No, Immigrants Will Not “Take Your Jobs,”…
How this phrase, and many others, are used to hurl xenophobic viewpoints around without looking at the facts.
Growing up in a conservative family, politics were often brought up when sitting at the dinner table. One of the hot topics regarding conservatism is the idea that immigrants are a burden to the United States because “they take jobs away, don’t pay taxes, and take advantage of the system.”
Without question, I quickly started to use this phrase as a weapon in my political arsenal. However, I recently started to think for myself and do some research. Are immigrants really coming up here and stealing jobs away? I quickly found that I, and an ever-growing population of people who had not bothered to do basic research, did not having a single statistic to back up our point. In fact, everything I read was saying the exact opposite. Immigrants weren’t taking our jobs or stealing our tax money… they were creating jobs and contributing millions of dollars to our economy.
“They Take American Jobs”
Actually, they are often the ones providing jobs for Americans, not taking them. According to the American Immigration Council, there were 35,162 Colorado business owners who are immigrants. Those business owners provide millions of jobs to Coloradans across the state.
Skeptics will often refer to the fact that 63 percent of households headed by a non-citizen reported that they used at least one welfare program, compared to 35 percent of native-headed households, in 2014, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. However, this doesn’t take into account the amount of immigrants who come to the United States and are offered minimum wage jobs that can’t support a family. Discrimination on the basis of documentation and race can prohibit the ability for immigrants to earn enough capital to start a business, but that is slowly changing as more businesses that are immigrant-owned are changing the stereotype.
“They Don’t Pay Taxes”
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy conducted a study of the amount of taxes paid by illegal immigrants alone in each state. Colorado’s illegal immigration population currently pays an estimated $139,524,000 in taxes each year. Together, illegal immigrants contribution in taxes could pay for 10% of the higher education budget in Colorado, according to the Joint Budget Committee. Legal immigrants in Colorado paid an estimated “$4.2 billion in local, state and federal taxes annually,” according to the 2017 numbers used for the study by Westword, and “had close to $13 billion in disposable income.”
According to the Center on Budget a Policy Priorities, illegal immigrants pay an average of 8% of their total income, while the top 1% of Americans pay an average of 5.4% of their total income. So, in reality, the Americans who are making the most money, and have the most to contribute, are the ones who are not paying their taxes.
“Immigrants Only Make Up a Small Percent of the Population, So Their Opinion Doesn’t Really Matter”
Actually, over the past couple decades, the amount of foreign born citizens living in Colorado has risen by 48.9% from 2000 to 2017, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and the total amount of immigrants living in Colorado is close to 550,000, or nearly 10% of the population.
According to Poltico, the Colorado voters in the 2016 election had put Hillary Clinton a meer 71,741 votes over Donald Trump, or 7% the total immigrant population. Just in Colorado, immigrants have a powerful voice in our society and deserve to be heard, recognized, and have their opinions and beliefs taken seriously.
Since the inception of the United States, immigrants have always played a role in the development and overall success of our country. In recent years, the United States has had to listen to politicians and social influencers refer to these lies in order to masquerade their xenophobic and racist ideologies towards immigrants, both documented and not. These basic statistics can combat the misstatement of facts about immigrants and their contribution to our country. I hope that many of you, who are in the same position I was in, can understand that facts are important, even if they don’t support something you’ve been told is true your entire life.
