Immigration Creates Economic Opportunity for America
America was built by immigrants. Historically, the anti immigration forces in the USA have labeled immigrants, Italians were called WAPS which stood for without papers, Eastern Europeans were called DPs, displaced people. Today based on religious affiliation and skin color we are discriminating.
The world is browning, and people need to accept this fact.
White birth rates have and continue to drop. Non-whites now make up a majority of kindergartners; by the next presidential election, the Census Bureau predicts they will be a majority of all children; and by 2044, no one racial group will be a majority of the country.
Only 23% of those born in the Baby Boom generation and before believe America’s new diversity is a “change for the better”; 42% call it a change for the worse.
The interests of America’s aging, infertile white population and its young, fecund immigrants will necessarily diverge, in ways that have nothing to do with anyone’s good or ill will. Both groups are dependent on government services, but in different ways. Sixteen percent of whites are over 65, versus 7% of minorities. The former, broadly speaking, want cheap drugs, lavish pensions, and a labor market in which young people will push wheelchairs and fix meals for next to nothing; the latter want new schools for their children, government-funded day care, and a so-called living wage.
For the first time, white families are supporting more dependent seniors than children.
For them, the welfare state is no longer in any sense an “investment,” the way its social-democratic designers used to claim. It is, to use an appropriately Baby Boom expression, a drag.
These statistics lend themselves to reflections about decadence and to questions about what it is we are really importing. It is not so much diversity, perhaps, and not so much labor, as traditional families.
A third of Hispanic households consist of families in which a married couple lives with children, and a third of Hispanics are under 18. A third of Asian-American households consist of these families, too, and the country’s Asian population is now ten times what it was in 1970.
Among whites, by contrast, such families make up only a fifth of households — except in those rare communities nationwide where the white population is growing. There, white habits resemble those of immigrants, with a third of families consisting of married couples and children.
Over time Hispanics “tend to become ‘Americanized’ with regard to family and household relationships.” But, for now, new immigrant groups — or at least those individuals visible to the IRS — bear a disproportionate burden.
Pay-as-you-go welfare states, in which all benefits are drawn directly from present earnings, are spectacularly unfair to those who procreate.
Everyone, in time, has a claim to the benefits. But one group pays almost all the costs of producing, nurturing, and educating the next generation’s workforce: parents. For taxpayers, welfare states offer massive disincentives to having children.
Both the old (who have already paid for others’ benefits) and the young (who will pay in the future) have legitimate but incompatible claims on the welfare state.
Trying to honor both is one reason the country is now in such a fiscal predicament.
Attempting to “persuade seniors that the key needs among striving young minorities — education, affordable housing, and steady employment — will work to benefit the Social Security and medical care programs that seniors will need in retirement.” Persuade all you like, but it’s not true, or at least not soon enough. In a pay-as-you-go system, there’s a lag of half a generation or a generation before education produces benefits (which, of course, not all education does). Politicians might reasonably ask seniors to consider posterity; but if anyone were capable of doing that, we wouldn’t have got ourselves so deep in debt in the first place.
America is at a demographic inflection point. The crosscurrents of demographic and cultural change are upending traditional voting patterns and straining the fabric of what it means to be American.
These shifts are also altering the face of the American political parties in significant ways. The Democratic and Republican parties as we know them are changing — college-educated whites in this past election have been moving more toward Democrats, as blue-collar whites are continuing their long trend toward Republicans.
The only question is whether these trends are Donald Trump-specific or something more permanent?
Republicans have become increasingly reliant on white, working-class voters, a shrinking share of public voters. In 1980, they were two-thirds of the electorate. By 2012, they were just over a third.
This shift among white voters is happening at a time when non-white voters are growing at rate never seen before in U.S. history. 2016 was the first election in which the white vote was below 70 percent as a share of the electorate.
In 1976, whites made up 89 percent of the electorate, and that held fairly steady until 1992. After that, as Latino and Asian immigration increased, and the black population held steady, the white vote has been set on a steady decline.
By 2012, whites were 72 percent of electorate, still a significant majority, but it was enough of a drop for Obama to win election with just 39 percent of the white vote — the lowest winning share for any Democrat in a two-way presidential race.
The Democratic Party has adapted to this demographic change, and is more diverse, more urban and more liberal than at any time in its history. The Republican Party, on the other hand, struggled.
After losing a record margin of Latinos in in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee was explicit, in a post-election report, that it needed to be more present in black and brown communities. On policy, it called for Republicans to endorse immigration reform. The 2013 immigration reform bill died in Congress — with Republicans standing in the way, despite it passing the Senate with 68 votes.
In the 2016 Presidential Election, an estimated 57.9 percent of eligible voters voted. Over 231 million Americans are eligible to vote, in 2016, just over 130 million of them voted and 90+ million of eligible registered voters did not.
Voter Turnout:
2012 Obama: 65.9m
2016 Clinton: 59.1m = -6.8m
2012 Romney: 60.9m
2016 Trump: 59m = -1.9m
Trump was able to exploit the fact that most Americans are apathetic and did not vote.
Trump’s razor-thin victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania gave him the electoral vote lead needed to win the presidency. These are largely white, older demographic markets. Imagine what the outcome of the election would have been if millennials, Gen X and late birth baby boomers [those just in their early 50's] had turned out to vote. We’ll never know.
Trump campaigned in the Rust belt with promises of returning manufacturing to the USA, lower taxes, regulation reform and deporting 11 million undocumented individuals.
Despite Trump’s campaign promises, bringing manufacturing back to the USA highly likely will not return jobs. Manufacturing today is driven by technology and robotics.
The days of a fork lift operator, or mindless labor packing widgets on a production line are of days of the past and will not return.
We are in the mist of next next revolution, the industrial revolution brought us the assembly line, electricity and running water into homes. Today, technology and robotics are replacing the need for human labor for basic jobs and this will increase as we move forward with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
With the shift in demographics, the low birth rate of white America, this country needs to embrace immigration or face stagnation.
In fact, immigrant-founded Fortune 500 companies employed 3.6 million workers around the world in 2011 and were responsible for more than combined revenues of $4.2 trillion in 2010 and $1.7 trillion of this revenue comes from immigrant founders according to the Partnership For A New American Economy. Those job-creation tendencies aren’t unique to a few success stories.
40 Percent of Fortune 500 Companies Were Founded by Immigrants or Their Children
These figures are remarkable because the foreign-born population of the United States has an average of 10.5% since 1850, which means immigrant founders way over-represented in the most successful 500 companies in US.
The likes of Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Arianna Huffington, Steve Jobs and many others have in common. In America, immigrants are 2.3 more likely to become an entrepreneur.
Immigrants represent almost 30% of the US entrepreneurs but only 13% of the population. Similarly, one-fourth of the technology and engineering companies has at least one immigrant co-founder.
Jordan Gonen took the time and effort to compile the list of immigrant founders, you know these companies and interact with their products almost daily.
Steve Jobs — Apple
Elon Musk — Tesla / SpaceX
Steve Chen — YouTube
Sean Rad — Tinder
Sergey Brin — Google
Travis Kalanick — Uber
Jan Koum — WhatsApp
Max Levchin — PayPal
Mike Kreiger — Instagram
Arash Ferdowsi — Dropbox
Andrew Grove — Intel
Phil Libin — Evernote
Pierre Omdiyar — Ebay
Jerry Yang — Yahoo
Sanjey Mehtora — SanDisk
Andrew Viterbi — Qualcomm
Ray Kroc — McDonalds
William Colgate — Colgate
Tomer London — Gusto
Patrick Collison — Stripe
Ragy Thomas — Sprinklr
Christian Gheorghe — Tidemark
Renaud Visage — Eventbrite
Igor Sikorsky — First American Helicopter
Charles Wang — Computer Associates
Adam Neumann — WeWork
Nine of Our Founding Fathers
Nigel Morris — Capital One Financial Services
Alexander Graham Bell — AT & T
William Russell Grace — WR Grace and Company
John W. Nordstrom — Nordstrom
Helena Rubinstein — Helena Rubinstein Incorporated
Marcelo Claure — Brightstar
Daniel Aaron — Comcast Television Company
Gary Vaynerchuk — Vayner Media
Renaud Laplanche — Lending Club
Samuel Sachs & Marcus Goldman — Goldman Sachs
Dhiraj Rajaram — Mu Sigma Inc
Noubar Afeyan — Joule Unlimited
William Procter — Procter & Gamble Co.
Mario Schlosser — Oscar Health
John Collison — Stripe
Tien Tzou — Zuora
Elizabeth Arden — Elizabeth Arden, Inc.
Ayah Bdeir — littleBits
Liz Clairborne — Liz Clairborne Inc
Charles Pfizer — Pfizer
William Mow — Bugle Boy Industries
K.R. Sridhar — Bloom Energy
Ben Huh — Cheezburger
James L. Kraft — Kraft
Andy Bechtolsheim & Vinod Khosla — Sun Microsystems
Peter Weijmarshausen — Shapeways
Maxwell Kohl — Khol’s
Michelle Zatlyn — CloudFlare
Nathan Cummings — Sara Lee
Kevork Hovnanian — Hovanian Enterprises
Phil Jaber — Philz Coffee
Iqram Magdon-Ismail — Venmo
Jeong Kim — Yurie Systems
E.I Du Pont — DuPont
Andrew Carnegie — Carnegie Steel Company
James Gamble — Procter & Gamble Co.
Beto Perez — Founder of Zumba
Alexander Asseily — Jawbone
Chamath Palihapitiya — Social Capital
Arianna Huffington — The Huffington Post
Immigrants create jobs and prosperity for America, every undocumented who has not committed a crime other than entering the country without papers that the Trump Administration has ICE round up and deport could be the next Liz Claiborne, Steve Chen or Sergey Brin. The economic loss that this country will suffer has the potential to be immense.
