Answering Kennedy’s Call
The stakes are enormous if Republicans succeed in removing most of the estimated 11 million undocumented workers (only half of which are from Mexico and the Latin countries), and cut legal immigration in half, as they have promised to do.
Republicans haven’t let up on their campaign to limit immigration since 2017 when I first wrote about the newly elected Trump administration’s demonization of immigrants.
It’s now become even worse as Presidential candidate Trump and VP candidate JD Vance on the campaign trail have even doubled down on demonizing immigrants, saying they are now eating the pets of Ohioans!
The absurdity of Republicans’ allowing Trump’s MAGA movement to take over the Republican Party has made it worse for economic growth as well. Any mass deportation of immigrants would cause great harm to the American economy.
For most of the past half-century, adults in the U.S. Baby Boom generation – those born after World War II and before 1965 – have been the main driver of the nation’s expanding workforce, reports the PEW Research Center. But as this large generation heads into retirement, the increase in the potential labor force will slow markedly, and immigrants will play the primary role in the future growth of the working-age population (though they will remain a minority of it).
The stakes are enormous if Republicans succeed in removing most of the estimated 11 million undocumented worker (only half of which are from Mexico and the Latin countries), and cut legal immigration in half, as they have promised to do.
Economic growth will plummet, since it is mainly based on growth of the working age population, as well as labor productivity, which has also fallen since 2000.
The drop in labor productivity is in part because of the drop in capex spending, the investment in new plants and equipment, which has fallen by half since 2010, but also because of the Great Recession. Corporations have chosen to move many jobs overseas where labor is cheaper, rather than investing domestically to improve the productivity of American workers.
The number of adults in the prime working ages of 25 to 64 – 173.2 million in 2015 – will rise to 183.2 million in 2035, according to Pew Research Center projections. (But) That total growth of 10 million over two decades will be lower than the total in any single decade since the Baby Boomers began pouring into the workforce in the 1960s.
The Nobel Economist Paul Krugman said it in his most recent NYTimes Op-ed: “Overall, the move of immigrants to some small cities has been very beneficial, one of the best hopes those cities have for economic resurgence, but the hopes will disappear if immigrants are scared off by a climate of hate;” (or driven out by MAGA Republicans, which is what Trump has been attempting to do).
We are now seeing an ageing Trump whose incoherence is becoming more obvious, especially since Vice President Harris exposed his mental deterioration during the presidential debate.
And MAGA Republicans are blindly following him into the rabbit-hole.
Harlan Green © 2024
Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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