Migrants seeking to enter the United States in front of a barbed wire barrier and Texas National Guard agents, on the border between Mexico and the United States, in Ciudad Juarez, May 13, 2024 (AFP/HERIKA MARTINEZ )
Without migrants, would the United States still be the world’s leading economic power? “No,” say experts, according to whom immigration constitutes the “backbone” of many essential economic sectors.
In the middle of a presidential year, the question of immigration has emerged as an explosive subject in America, with Republican candidate Donald Trump using ever more violent rhetoric against migrants and promising to carry out mass expulsions. he had just returned to the White House.
In this huge country with an aging population, immigrant workers constitute “the backbone” of the economy, explains Justin Gest, a specialist in immigration issues at George Mason University near Washington.
Many sectors such as food, services, agriculture, health and even construction “are structurally dependent on immigrant labor”, believes the political scientist.
This, he explains, in particular because immigrant workers constitute one of the “most flexible, mobile and versatile workforces in the country”.
Depriving businesses of this windfall would thus be “cataclysmic for certain industries”, warns Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the US Department of Labor and president of a progressive economic think tank.
“And that would have cascading effects throughout the economy,” she continues.
For Justin Gest, “the cost of labor would increase” and therefore “would lead to inflationary pressures which would result in increased costs for all Americans.”
– “Too many jobs” –
On the contrary, an increase in immigration would benefit the American economy, according to forecasts from the Budget Agency, a transpartisan body of the American Congress.
The increasing arrivals of migrants should allow the country’s economy to gain 7,000 billion dollars over the next decade, in part thanks to the work force of these people, this organization estimated in February.
“The United States benefits from an abundant workforce that crosses the border”, and which gives the country “a comparative advantage: wages do not increase, because the lack of labor does not exert strong pressure on wage growth,” IMF Director Kristalina Georgieva said in April.
Photomontage created on February 8, 2024 and showing Joe Biden in Las Vegas on February 4, 2024 and Donald Trump in Concord, New Hampshire, on January 19, 2024 (AFP/Archives/SAUL LOEB, TIMOTHY A. CLARY)
New arrivals come to fill low-skilled jobs that are difficult to fill by other workers.
“The United States has something that other countries in the Americas do not have: an overflow of jobs,” points out Oscar Chacon, director of Alianza Americas, a coalition of 58 associations defending immigrants in the country. .
More than 8 million jobs are unfilled across the country, according to the Department of Labor.
However, these arrivals of migrants “create an internal political problem”, pointed out the director of the IMF.
The question divides Americans. The Republicans thus accuse the Democratic president of having allowed the country to be “invaded”. Since the start of his mandate, more than 7 million people have been intercepted after crossing the border with Mexico illegally, according to official figures.
And Donald Trump regularly refers to particularly shocking murders, committed by people who entered the United States illegally, to insist that there is a wave of crime due to illegal migrants, without statistics or studies carried out by experts, do not confirm such a phenomenon.
© 2024 AFP
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