IT’S A CASE OF FACTS VERSUS FICTION and political rhetoric. And it applies to Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Cubans, Canadians, Jamaicans, Haitians, Germans, Guyanese, Nigerians, Britons, Barbadians, Trinidadians and other foreign born residents whose roots are in more than 150 states that belong to the United Nations but call the United States (US) home away from home.
The picture became clear when Jason Furman, chairman of US President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Maria Contreras-Sweet, US Small Business administrator (SBA), assessed the role of immigrants in the resuscitation of the US economy in the wake of the great recession, the worst since the great depression.
“Immigration is really one of the reasons why the United States [has] among the strongest growth of any of the advanced industrial economies and [remains] critical to our economic future as well,” said Furman during a White House “press call” in which the BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY in New York was invited to participate.
Contreras-Sweet agreed with Furman. She pinpointed small businesses as a key economic sector in which immigrants play a vital part.
“We have been tracking our entrepreneurship numbers and their success rate and we know that for the Fortune 500 companies 40 per cent of those businesses have been started by immigrants or the children of immigrants,” the SBA administrator explained. “We know now that we have been tracking patents immigrant entrepreneurs” were receiving patents “at twice the rate of the national average”.
In essence, immigrants consider entrepreneurship an essential “way forward” in their quest to achieve the American dream, she said. Those assessments stand in stark contrast to the depressing accounts of immigrants often heard on Republican presidential platforms in 2016.
With almost 42 million living, working or studying in America’s 50 states, Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and other Republican presidential hopefuls have pointedly complained about the steady influx of the foreign born into the US, describing them as being harmful to America’s way of life and its prosperity.
Trump has called them rapists, thugs, drug dealers, killers and criminals who flow across the border with Mexico bent on causing mayhem.
But the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers sees things differently. For one thing, the arrival of immigrants from every part of the world boosts the size of the economy, he asserted. For another, they add to the nation’s level of “competence” given their diverse skill sets.
“Immigrants have been critical to the success of the United States,” Furman insisted. “They have helped us build a stronger workforce, [added] more innovation, entrepreneurship, and [spurred] job creation across the board. If you look at the commonsense immigration reform which the president pushed a couple of years ago, the Congressional Budget Office took a look at that and said it would add US$1.4 trillion to the economy and that’s because it would expand our workforce and because it would bring in more talented people who would contribute to innovation in our economy as well.”
As a matter of fact, the pool of talented people expanded significantly with the addition of 14 million legal immigrants who had entered the country during the first decade of the 21st Century.
Interestingly, according to the US Census Bureau and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics, the top 12 immigration sending countries worldwide in 2006 were Mexico, China, the Philippines, India, Cuba, Columbia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Vietnam, Jamaica, South Korea, and Guatemala.
By 2013, when almost a million people entered the country, Haiti had joined the list of the top ten sending nations. in that year, 20 351 Haitians were given the immigration greenlight to reside in the US.
Three years ago, the number of legal immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Belize, had collectively surpassed the two million mark, with Jamaica heading the list of CARICOM states with 714 743. Next were Haiti (593 980), Guyana (259 815), Trinidad and Tobago (232 026), Barbados (52 499) and Belize 50 296.
Most of them were in New York, Miami, Washington DC, and Massachusetts. The remainder were scattered in Connecticut, New Jersey, California, Illinois, Texas, Georgia and other parts of the country.
When Cuba’s 1.1 million, the Dominican Republic’s 991 046, Panama’s 101 000, Nicaragua’s 240 619, and Venezuela’s 197 724 were added to the immigration population from Western Hemisphere nations with Caribbean coasts, the figure received a two million immigrant boost.
Absent from the tabulation are more than 500 000 immigrants from The Bahamas, Grenada, Suriname,
St Lucia, Antigua & Barbuda, and their neighbours. When the estimated two million undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Belize are added to the labour market the presence of the multi-lingual Caribbean region in the US economy grows significantly.
The fact is reflected in the remittances which flow to the island nations and coastal states from America and Canada every year.
The immigrants remit at least $5 billion to CARICOM nations every year, most of it going to three countries – Jamaica, Haiti and Guyana.