This administration is obsessed with deporting immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security claims its focus is on undocumented (illegal) immigrants and those who have committed crimes. However, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials appear far less discriminating with who they attempt to apprehend, with alleged quotas being used to drive deportation numbers. It appears that anyone who “looks like” an immigrant is at risk of being questioned and taken into custody.
Yet without immigrants, our nation would suffer labor shortages across multiple industries. Here are just a few.
International medical graduates fill a critical national need for physicians, particularly for primary care specialties like internal medicine, family medicine and pediatrics. They represent around 20 percent of the physician work force, with many willing to work in rural areas where U.S. medical graduates are less inclined to take positions. Keeping such people out of the country, or making it difficult for them to secure work visas, places headwinds on their arrival, relocation and settlement into the country. With an aging population, the need for skilled medical personnel will only grow, and embracing international medical graduates is critical to maintain our nation’s already strained healthcare system.
The same holds true in higher education, particularly in STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. Satisfying the needs to educate the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) innovators and technologists, for example, demands a highly skilled academic pipeline that cannot be filled with domestic personnel alone.
Countries with high-quality STEM undergraduate programs, like those in India, Singapore and China, provide a reliable stream of talent to fill domestic graduate programs that will serve to mitigate future shortages in faculty at all levels. By discouraging international students from enrolling in U.S. schools, the administration is effectively turning away STEM talent that will ultimately dampen economic growth well into the future. Such short-sighted thinking is a prescription for economic stagnation for our nation.
Even those who come into the country and fill positions and needs that do not demand higher education and training are valuable assets. Many will start their own businesses, have children here and then support their educational advancement, earning higher degrees including masters’ and doctorates. Within one generation, these children can rise to be upper-middle-class citizens, contributing to the nation’s economic health and well-being.
Those who work at lower-paying jobs also ensure that their children are well educated and obtain higher degrees. They experience the American dream by fast-tracking their offspring well up the societal economic ladder.
America has always been a nation of immigrants. That does not mean that our borders should be wide open for anyone who wants to live here. To the contrary, a systematic and transparent set of rules and policies that facilitate immigration into the U.S. population is necessary to create a human capital pipeline that strengthens the nation’s economic and societal fabric.
Those fortunate enough to be born here often take for granted what they have. Those who immigrate here are seeking a better life for themselves and their families. They work hard and play by the rules far more than those born here, simply because they have been given a privilege that not everyone gets to enjoy.
As a country, whose GDP is one-quarter of the world’s GDP, we are voracious consumers. We lack the personnel and resources to create all such goods and services. Welcoming those who can support such consumption is a simple bar to assess immigration and provide a measure for their return on investment.
Immigration also serves to counterbalance a total fertility rate that has been persistently below replacement for decades. Immigrants provide a necessary infusion of human capital that cannot be generated internally. Even if the fertility rate instantaneously jumped above replacement levels, it would take a generation or more for its positive effect on human capital development to be realized.
In a counter-factual world, if our borders were instantaneously shuttered and all immigrants magically vanished, our country would cease to function as we know it. Independent of the 48 million documented immigrants, if the 11 million undocumented immigrants suddenly disappeared, many of the goods and services that we rely upon would become unavailable. This is why the president is willing to permit migrant farm workers to remain in the country and continue working.
To keep America great demands sensible immigration policies that focus first on what the nation’s needs are, and how they can be filled. Taking a vigilante-like approach to immigration control is not the solution.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a computer science professor in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a data scientist, he uses his expertise in risk-based analytics to address problems in public policy.
