Taggan Goddard’s Political Wire posted two stories next to each other (almost certainly deliberately) about immigration:
Gallup: Immigration Surges to Top of Most Important Problem List
WaPo: The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason.
Gallup first:
Significantly more Americans name immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. (28%) than did a month ago (20%). Immigration has now passed the government as the most often cited problem, after the two issues tied for the top position the past two months. The government ranked first each month from January through November 2023.
This is largely Trump’s and the GOP’s doing. They are no longer convincing the voting public that the economy is a disaster and that it’s a disaster because of President Biden. So they have turned to immigration as their latest weapon. It appeals to the racists and the isolationists who unfortunately make up too large a percentage of Americans (let me clear on this point: 1% is too large a percentage, and we’re way beyond that).
Now the Washington Post:
Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world.
That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Part of this is due to the Covid pandemic (which Trump made worse), which caused a big drop in the labor pool. As the country recovered from it, there remained a gap between available labor and labor demand — a gap which immigrants, both legal and undocumented, was able to fill:
But the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were desperate to hire. Plus, it would be exceedingly difficult for immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. . . .
Experts argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since January 2023, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis that used three-month rolling averages in labor force participation to account for data volatility.
The US economy has not only recovered from the pandemic faster than expected, it has recovered faster and better than the other developed countries (Business Insider as far back as Nov 2021: One gobsmacking chart shows how Biden's economy is doing way, way better than all the others). And it’s powered by immigrants of all kinds who are willing to do dirtier jobs for less pay than most Americans:
In Dalton, Ga. — known as the “Carpet Capital of the World” — Jan Pourquoi said the entire economy would collapse without immigrant workers. Pourquoi owns a rug company with a warehouse near the city’s railroad tracks and pays $11 an hour for jobs like cutting and sewing door and bathroom mats. He said that he doesn’t question anyone’s paperwork, and that he knows workers will reliably line up at his door looking for openings every morning.
Now, undocumented immigration does remain a major problem, and President Biden needs to more visible in his efforts to fix it. Trump and the House Republicans just handed him a major propaganda tool in rejecting their own draconian solution that Biden and the Democrats had agreed to; now the Democrats need to pound that message and keep pounding it. But Biden and the Democrats also need to drive home the point that not only is the economy doing better now than under Trump (even before covid); we need to hammer home the point that we couldn’t have recovered this fast without immigrants.