Benefits of Immigration: How Immigrants Help the Economy

Immigrants coming from the Northern Triangle have been fleeing their country not for economic opportunity, but for asylum. Gangs and groups in the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador) have pretty much taken over the countries and struck fear in the populations. Nearly forty percent of immigrants have had attacks or threats on their families because they left the family. More than forty percent have had a relative who was. Thirty-one percent knew someone who was kidnapped, and seventeen percent knew someone who simply vanished! These are things the United States cannot ignore. We should protect these people by letting them into the country and giving them a new life. If the US lets immigrants from the Northern Triangle into the country, then they will help the economy. They will get jobs and invent new things, start new businesses, and boost the economy as a whole. Immigrants make America what it is, and not letting them in does not help the country, but rather cripples it.

So, some say that there are some ways how immigrants help the economy and that the US should let them in. It is, after all, a fact that immigrants improve the economy as a whole. Some estimates show that immigrants contribute around two trillion dollars each year, or about 10 percent of annual GDP; immigrants are estimated to make up about 2.6 percent of GDP. These stats show that immigrants are, in fact, a positive factor for the economy. In order to increase strength as a country, one needs money, and immigrants help get some.

Immigrants can also become future entrepreneurs, scientists, and inventors of the country. These jobs will help America patent new things, making the US more technologically advanced. It has been researched that immigrants create more patentable technologies than natives. Even though immigrants only make up eighteen percent of the workforce, they have twenty-eight percent of high quality patents (defined as those granted by all three major patent offices). Immigrants are also more likely to be physicists, chemists, and physiologists or work in medicine. Immigrants can become great contributors to the US, and showing the skills that they have in the different fields can help the United States grow. Rates of entrepreneurialism in natives are declining, but the same rates in immigrants are increasing. The reason why native don’t invent new things is because it is easier to get a job, but immigrants do not mind the risk of inventing new things, because they have nowhere else to go.

The big metropolitan cities in America have grown not just from natives, but mostly by immigrants. In ninety of one hundred metropolitan areas in the US, immigrant college graduates are more prospective than natives. Immigrants prevail and succeed in metropolitan areas more than natives do! The immigrants help grow the big cities, it’s not just the natives. Also, immigrants are known to react to economic crises better than natives do. If the market crashes for some reason, or the US is dumping money into big projects, then America needs to uphold the economy somehow, and immigrants seem to know how to do that.

The previous points were the things that immigrants do to help the country, but some say that immigrants do not help the country, and the big reason why they say that is because they take jobs. The thing is, though, immigrants from the Northern Triangle may take jobs, but they take jobs nobody wants, such as construction workers, farmers, or any of those backbreaking jobs, and so everything that needs to be accomplished job-wise will be worked on and the economy will grow. Immigrants from the Northern Triangle take jobs natives-borns don’t want to have. Immigrants may take jobs, but the impact of immigration labor on the wages of native-born workers is low. Undocumented workers often do the tough jobs that natives are not willing to do. Natives want to go to college and get a degree in a field that makes more money, and immigrants may not have that opportunity, so they can take jobs that do not require a degree.

Immigrants also create businesses that improve the economy. The Kauffman Foundation found that businesses led by immigrants have generated more than sixty three billion dollars and have created almost six hundred thousand jobs since 2006. If immigrants are well educated and know things about business, then they can actually produce jobs instead of taking them away.

Immigrants also have pretty much no impact on the wages of native-born Americans, but if one looks closely, they see that immigrants increase the wages just slightly. Immigrants expand employment opportunities in many different ways. For example, less-skilled immigrants in the agricultural, construction, or household fields improve wages by expanding jobs in American businesses and improving the responsibilities of bosses, (Greenstone, 2016) thus expanding the opportunities for jobs within native-born Americans, especially women, in high paying jobs. The immigrants do tough jobs, and when they succeed in those fields, it boosts our economy, thus boosting wages. Immigrants without a college degree in 2018 made up about ten percent of all people in the US, but these people reflected the share of workers in many important jobs. These include farming, fishing, forestry, grounds-cleaning, maintenance workers, hotel workers, and home health care workers. Even though these jobs may not be appealing to most natives, immigrants will take jobs anyway. Without these jobs being taken care of, how will we get them done if no native-born is going to do it? Most estimates show an impact on low-skilled native-born wages of 0 percent to –1 percent. Another estimate of the impact on low-skilled natives estimated a slightly positive impact on wages (between 0.6 and 1.7 percent). Furthermore, the impacts on wages of native-born workers with more education are mostly estimated to be positive, such that most estimates find the overall impact on native workers is positive. Immigrants do not decrease wages, in fact, they increase wages. It may be minuscule, but it is still there.

All in all, these people from the Northern Triangle need help. Ana Quintana (of the Heritage Foundation) said this: “I remember one of the first times I arrived in Honduras, as I was reading the newspaper that morning, I read this horrible story about how a 7-year-old was killed on the way to school because he didn’t have the equivalent of 4 or 5 cents to pay a local gang to cross the street because that was the tax that the gang would charge just for people to be able to cross that street.” Seven year olds dying on their way to school because they did not pay one day’s worth of tax should not happen anywhere for any reason what-so-ever. Sure, maybe some immigrants who want to enter are drug, gun, or weapon dealers, but in any way, there is much evidence that supports the fact that the United States should let the people who need help into the country. We can deal with the people who have criminal records, but the people who are running away from the terror in their countries should be helped. Immigrants will help and strengthen the economy as a whole. Turning them back into their countries is pretty much like killing them. Where is the benefit in that?