Washington D.C. – A new editorial by the Washington Post is the latest high-profile call for Congress to strengthen our economy by passing long overdue immigration reforms.
The editorial, excerpted below, notes:
“[N]et immigration in the United States — the number of all foreign arrivals, including illegal ones, minus the number of departures — has been on a downward slope for five years, partly but not only because of the pandemic. As the Economist noted recently, migrants added just 247,000 people to the U.S. population in the year that ended in July 2021, the smallest increase in three decades and an amount equal to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the country’s population. The Trump administration, having launched an assault on legal as well as illegal immigration, drove down the number of entries through red tape even before covid-19’s arrival.
…Despite the fact that most apprehended migrants are sent back to Mexico under a public health edict the Trump administration imposed, Republicans predictably weaponize the surge of migrants at the border, using it to scare Americans and score political points. The fact that net immigration is tumbling and contributing to labor shortages — and thereby also to inflation, by helping to drive up wages — is lost in the tsunami of political rhetoric about an ‘invasion.’
… The nation’s anemic birth rate, which has declined in every year but one since 2014, will sap economic vitality in the absence of a robust flow of immigrant workers. The way out of that dead end is for Congress to overhaul the immigration system to allow for higher inflows of legal workers and a path to legalization for some of the estimated 10 million undocumented migrants, many of whom have been in this country for 15 years or more. Unfortunately, there is little prospect of that in a political environment in which Republicans falsely equate immigrants with bringing higher crime, draining welfare programs, and smuggling fentanyl and other drugs. If immigration is forever wielded as a political cudgel, and not as a policy component of economic growth, everyone will suffer.”
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Deputy Director of America’s Voice:
“Republicans’ nativism comes at the direct expense of our short- and longer-term economic need. The Post editorial is the latest reminder why all Americans pay the cost for the GOP’s politicized nativism and obstruction to long overdue legislative reforms.”
