Opinion Columnist
Washington Post
By Catherine Rampell
June 29 at 7:16 PM ET
Last week President Trump suspended visas for huge categories of immigrants, allegedly to “protect American jobs.”
To understand how disingenuous this rationale is, consider the case of Vihaan Baranidharan.
Vihaan is stuck in India, where he went to see his sick grandmother for what was supposed to be a short visit. Thanks to Trump’s order, he’s blocked from getting the visa stamp needed to return to Dallas. But Vihaan has not taken, nor has any plans to take, any American’s job. He doesn’t have the experience to be competitive in the U.S. job market — or even sufficient vocabulary.
Because Vihaan just finished first grade.
“What risk could he pose to the U.S. economy?” pleads his mother, Sindhu Turumalla. “He is 7.”
That doesn’t matter to the Trump administration, which is exploiting the economic downturn as another excuse to punish immigrants — whether legal or undocumented, professional or working class, entrepreneur or student, adult or child.
The United States is so far the only country to “explicitly justify mobility limitations not on grounds of health risk, but to protect the jobs and economic wellbeing of” its citizens, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
In an April executive order, Trump suspended issuance of green cards for most people applying from abroad. Last week’s executive order expanded the ban to large categories of temporary, employment-based visas. This included the highly skilled immigrants the administration usually claims it prioritizes, as well as any spouses and minor children who normally accompany these workers.
The U.S. economy is indeed in bad shape. But it’s hard to fathom that the estimated 377,000 would-be immigrants now barred from entry present much “risk to the U.S. labor market,” as Trump claims.
Keeping them out, however, could actually harm the economy in the long run. Vihaan’s family presents a helpful case study.
His dad, an executive handling cybersecurity at a major global bank, has been based in the United States since 2017 on a visa specifically for executives transferred from abroad within the same company. He manages, and hires, U.S. workers. While unemployment overall is in double digits, in his field — computer-related occupations — unemployment has declined since the pandemic began, hitting 2.5 percent in May.
What’s more, economists generally believe that highly skilled immigrants like him create job opportunities for Americans and make the country more competitive, especially in STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math, fields.
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Read the rest of Catherine’s article at the link.
Let’s see, 21 million Americans out of work. 377,000 foreign workers barred. That’s less than 2% — statistically insignificant. But, politically, it’s “red meat” to Trump’s White Nationalist followers.
Beyond that, it’s largely apples and oranges. Among others, Trump is barring intracompany executives and managers, those with specialized business knowledge, skilled professionals, and those coming under exchange programs. But, the hardest hit sectors of the U.S. workforce have been things like hospitality, government, and mining.
So, Toyota is going to hire an out of work bartender to run a U.S. Division? An international tech company is going to replace its chief information officer with an out of work coal miner? Or, perhaps a laid off government bureaucrat is going to replace a seasonal camp counselor in Maine? Not likely. More realistic that the employer would simply shift the work abroad or just close or reduce the U.S. operations.
During my years in the INS, we went through various iterations of “programs” to notify state and local employment agencies when a major enforcement operation supposedly “freed up” jobs for U.S. workers — usually in agriculture or manufacturing. None of these efforts created meaningful opportunities that U.S. workers were ready, willing, and qualified to take, at least on any systematic, consistent, or widespread basis.
The oft-cited claim that “they are taking our jobs” or that deportations, exclusions, and bars “protect the American labor market” is largely unsupported by hard data. Let’s just take a look at those who advance such basically mythical claims: nativist immigration groups and GOP politicos.
These are the same folks who oppose increases in minimum wages, bust unions, eliminate health and safety protections, don’t believe in health care, weaken anti-discrimination protections, cut unemployment benefits, and support management’s unilateral right to exploit workers to the max. These are not groups and individuals with any real concerns about the health or welfare of U.S. workers except to the extent that they think their claims — supplemented with racist dog whistles identifying the “foreign invaders” as people of color — might win them some votes at election time.
Or let’s take something more basic. I just listened to a news report saying that the simple act of everyone wearing a mask could save the U.S. economy one trillion dollars. That’s real money!
So, if Trump, Pence, and the GOP really wanted to help American workers and the economy in a meaningful way, they would be pulling out all the stops to promote, actually demand, that all Americans wear masks and practice social distancing. They would be strongly supporting governors, mayors, and public health officials urging these uniform practices. Yet, that’s not what’s happening.
The visa suspension is just another Trump racist ruse. Something to make the gullible think he is concerned about them when fact is he’s never been concerned for anyone in his life except himself. But, it’s dangerous because it promotes the myth of the link between immigrants and America’s economic problems and shifts the attention from the Trump kakistocracy’s “malicious incompetence” that actually was a major contributing factor to our inept, at best, COVID-19 response and the problems and chaos that have followed.
The real situation looks more like this: 1) with the economy ailing, there would be a natural decline in job-based immigration in certain sectors because of market forces, regardless of what Trump does; 2) with America’s well-advertised failure to deal competently with COVID-19 and Trump’s ugly hate rhetoric, “immigrants with choices” may well choose other destinations (Canada is one that is already benefiting from Trump’s obsession with xenophobic immigration policies); 3) with Americans barred from entry into the EU and perhaps other countries, the vital force of immigration and its overall positive effect on the world economy will be muted in the U.S.; and 4) with the legal immigration system, including the refugee and asylum systems, shut down whatever future immigration does occur under Trump is likely to be of the extralegal variety, unscreened, unmonitored, and uncontrolled.
The latter are likely to be refugees with limited options, driven more by necessity than economics, although for many refugees persecution and economic factors are inextricably intertwined. Even here, the practical difficulties of travel during a worldwide pandemic are likely to have more of an impact than Trump’s elimination of asylum.
Indeed, our country has long benefitted from asylum seekers’ (now sadly misplaced) trust in the U.S. legal system that leads to their turning themselves in at ports of entry, surrendering near the border, or voluntarily applying at a USCIS Asylum Office in the U.S. With the U.S. legal system now in “full fraud mode” refugees stand a better chance of losing themselves in the interior than of gaining protection from a system specifically designed to treat them unfairly and abusively.
Trump claims great “success” for his abrogation of the legal immigration system and crimes against humanity. But, who really knows how many folks cross the border without our knowledge and where they end up? And, no ridiculous and wasteful wall is going to stop that.
That doesn’t mean that the extralegal immigration won’t be beneficial — past extralegal immigration has benefited the U.S. overall and often, but not always, the migrants themselves. But, by keeping migrant populations underground, living in fear and uncertainty, and subject to exploitation, we limit the immigrants’ abilities to reach their full potential and to contribute fully to our society. In other words, we limit our own capacity to get the full benefit of the reality of human migration in a global society.
In November, we have a chance to end the stupidity and cruelty and to establish a more just society that recognizes the benefits of equal justice for all and treats migrants fairly, humanely, rationally, and with respect for their legal and human rights. We can’t afford to blow it, again!
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
PWS
07-01-20