Immigrant Labor Key to National, Local Economy

None by KCPW

Shutting Off Flow of Workers Could Be Disastrous

(KCPW News) Due to declining fertility rates in America, immigrant labor has become a key ingredient in a growing economy. Shutting down immigration or sending home all illegals would be disastrous for the local economy, let alone the nation as a whole, says University of Utah senior research economist Pam Perlich:

"Half of the labor force growth in this country over the last 15 years is the foreign-born population - immigrants. We face the same thing that other developed nations have, and that is a declining fertility rate, a slowing population growth rate. Had it not been for immigration, we wouldn't have had near the population growth rate that we've had nationally."

Perlich has authored a new report on immigration and its impact on the country, the western United States in particular. She says past labor and immigration history can be useful in the current debate over immigration reform. For instance, the impact of quotas and the virtual shutdown of immigration in the 1920s led to the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the Northeast and its plentiful factory jobs.

But the industrial revolution is over, Perlich says, adding that "there's no machine that's going to make beds in hotels, and there's no machine that's going to put sheetrock up. A lot of these types of jobs are very labor intensive jobs."

Perlich says one community in southwest Wyoming is trying to fill jobs created by the area's energy boom by courting displaced autoworkers from the MidWest.

To hear more from Perlich on immigration data and its economic and social implications, click here.

Email to a friendPosted in KCPW Newsroom. Copyright 2009 KCPW