An influx of refugees from Latin America, U.S. political wars, and the 2024 Presidential campaign have fueled anti-immigrant campaigns in the United States. In statements echoing Adolf Hitler and 20th century Nazi ideology, former President Donald Trump promises, if reelected, to keep out refugees he believes are poisoning the “blood of America.” Governors of states along the Southern border have been placing people on buses and sending them to Northern cities, straining municipal budgets and threatening to increase homelessness.
This type of hostility to new immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, is not new. At the nation’s founding, Black immigration was banned. Starting in the 1880s, the United States placed bars on Asian immigrants. In 1924, advocates for immigration quotas that would restrict Southern and Eastern Europeans, specifically Italians and Jews, argued that these immigrants would be too difficult to Americanize.
Thomas Aldrich, a writer and editor with Atlantic Monthly, published a poem there, “The Unguarded Gates,” in 1892, where he warned, “Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild motley throng” with “accents of menace alien to our air.” In the poem, Aldrich begged Liberty, the “white Goddess,’ to reconsidered whether it was wise “To leave the gates unguarded.”
During 1924 Congressional debate, Robert L. Bacon (Rep-NY), who represented Long Island’s Suffolk County, argued “we have a work to do in assimilating and Americanizing those we already have living under our flag without lifting the floodgates and permitting an inundation to come rushing through . . . We cannot do this work if we spend all of our time at Ellis Island welcoming the millions who would like to come from other and more unfortunate lands . . . It must be admitted that the nationals of some countries assimilate easier and become Americanized quicker than the nationals of other countries.” The House of Representatives passed the immigration restriction law by a vote of 308 to 58; the vote in the Senate was 69 to 9.
A new study by the Immigration Research Initiative places a very different light on recent immigration. Focusing on Long Island, New York, it argues that an influx of immigrants, documented and undocumented, provides a boost for local economies. About 20% of Long Island’s two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are immigrants, and with their American born children, their families make up a significantly larger percent of the population. families ma
The study found that “New immigrants arriving to Long Island can expect to earn a median wage of about $27,000 per year. If there are two wage earners in a family, as is likely the case for most of the immigrants coming to New York, their combined income would be about $54,000,” which is above the 2021 federal poverty level of $12,880 for individuals and $26,500 for a family of four. The study also found that after five years, an individual’s annual wage was closer to $35,000 per year, bringing a two-income family’s annual earnings to about $70,000. The authors of the study calculated that for wages for every 1,000 newly arrived immigrant workers contributed $27 million to the local economy and increased state and local tax revenues by about $3 million. After five years, the local benefit for each 1,000 workers is $35 million annually and tax revenues increase to $4 million.
New immigrants also fill vital jobs, especially as caregivers for children, the elderly, and people who are chronically ill, and in medical facilities. According to Anthony Capote, a senior policy analyst at the Immigration Research Initiative and one of the study’s authors, initially “there’s a net cost” as migrants integrate into new communities, “But in the long run, there’s a net benefit.” Nationally, immigrants pay almost $26 billion annually in income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes. They are also paying local sales and property taxes. New York State currently receives $1.1 billion in taxes from immigrant families, a number that would increase by $250 million if the federal government passed legislation providing a path to legal status for undocumented workers.
A number of countries now have aging or declining populations including Japan, Italy, Finland, Portugal, and Greece. In Japan, 28% of the population is age 65 or older. In the United States the age 65 and older senior citizen cohort is 16%. Seven European countries have population decline rates of over 18% including Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Lithuania. In Asia, Japan has a population decline rate of 16%. Ukraine’s population is expected to decline from 43.7 in its last census to 35.2 million by 2050, almost a 20% loss. Japan’s population is expected to drop by over 20 million people by 2050. China, the second most populous nation in the world after India, reported a population decline of almost a million people in 2022, the first population decline in China since famine in the 1950s and early years of the 1960s.
Aging populations and declining populations put a two-way strain on national social service systems. Older people need greater health services and receive government pensions and a higher ratio of retirees to workers means that a smaller percentage of workers are contributing to national budgets. The United States has largely avoided this problem because of the influx of younger immigrants into the workforce.