I’m fortunate to be able to type out this column. Over a year ago, while pruning my yard, I accidentally sliced the base of my thumb, severing two tendons. Luckily, an excellent surgeon sewed them back together, restoring to me the gift of a working hand.
This surgeon — I surmise, based on his accent and last name — is an immigrant from South Asia. This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for him and all the immigrants who make Oregon and our nation a stronger, more vibrant place.
Anti-immigrant sentiment reached fever pitch during election season, with dehumanizing rhetoric flowing from Donald Trump’s campaign. Having won, the incoming administration says it will carry out its campaign promise of mass deportations.
This would be a tragedy and a historic mistake. While Trump and others blame immigrants for the economic struggles that many people endure, the reality is that immigrants strengthen the economy.
Immigrants boost the economy beyond what their numbers would suggest. They make up 10% of Oregon’s economy but account for 13% of the state’s economic output, a report co-released by the Oregon Center for Public Policy shows. The reason for this is that they are more likely than native-born people to be of prime working age.
Immigration benefits those who arrive from abroad, of course, but also those already here. “When immigrants move to the United States,” researchers point out, “it means more jobs: there are more consumers, more workers, more business owners. Study after study shows that there is no fixed number of jobs in the economy. Immigration creates benefits for U.S.-born workers too.”
So important are immigrants to the economy that some industries could not survive without them. In Oregon, 60% of the state’s full-time farmworkers are immigrants. Fruit would die on the vine and fields would go fallow without the hard-working immigrants who perform this difficult, low-paid labor.
On the other end of the income spectrum, immigrants have long played a vital role in Oregon’s high-tech economy. No company casts a bigger shadow in Oregon than Intel, a company co-founded and led during its heyday by a refugee from Hungary. In 1997, Time Magazine named this immigrant, Andy Grove, Man of the Year, calling him “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips.” Today, immigrants still help power Oregon’s technology sector, accounting for about one-third of advanced computer jobs.
Expelling the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S., as the Trump administration proposes, would weaken our nation. Based on past instances of mass deportations, researchers estimate that deporting 7.5 million immigrants today could shrink the economy by as much as 6.2%, a massive hit to our well-being. To put that in perspective, the economy declined 4.3% during the Great Recession of 2008.
Rather than open job opportunities for native-born workers, mass deportations would lead to a negative ripple effect throughout the job market.
“For example, if a shortage of construction workers prevents a house from getting built, the businesses that would be furnishing that house— from kitchen appliances to bedframes — lose business, too,” explains the American Immigration Council. “Without field workers to pick crops, truckers have no goods to transport, and farmers have no need to buy new farm equipment.”
The damage, of course, would be much more than economic. Undocumented immigrants are our family members and neighbors. In 2022, some 7 million undocumented immigrants belonged to households that included U.S. citizens. Deportation breaks these bonds, separating children from their parents, uprooting people who have built lives and businesses in our communities. Mass deportation would leave devastation in its wake.
There’s no guarantee that the persecution of immigrants would end there. Remember that the most notorious attack on immigrants during the campaign was aimed at Haitian immigrants residing legally in the country. For his part, Trump’s influential adviser Stephen Miller has called for greater use of a process that strips naturalized immigrants of their citizenship. History shows that once the evil genie of xenophobia and bigotry has been unleashed, it can be hard to contain.
I was 13 when I celebrated my first Thanksgiving. My family had much to be thankful for that day. We had arrived weeks earlier to the safety of the U.S., having fled a civil war in the country of my birth.
Today, I remain grateful for the opportunities that this country has given me. Likewise, I give thanks for the millions of other immigrants whose contributions make it a stronger nation.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.