With economic activity in the United States reduced to its bare essentials, it became clear that the immigrant workforce is a mainstay of the indispensable industries that are operating in the midst of the crisis left by the pandemic, in the fields, in food stores, in food processors and in hospitals.
Donald Trump’s recent announcement to suspend legal immigration into the country would impact the economic reconstruction that has to come after the pandemic.
But, in addition, a significant portion of immigrant workers in the United States does not have papers that guarantee their legal residency. They are at the forefront of the response to the crisis, exposed to contagion, yet their health is not protected: because of their status, they have no health insurance or low coverage, no sufficient income and fear going to the doctor and being deported by the authorities. They are not guaranteed access to health care.
“The fear that we have as immigrants is something whose extent only we can know. We’re afraid of getting sick. We’re afraid of dying. We’re afraid of complaining at work, to our supervisors, because we’re not getting adequate cleaning supplies. We’re ignored completely,” Maria told Time magazine’s Lissandra Villa. Maria is from Mexico, she has no papers, and works a day laborer in the countryside of the Washington state, in the northwest of the U.S.
The only thing Maria and workers like her have is a letter from their employer confirming that they are work for an essential activity, which allows them to move around in the midst of the confinement. As we showed in an IQ Latino note on April 13, deportations, however, have continued to occur in the midst of the pandemic.
Maria remains unprotected, like the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
The Migration Policy Institute published the following data in March, when the crisis began (some of which Villa mentions in his report): six million working immigrants are now on the frontline “of keeping U.S. residents healthy and fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In these figures the institute does not distinguish by legal status, but the numbers say that the occupation of immigrants has grown in areas indispensable to the response to the pandemic: “29 percent of all physicians and 38 percent of home health care,” in addition to those who clean hospitals, serve in grocery stores, and work in food production and distribution chains.
Before the pandemic, the immigrant workforce was already a mainstay of the U.S. economy.
A New American Economy report says: “While the undocumented population frequently comes under fierce criticism, the data shows that a large number of the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants here are working, paying taxes, and even starting their own businesses. They also play an integral role in our economy, often filling jobs in agriculture, construction, and hospitality that would otherwise remain vacant.”
Undocumented immigrants also make up a significant portion of the workforce that supports the food processing, kitchen (restaurants, school cafeterias, hospital catering), building cleaning and pest control, and maintenance industries, according to the data.
One sector in particular is very illustrative, the report says: undocumented immigrants make up 50% of all hired workers in the fields and crops, “, making them essential to the success and continued viability of American farms.”
What a milk farmer in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin told Leon Krauze in Jun last year –when a crisis like the current one was not on the horizon—confirms this. Krause mentioned it in a Op-ed for The Washington Post: “Our industry doesn’t exist without immigrant labor. Eighty percent of the milk in Wisconsin is harvested by immigrants. If you took the immigrants away, way over half of the farms would go out of business.”
The New American Economy report says that in 2018, 95.8 percent of undocumented immigrants were working–even though the nature of their jobs is not stable–and that their work generated global profits, including the taxes they pay, of $249.7 billion.
The organization Unidos Us has more details: 8% of the income of each undocumented immigrant on average goes to pay taxes: the total is approximately 11.64 billion dollars in state and local taxes per year. “Moreover, all immigrants—regardless of status—will contribute approximately $80,000 more in taxes than government services used over their lifetime.”
Donald Trump announced this week an executive order that will stop immigration to the United States for two months, of green cards (permanent residence visas) processes in particular.
The data contradicts him, but the bottom line of the message that Trump first tweetted on Monday night is this: immigrants shouldn’t do the work that in his view belongs to United States citizens.
“In order to protect American workers, I will be issuing a temporary suspension of immigration. Pausing immigration will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopen. It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labour flown in from abroad,” Trump stressed in his daily appearance Tuesday.
To date, some 22 million Americans are applying for unemployment benefits in the country.
The Migration Policy Institute’s report highlights that the economic difficulties that are already present and will continue in the post-pandemic period will be “exacerbated” in the case many immigrant workers because of their “limited access to safety-net systems and to federal relief.”
The Trump Executive Order will not affect migrant workers who are now on the frontlines of essential activities. However, most of them do not have access to government assistance, because they don’t have a legal residency.
“While green-card holders, those on a temporary work visa, and individuals with Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals can access unemployment insurance, most noncitizens cannot turn to the federal, means-tested benefits, including food stamps, that other workers tap in times of need. And immigrant workers face additional vulnerabilities, including smaller incomes and lower rates of health insurance coverage.”
On the other hand, Dany Bahar, a senior fellow at Brooking Institutions, wrote in an op-ed piece for The Washington Post that Trump’s executive order to suspend immigration for two months “will certainly affect skilled and specialized workers who will play a crucial part in the eventual recuperation of the U.S. economy.”
“If there is something that will be needed more than ever to return unemployment to normal levels after the covid-19 pandemic if there ends, it is more, not less, immigration,” he added. This is based on a study by the Harvard Business School, according to which about a quarter of the startups and patents registered each year have immigrants as their responsible parties.
Indeed, the Seattle Times reported on concerns about Trump’s executive order among the state’s technology industry, as they rely on foreign workers to fill their hhigh skilled positions, and whose companies had potential hires with ongoing permanent residency approval process.
Dany Bahar added: “In the midst of an economic collapse that will more significantly affect small and medium enterprises (SMEs) than established large firms with enough cash flow and resources to survive, the policy prescription should go in line with creating an environment to boost the creation of productive SMEs that would foster competition within industries. Halting immigration, and with it business investment and creation, is doing exactly the opposite. In fact, there is now robust evidence showing how restricting immigration results in U.S. companies pushing jobs out of the United States.”