Immigration Has Different Impacts (II)

By: Michael Sanford

Consider the economic role played by immigrants as workers. In the factories of Chicago, which is losing native population, immigrants are more than one out of four workers, and without their presence those factories might need to move elsewhere to find needed workers.

In Atlanta, Georgia, a city to which natives are streaming from places like New York and Philadelphia, the number of service sector jobs has mushroomed in recent years, and immigrants are an important part of the labor force that undergirds that expansion.

In addition, states with low native population growth but rapid immigrant growth may expect greater cultural and linguistic changes than states where these social changes are diluted because so many natives are moving in. Immigrants moving into a region may or may not cause native-born Americans to leave the area.

In the end the question can be of the chicken-or-the-egg type: are natives leaving an area because it is undesirable, while immigrants are moving in because they have different expectations? Or do immigrants “push” out the natives, who flee in the face of competition from the newcomers? Researchers debate whether this kind of push-and-pull mechanism explains why natives have been leaving many metropolitan areas where there is immigrant growth. Immigration has different impacts in different states.

Usually, however, this has been interpreted to mean that places with high immigrant numbers are heavily impacted by immigration, while areas with low numbers are not. However, immigrant numbers should be taken in the context of native population growth to better understand the impact of immigration. A state may have high immigration, but if it has high native population growth, some impacts of immigration are diminished.

This fact may not change the attitudes and opinions of persons unhappy about immigration in booming areas of the south and west like North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada. But the truth is that their immigrant numbers do not translate into the same level of impact as similar numbers in Michigan, Kansas, or New Jersey. In these latter states, the foreign born are proving to be more valuable than ever.

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