Countering the Anti-Immigrant Conversation
Afraid of being trolled on social media and bullied in the public square, Democrats, progressives and others fail to effectively counter racist anti-immigrant rhetoric - and, yet, it's not that hard
Publisher’s Riff
It's deeply troubling to watch how “mainstream,” (corporate) popular discourse and, yes, news reporting on the topic of immigration is devoid of proper context and something very critical for a conversation like this: facts. Instead, what happens is an acceptance of irresponsible and dramatic cable news headlines and many of us, unwittingly or not, "carrying the devil's water," as the old saying goes. It's not just Fox cable daily obsessed with live dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico border about thousands of migrants desperate to get access into the United States, but other competitors such as MSNBC and CNN are jumping into the fray in a race for more viewers, readers and ratings.
This now, once again, has the general public unnecessarily afraid of "hordes" of "illegal immigrants," thereby placing added political pressure on policymakers, especially the Biden administration, to do something. But, while that situation at the border, more specifically at a popular El Paso, Texas crossing point, might be a crisis for the people at that spot (many of whom are managing a set of extenuating circumstances and political showmanship from Texas’ governor), it's not really the brand of stereotypical "migrant horde" crisis that's being framed by news outlets and political white nationalists who created that framing in the first place.
What's also happening is that, more and more, other population groups in the U.S. who are prime targets of the white supremacists who create racist "illegal immigrant" messaging are believing the tropes and disinformation headlines. This is classic divide and conquer. It's a centuries-long strategy that white racist political, business and aristocratic interests employ in often successful efforts to keep the targets of their insidious plans from fully aligning and teaming up against them. That's what's happening in this instance: we're seeing a concerning number of Black Americans, for example, who agree with the notion that "illegal immigrants" are taking their jobs or adding to economic and community insecurity. Antiquated, racist notions that the "illegals take our jobs" brought to you by the creators of "the negroes are taking your jobs" during Reconstruction. Yet, no one can tell us exactly how many jobs are being stolen.
The big question here: Why would anyone want to carry the devil's water on this topic? Clearly, the original source of all anti-immigrant messaging and rhetoric is white nationalist organizing. Why would Black people and Black media influencers want to carry out white supremacist talking points and, by virtue of that, do the white supremacists' work for them? That's a key question we have to ask ourselves and it's at the core of what should be a robust counter movement by Black communities, other aligned BIPOC communities, Democrats, progressives and others. That counter has not really happened, yet, as many are afraid of being bullied in public debates.
That has to end and can end. There is absolutely no evidence that Brown Latino migrants are taking Black jobs. When people who push this infamous trope are challenged, the best they can come up with are personal anecdotes. Indeed, as Ohio State University's Treva Lindsey was saying here to the Washington Post in 2019 "increasing the labor supply could actually increase job opportunities in certain industries with sizable numbers of black and Latino workers." More here ...
A 2016 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania found that an increase in the labor supply resulting from immigration could actually generate more employment in industries such as home construction and food production. Simply put, more demand for goods and services means greater demand for those providing those goods and services. While a handful of less-than-credible studies suggest that undocumented immigrants take jobs from U.S.-born black people and Latinos, existing data simply doesn’t bear out a correlation between undocumented immigration and unemployment rates among U.S.-born racial and ethnic minorities.
That's the thing: anti-immigrant white nationalists never present facts to back up the claim that immigrants - illegal or otherwise - harm our communities ... because there are no facts to back up those claims. So: Did migrants raise the rents? Is it the migrants who've been raising the price of living or gentrifying us out of our neighborhoods? Oh, so it's migrants who are price-gouging all of us and calling it "inflation?" So, it was migrants who raised gas prices? Are migrants the ones responsible for higher violent crime rates? So, you’re saying it's migrants who engaged in epic levels of criminal negligence and corruption when the COVID pandemic hit and not only allowed it to kill more than 1 million Americans, but set up a system whereby their rich buddies could pilfer billions in "paycheck protection program" dollars from the federal government? Show us, again, how migrants lowered our wages?
You see how it all falls apart easily? Migrants, undocumented and otherwise, actually expand the economy, as onclusive evidence shows. Here's the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy about the nearly $12 billion in annual combined state and local taxes undocumented migrants contribute to governments ... and the billions we miss out on by not making them "legal" ...
The truth is that undocumented immigrants living in the United States pay billions of dollars each year in state and local taxes. Further, these tax contributions would increase significantly if all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States were granted a pathway to citizenship as part of a comprehensive immigration reform. Or put in the reverse, if undocumented immigrants are deported in high numbers, state and local revenues could take a substantial hit.
It doesn't stop there: how about the more than $400 billion in combined state, local and federal taxes that all immigrants contributed each year to public budgets, as Boundless found ...
Like everyone else in the U.S., immigrants also pay sales taxes and property taxes , even if they rent. This means undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars each year in taxes – over $492 billion dollars in total taxes in 2019 alone. In fact, several studies have found that undocumented immigrants would earn much more, and therefore pay much more in taxes, if they had temporary or permanent legal status.
Immigrants in the U.S. contributed more than $330.7 billion in federal income taxes in 2019, and over $492 billion dollars in total taxes (including state, municipal, and sales taxes). The Tax Foundation estimates that American and immigrant taxpayers paid $1.6 trillion in individual income taxes in 2019. In this context, it’s important to note that immigrants made up only 13.5% of the U.S. population in 2020, meaning that immigrants make an outsized contribution to the U.S. revenue system.
So, not only do 1) more immigrants in the United States grow the labor pool and, in reality, create more jobs, but 2) more immigrants in the United States actually - and substantially - increases tax revenue, not to mention 3) strengthen the American dollar's dominance in the global economy as many of those immigrants send remittances back to their home countries (because, let's be real, immigrants aren't clamoring to get into China or Russia, right?). Which all makes sense because this massive and very powerful nearly $26 trillion economy, the largest in the world, was made possible by both forced immigration (that would be the formerly enslaved Black people who were shipped here against their will to build the original American economy) and the influx of immigration from around the world that made the U.S. the most diverse and racially intersectional of all nations on the planet. Increased American diversity is what makes the American economy much more powerful than everyone else's economy. It's our obvious secret weapon.
So, why would we want to ruin that? With that much economic growth potential, we should want more immigrants. What we need to focus on is how we improve the system for entry.