Immigration and economic growth
By Wadi'h Halabi (Peoples Weekly World)
Capital has been flooding into the U.S. since the 1991 Gulf War. In the three months
after imperialism began bombing Yugoslavia in 1999, capital gushed into the U.S. at
the extraordinary annual rate of $1,109 billion, according to Federal Reserve Bank
statistics. This capital is fleeing the instability, wars, declining profit rates and
outright losses found in more and more of the capitalist world. Its flight contributes
to further destabilization of those areas. Its inflow in turn has been a real, if
unpublicized * and temporary * factor in the longest economic expansion in U.S.
history.
Immigrants have also been coming to the U.S. in growing numbers since the Gulf War.
Nearly 12 million people, three-quarters with documents, came to the U.S. in the
1990s, breaking the previous record of 8.8 million set in 1901-1910. Most are
attempting to flee the low wages, mass unemployment, insecurity and conflicts
characterizing more and more of the capitalist world. Their departure further
impoverishes their countries of origin. And receiving even less publicity are the
contributions of immigrants to the U.S. economic expansion.
Immigrants accounted for one-quarter to one-third of the growth in the U.S. labor
force in the last decade. Without immigrants, the U.S. economy could not have grown as
it did in the 1990s. Without immigrants' labor and purchases, the economies of the
largest U.S. metropolitan areas, from N.Y. to Silicon Valley, would slump or stop
functioning. Immigrants are reported to account for one-quarter to one-third of home
purchases in New York City, Los Angeles and several other cities.
Recent articles in Southwest Economy, a regional publication of the Federal Reserve
Bank, and a study commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences (James Smith and
Barry Edmonston, eds., The New Americans) testify to a few of the contributions from
immigrants. According to New Americans, federal and local governments enjoy an average
net gain (in present dollars) of $80,000 from each immigrant and children. That is how
much taxes paid by immigrants will exceed the cost of government services, with the
Pentagon and prisons included in calculations of "services."
New Americans estimates that the net contribution to government from highly educated
immigrants and their children will average $200,000. All in all, that comes to about
$1 trillion in net gains to government from the 1990s immigrantion alone.
In addition, New Americans does not fully take into account the savings to the U.S.
from having other countries raise and educate immigrants, whose median age on arriving
is about 25. And, typical of capitalist economic studies, the work does not even
mention the profits made from immigrants' labor.
An important fact from Southwest Economy is that California and Texas, two states
bordering Mexico, now have the highest manufacturing employment of all the states in
the U.S. As recently as 1985, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania ranked ahead of Texas in
manufacturing employment.
In addition, if maquiladoras, the factories in Mexico, primarily producing for U.S.
corporations, were counted as a "state," their 1.1 million workers would have placed
them between California and Texas in manufacturing employment.
"One of the best-kept secrets in Washington D.C.," crows the Federal Rreserve's
Southwest Economy, "is that NAFTA is a success ... Maquiladora manufacturing [should
be] thought of as a physical extension of Texas and California production," keeping
U.S. corporations "competitive" in the unmentioned "race to the bottom."
Why then is there so much capitalist-inspired propaganda and discrimination against
immigrants? For the same reason there is relentless discrimination against
African-Americans, Puerto Ricans and other people of color * to keep labor divided and
cheap. Recent immigrants' earnings averaged 33 percent below those of U.S.-born
workers in 1998; they had been 12 percent lower in 1960.
Immigrant workers face some of the hardest work, lowest wages, poorest benefits and
worst housing conditions in the United States. But immigrants have not been mere
passive victims of capitalism. Immigrants have been prominent in recent labor-led
struggles * economic and political * throughout the U.S., from New York to California.
Immigrant workers, together with African Americans and Puerto Ricans, are certain to
be prominent in the coming struggles to unite workers of all countries and skin
colors.
A button worn by a Southern California trade union leader sums up some of the
capitalists' worst fears:"Those darn immigrants," it reads, "are scaring away all the
bigots"!
