Xenophobia refers to hatred and discrimination toward foreigners. It is not a new theme in American history, but one may find it surprising that in modern times, the most explicit culprit of this form of bigotry would be our nation’s President-elect.
Donald Trump kick-started his campaign by brazenly declaring that Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug-dealers, and he continuously placed the group at the center of relentless scapegoating while half of the country listened, laughed, and agreed. By claiming that illegal immigrants are a drain on our system, Trump and his supporters formulated what they believed was a logical and reasonable pretext for racism.
But it isn’t racism if there are good reasons, right? How can it be racism when they don’t pay taxes and they’re stealing our jobs?
While those who advocate these beliefs are flying their Confederate flags and patting themselves on the back for “not being racist,” illegal immigrants throughout the US are paying taxes and working low-skill jobs that hardly overlap with those sought by native-born American citizens.
Illegal immigrants pay billions of dollars in state and local taxes every year while remaining ineligible for most government benefits. The Social Security Administration reported that in 2010, undocumented immigrants and their employers generated roughly $13 billion in payroll taxes, about a billion of which can be attributed to the employers — illegal immigrants are the source of the rest of that figure. The Social Security Administration also reported that a relatively small portion of those immigrants receive benefits. Thus, we have a picture that is far from the stereotypical lazy immigrant cheating the system.
It is quite illogical to root one’s reasoning in this argument when Donald Trump himself neglected to pay personal income taxes for almost 20 years. But I digress.
And the fallacies don’t stop with the issue of taxes. Those who claim that immigrants are ‘stealing our jobs’ may be shocked to discover that this argument makes little to no sense. Not only has the American desire for low-skill work been steadily decreasing in recent times, but immigrants and native-born American citizens typically pursue different jobs due to their varying skill-sets. Urban Institute’s Maria E. Enchautegui found that “immigrants and native workers with low levels of education may be competing for different jobs and even could be complementing each other.”
The overlap here is relatively small, and, as Enchautegui states, even if illegal immigrants were to become authorized to work in the US, “that still may not be enough to increase competition with natives for low-skilled jobs.” She also has noted two important trends: the number of native workers without high school diplomas is decreasing, while the number of their immigrant counterparts is increasing. That brutal work climate in which there is no room left for American workers, a situation which advocates of “the wall” so often describe, appears to not exist.
Whether or not anti-immigrants want to believe it, immigration drastically benefits our economy. This is an idea vouched for by not only liberals, but also economists. Angel Aguiar and Terrie Walmsley found that full deportation of Mexican immigrants would reduce gross domestic product, while full legalization would increase it. Additionally, Harvard Kennedy School professor Lant Pritchett studied the potential effects of open borders on world GDP and found that open borders would effect an increase of $65 trillion. And these are only a couple of the positive effects that economists have observed of immigration.
The immigration process is extremely difficult, with complex requirements and years-long (sometimes decades even) waits. So even in the hypothetical case that immigrants were job-stealing freeloaders, would not the best solution for a country who prides itself on its ‘melting pot’ nature be to make this process easier, thus eliminating that inequality?
Or does the real origin of this anti-illegal immigration stance lie somewhere darker?
