Immigration in Irons?

Lately, I’ve been sniffing a little shift in the immigration winds.

I think it started with the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Four workers died that night. Four men doing the hard, dangerous work most of us once took pride in and now want to avoid.

Four men peacefully struggling to earn their daily bread. Fathers working to feed their children. Brothers sending money home. Churchgoers. A dad who laughed with his young daughter at a water park kind of men.

In other words, men with the family values so many Americans cherish.

They were also immigrants. Their deaths while earning a hardscrabble living for their families wiped out the concern about their immigration status. Most of the press respectfully reported their status as “undisclosed.” President Joe Biden, on his visit, skipped over it, referring to them as Baltimoreans, stressing their humanity, not their status.

Oh, of course, some extremists found a way to whip up the racial boogeyman, incanting “DEI” as the cause, presumably because the compassionate and competent governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore are Black. Never mind that they are leaders elected to their posts, not appointed, so how affirmative action works here has left me scratching my curly topped head.

The fact that it was four immigrants who died — while a greater tragedy was averted because first responders acted quickly and by the book (why isn’t DEI credited for that?) — focused the media’s spotlight on the harsh and dangerous circumstances under which so many immigrants work and their contribution to the American economy. Turns out it’s quite a story.

For instance, immigration may be the answer to a mystery that’s been eluding even our leading economists.

By most traditional analysis, our economy should be in the crapper. A year ago, we were predicting either one of two bad outcomes from the pandemic recovery: runaway inflation or recession. A soft landing was a whispered hope.

But here we are, with 39 months of continued job growth, and the jobless rate below 4 percent for 26 straight months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Seems to me that’s really making America great again.

Inflation, while continuing, is at a much lower level than it should be given growth levels. It’s an economic mystery, the monetary equivalent of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. It just keeps giving and giving.

According to some the answer is immigration, legal and illegal.

You see, our population is aging. Even Gen X is hitting retirement. Meanwhile, our birth rate is declining. As a result, our productive native-born workforce, those between the ages of 25 and 54, actually has shrunk by 770,000 since February 2020.

Normally, this would mean the kind of economic anemia Japan suffered for years — until recently.

Instead, “Filling the gap,” as noted by the Associated Press, “has been a wave of immigrants. Over the past four years, the number of prime-age workers who either have a job or are looking for one has surged by 2.8 million. And nearly all those new labor force entrants — 2.7 million, or 96 percent of them — were born outside the United States.

“Immigrants last year accounted for a record 18.6 percent of the labor force … over the past two years, new immigrants raised the economy’s supply of workers and allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating and accelerating inflation.”

Because of immigrants, in the tradition of American exceptionalism, we’re booming. We’ve got the best economy in the world thanks to the good old-fashioned formula of the American success story, immigrants. They’re not only filling jobs, they’re spending, which is helping drive our economic growth.

The boom has led to a demand in labor. Industries like construction, hospitality, agriculture and health care — traditionally Republican constituents — are desperate for workers. Add to the mix the stimulus being created by Biden’s economic programs, such as the CHIPS and infrastructure acts, and you have an economy poised for even greater growth, where about the only thing holding us back is a supply of labor.

And here’s where we’re cutting our exceptionalism nose to spite our red-white-and-blue face.

For the sake of political expediency, we keep the boogeyman of the “bad immigrant” going. Donald Trump and his CroMAGA lot are stuck in the rut of focusing on the border, where the only solution they offer is terror tactics, calling migrants “criminals,” “terrorists,” “drug dealers,” “rapists,” “blood poisoners” and “vermin.”

All are from not nice countries, as opposed to “nice ones” like Denmark, Switzerland or Norway, according to Trump at a recent billionaire Palm Beach fundraiser. I guess “not nice” is a step up from “shithole.”

And this is where the other shift in the immigration winds comes in. Progressives — myself included — are acknowledging that there is indeed a crisis at the border. The numbers don’t lie. They’ve gone up dramatically since Biden assumed office, as they were going up when Trump was in office.

Biden tried a different approach than Trump, a humanitarian-based one. Unfortunately, it backfired, in good part because the circumstances in countries of origin have worsened. Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti are economic basket cases thanks to either repressive and/or failed and/or corrupt regimes.

In Mexico and Central American countries, drug cartels have taken over, fueled — and we need to face this — by an American demand for drugs that is killing our people, especially our white working-class men. The not-so-cynical among us would add that this is part of China’s plan to destabilize the U.S. by continuing to supply fentanyl ingredients to the cartels.

Regrettably, Biden’s humane approach failed. In this era of instant, massive communication through social media, it sent out the message that our border is open to those with enough gumption or desperation to survive the Darién Gap so long as they could present (or fabricate) a credible threat of persecution. This, in turn, has jeopardized our fragile asylum policy.

Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas or Ron DeSantis of Florida took their snarky shots and sent their migrants to places like Martha’s Vineyard and the New York Port Authority. The ploy was effective.

In New York City, with its requirement of providing housing for everyone, this export of migrants led to a Sophie’s Choice tragedy where, under a legal requirement to provide shelter, New York had to decide between housing our native homeless or the new asylum seekers.

And so, New York’s crimped and reactionary mayor, Eric Adams, huffed and puffed and tried to turn to the suburbs, like us on Long Island, bringing the border crisis here and turning traditionally immigrant-friendly New Yorkers into build-the-wallers.

Here’s where the two conflicting winds could begin to converge. We have Democrats willing to join Republicans and passing a restrictive immigration reform bill in the Senate. We have the U.S. businesses needing immigrant labor. We have a bunch of immigrants needing work.

We have the policy means to provide them a chance to work and get them off the streets in the form of temporary protective status or something called parole. All’s poised for a flawed but doable harmonic convergence.

But we also have Donald Trump and his flaccid version of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. The guy currently snoozing through his criminal trial wants to stay out of jail, and so he’s flailing, killing the chance to save the country in order to save himself.

Yep, the immigration winds have shifted and are pointing in the same direction: toward a sensible compromise for the first time in decades. But there’s also the stench of selfishness and nativism wafting in.

Which way the wind will blow remains to be seen — but meanwhile, we’re all in irons in a churning sea.