MIAMI (AP) – After fleeing the economic and political turmoil in Venezuela, Luisana Silva now orders carpets for a South Carolina rap company. He earns enough money to pay rent, buy groceries, fill his car with gas – and send money to his parents.
Arriving in the United States was an ordeal. Silva, 25, her husband and their then 7-year-old daughter braved the treacherous jungles of Panama. Darien Gap, traveled the length of Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande and surrendered to the US Border Patrol in Brownsville, Texas. Seeking asylum, they received work permits last year and found jobs in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
“My goal is to help my family who are in dire need of money and grow the economy here,” said Silva.
His story is like one family’s difficult quest for a better life. The millions of jobs that Silva and other new immigrants are filling in the United States appear to solve a puzzle that has puzzled economists for at least a year:
How did the economy succeed, adding hundreds of thousands of jobsevery month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates sharply to fight inflation – usually a recipe for recession?
Increasingly, the answer appears to be immigrants — whether they live in the United States legally or not. The increase in foreign-born adults has boosted the supply of available workers after a US labor shortage left many companies unable to fill jobs.
More workers filling more jobs and spending more money helped grow the economy and create more jobs. The presence of foreign workers reduced the pressure for companies to raise wages sharply and to pass on their higher labor costs to their customers through higher prices that fueled inflation. of things. Although US inflation remains high, it has fallen from its levels two years ago.
“It’s been a surprise — how do we continue to have such strong job growth while inflation continues to fall?” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute and the who was once the chief economist at the Department of Labor. “The immigration numbers are higher than we thought – that really solves the problem.”
While it helps boost economic growth, immigration is also at the center of a heated election-year debate over control of the nation’s Southern border. In his bid to return to the White House, Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked immigrants in derogatory terms, identifying them as dangerous criminals they are “poisonous in the blood” of America and attract more and more lies about immigration. Trump has vowed to finish building the border wall and to begin “the largest deportation operation ever in American history.” Whether he or President Joe Biden wins the election could determine whether the influx of immigrants, and their vital role in growing the economy, will last.
The influx of immigrants came as a surprise to almost everyone. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the number of immigrants — arriving rather than leaving — would reach 1 million by 2023. The actual number, the CBO said in a January update, is was three times that estimate: 3.3 million.
Thousands of employers really needed newcomers. The economy – and consumer spending – had slowed as a result of the pandemic. Companies were struggling to hire enough workers to keep up with customer orders.
The problem was compounded by demographic changes: The number of Native Americans in their prime working age — ages 25 to 54 — was falling because many of them had left that age group. and they are nearing or entering retirement. Numbers in this group have dropped by 770,000 since February 2020, shortly before COVID-19 crippled the economy.
Filling the gap has been a wave of immigrants. Over the past four years, the number of youth workers working or looking to work has increased by 2.8 million. And nearly all of the new people entering the workforce — 2.7 million, or 96% of them — were born outside the United States. Immigrants last year made up 18.6% of the workforce, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of government data.
And the employers accepted the help.
Consider Jan Gautam, CEO of the lodging company Interesting Hotels & Resort Management in Orlando, Florida, who said he can’t find American-born workers to take housekeeping and laundry jobs at his hotels. 44. Of Interessant’s 3,500 employees, he said, 85% are immigrants.
“Without workers, you’re broke,” said Gautam, himself an immigrant from India who started working in restaurants as a dishwasher and now owns his own company.
He said: “If you want to grow the economy, there needs to be more immigrants coming to this country.”
Or consider the workers at the Flood Brothers farm in Maine’s “dairy capital” of Clinton. Foreign-born workers make up half of the farm’s workforce of about 50, feeding the cows, tending the crops and helping collect the milk – 18,000 liters a day.
Jenni Tilton-Flood, a partner in the operation, said: “We couldn’t do it without them.
For every unemployed person in Maine, there are, in fact, two job openings, on average.
“We wouldn’t have an economy, in Maine or in the US if we didn’t have skilled workers coming from out of this country,” Tilton-Flood said in a phone interview with The Associated Press from her farm.
He said: “Without immigrants – young asylum seekers as well as our long-term immigrant supporters – we wouldn’t be able to do the work we do.” “Everything that affects the American economy is driven by and will only be saved by accepting foreign workers.”
A study by Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, economists at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, concluded that over the past two years, new immigrants have increased the economic supply of labor and allowed the United States to produce activities without excessive heat and accelerating inflation.
In the past, economists estimated that American employers could not add more than 60,000 to 100,000 jobs per month without heating up the economy and fueling inflation. But when Edelberg and Watson included the increase in immigration in their calculations, they found that monthly job growth could be twice as high this year — 160,000 to 200,000 — without putting upward pressure on inflation.
“There are a lot of people working in the country,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said last week. lecture at Stanford University. Mainly because of the influx of immigrants, Powell said, “it’s a bigger economy but not a tougher one. It’s really unexpected and unusual.”
Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden’s immigration policy over immigration at the Southern border. Only about 27% of the 3.3 million foreigners who entered the United States last year did so as “lawful permanent residents” or on temporary visas, according to an analysis by Edelberg and Watson. The rest – 2.4 million – came illegally, overstayed their visas, are awaiting immigration court hearings or are in a parole program that allows them to stay for a short time and sometimes work in the country.
“There you have it,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director who is president of the conservative American Action Forum, wrote in February. “The way to solve the inflation problem is to tolerate the immigration problem.”
Many economists suggest that immigrants benefit the American economy in many ways. They take on undesirable, low-paying but important jobs that many native-born Americans cannot do, such as caring for children, the sick, and the elderly. And they can boost the country’s creativity and productivity because they have the opportunity to start their own businesses and obtain patents.
Ernie Tedeschi, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center and a former economic adviser to Biden, calculates that the immigration boom has accounted for a fifth of economic growth over the past four years.
Critics argue that increased immigration could force wages down, especially for low-wage workers, a group that often includes long-term immigrants. Last month, recently economic report of the presidentBiden advisers acknowledged that “immigration may put downward pressure on the wages of some low-wage workers” but added that many studies show that the impact on the wages of the US-born is ” small.”
Even Edelberg recognizes that an unexpected wave of immigrants, such as the recent one, can burden state and local governments and burden them with heavy costs. He said that a streamlined immigration system would help.
The recent increase “is somewhat of a hindrance to the growth of immigrants in the United States,” Edelberg said. “I don’t think anyone would have sat down and said: ‘Let’s create a proper immigration policy,’ and this is what they would come up with.”
Holtz-Eakin argued that an immigration cut of the kind Trump has vowed to impose, if elected, would result in “very slow labor growth and a return to strong trade” between contain inflation and maintain economic growth in the United States. Countries have so far been able to avoid it.
Currently, millions of job vacancies are being filled by immigrants like Mariel Marrero. A political opponent of Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, Marrero, 32, fled his country in 2016 after receiving death threats. He lived in Panama and El Salvador before crossing the US border and applying for asylum.
While his case is pending, he received permission to work in the United States last July. Marrero, who had worked in the archives of the Venezuelan Council in Caracas, found work selling telephones and clerking in a convenience store for Venezuelan immigrants.
At first, he lived in his uncle’s house for free. But now he earns enough to pay the rent on the two-bedroom house he shares with three other Venezuelans in Doral, Florida, a suburb of Miami with a large Venezuelan community. After rent, food, electricity and gas, she has enough money to send $200 a month to her family in Venezuela.
“One hundred percent – this country gives you opportunities,” he said.
Marrero has his own American dream:
I see myself having my own company, my own house, helping my family in a more comfortable way.”
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Wiseman and Rugaber reported from Washington, Salomon from Miami.
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