Immigration has always been a plus

And of course there’s only one kind of person in America who will show up at a meatpacking plant or metal factory in a small midwestern town and treat it as if it’s the greatest opportunity in the world: an immigrant, without much education, usually from a low-income country.

If you’re a poor immigrant from a low-income country like Honduras, or Somalia, or Haiti, or Laos, or even the poorer parts of Mexico, the chance to live in a first-world country like America and work in a relatively clean, relatively safe factory for $14 an hour is the chance of a lifetime.

[...]

If you think immigrants get “dumped” on small midwestern towns, you probably need to adjust your mental image. It’s not the government causing a bunch of Somalis to move to Lewiston or a bunch of Haitians to move to Springfield — it’s simply America’s freedom of movement and free enterprise at work. The people of an immigrant group decided to move to a town — usually from elsewhere in the U.S. — and local businesses decided to hire and recruit them. It’s all just the private sector and individual freedom at work here — the furthest possible thing from communism or socialism.

In fact, the only way you could prevent this sort of mass “flooding” or “dumping” of low-skilled immigrants into small heartland towns would be to either A) keep them from coming into the country at all, or B) institute some kind of communist-style internal mobility restrictions. Obviously the MAGA people would prefer to do the former. But because immigrants tend to concentrate in specific locations — mainly to be around people who speak the same language — you’d have to essentially cut off most or all low-skilled immigration in order to make sure that no towns in America got “flooded” with immigrants. Again, this is exactly what the MAGA people want to do.

But we should ask ourselves: Would this be worth it? After all, these “floods” of immigration are just about the only thing that can save a small town in the American heartland.

[...]

We know from experience that mass low-skilled immigration can and often does restore a declining heartland town to growth.

[...]

The stories of [...] small towns that have received a bunch of immigrants in recent years all sound the same. At first the newcomers are met with suspicion and apprehension, and schools struggle to deal with a sudden huge influx of ESL kids. But as time goes on, the small-town residents experience the optimism of the return of local growth, and most of them warm to the newcomers. The town gains a local ethnic flavor, and in general most people are either happy about the change, or at least accepting of it.

[...]

[I]f you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions? Would you starve them of the only resource that they could possibly use to revitalize themselves? Would you just tell all the people in those towns to pack up and move to New York and Chicago? What’s your alternative plan? Because I honestly don’t see any other way those places are going to get saved.

  Noahpinion

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.