that, although Court-forced new maps in Alabama, Louisiana and possibly Georgia and even Florida (doubtful) given some reason for some hope. Although, that still leaves Texas, Florida (probably) and North Carolina, where Republicans legislatures do not fool around with fairness or equality.

California, New York and Illinois should start building affordable housing— a lot of it and FAST.