A sustained inflow of new immigrants is going to be much more important for the United States in the years ahead than previously thought, several new studies say.
The importance of continued immigration to the U.S. has grown rapidly in the face of both domestic factors and international challengers that seek to rival America’s superiority in the fields of economy and technology.
Yet, it is not just the American economy and technology that immigrants will shape in the foreseeable future. It is the very fundamental make-up of the population that will derive its strength from immigration.
After two years of Donald Trump presidency – which kept immigration at the center of political controversies and fights – and now with Democrats taking charge of the House of Representatives, the advent of 2019 may be a time for a dispassionate look at some of the factors that necessitate inflow of fresh immigrants into the United States.
Let’s look, for example, at the latest population estimates released by the Census Bureau. The latest trends tell us clearly that the United States is facing a demographic stagnation, with the population growth ebbing to the rate of 0.62 percent for 2017-2018 – the lowest level recorded in the past 80 years.
A major reason for this shrinking growth in the number of people in the country has been the aging American population. Interestingly, the historic low of the last eight decades come at a time of economic boom.
What does that mean? In simple terms, the American population will fall woefully short of workforce that would be required to sustain high economic growth rate. China’s rise tells us that how population, particularly young workforce can be vital to economic expansion.
In America’s case, the demographic stagnation demands that that the country take in foreign workers both in traditional labor and farming areas as well as in modern fields of technology to fill the expected development disconnect.
In 2017, a Pew Research Center report found that America will need to have current levels of immigration to sustain its current economic growth rate.
A Brookings Institution article by William H Frey underscored the key role that immigration will play in shaping the U.S. population in the face of a variety of reasons for slowdown – from reduction in natural increase to millennials’ delaying births.
“This leaves immigration as an ever-more-important contributor to national population growth,” Frey writes.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics informed us in the summer of 2018 that the number of foreign-born workers in the market has now stands at 27.4 million – equal to 17.1 percent of the total work force.
The number of foreign-born workers – legal residents, undocumented, refugees and students – has been showing an upward trend since 2000, when 13.3 percent of the workforce was foreign-born.
This trend coincides with America’s continued progress in traditional areas as well as a massive transition into a digital economy in the last two decades. That means while technology is taking away jobs in some states, the United States continues to rely on workers for development in labor-intensive areas like construction, farming and service industries.
According to statistics cited by Frey, America entered the 21st century with natural increase in population exceeding immigration by 50 percent. The immigration in 2001-02 was slightly higher than 2018 1.05 million against 0.99 million.
“Because of the recent decline in natural increase, immigration now contributes nearly as much to population growth, and is projected to be the primary contributor to national population growth after 2030 as natural increase continues to decline. Thus immigration—its size and its attributes—will be an important contributor to the nation’s future population that is growing slowly and aging quickly,” Frey explains in the researched piece.
Recent studies have shown that immigrants do not take away jobs from native Americans as a large number of them do not go for high skilled professions.
At the same time, it is a fact that immigrants have been a big force behind the U.S. information technology advances – from inventors to chief executive officers of the tech giants have been immigrants.
In the field of research and higher education, a recent study by George Mason University’s Institute for Immigration Research highlighted the connection between immigrants and the Nobel Prize winners.
The solution for America seems to be orchestrating immigration reforms in a way that helps it advance economically as well as addresses hazards that some states confront in the form of jobs losses to deployment of artificial intelligence and diminishing investment in local industries. Slowing down immigration looks like an idea out of step with the times.
