Immigrants are More than Just the Jobs They Do

Let’s drag this conversation away from capitalism and back to humanity.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Undocumented immigrants are vital to America because they do the jobs most Americans won’t. If they disappear, the farming and construction industries will be devastated and the cost of everything would rise dramatically.

This is a statement that we hear all the time, primarily from the left and the people who defend undocumented immigrants. It is, like many things on the left, well-meaning and intended to highlight the value that immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, contribute to society.

It’s also very, very dehumanizing.

Those statements are factually correct, of course. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, comprise huge parts of many industries — construction, meat packing, farm work, and others. Their disappearance would cause a massive blow to many of those industries.

However, immigrants are, first and foremost, people. Yes, they do a lot of important work in America, and in a lot of ways our economy would crumble without them.

They are also members of our communities who contribute a lot more than just tax dollars.

Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, do a lot of things in the community. They take care of their families, they go to church, they volunteer, they host neighborhood cookouts, they give to charity. Immigrants make art and music, they sing and dance and celebrate and laugh and cry and grieve and live their lives like any of us because they are human beings.

We are all human beings, whether your family has been here a week or a century. Trying to define an entire group of people by their jobs, or what they contribute to the country in a strictly economic sense, strips away their humanity. Just as I am not defined by my job, neither are they.

It’s an easy trap to fall into — we need to demonstrate the value of an entire group of people, so we fall back on their contributions to the economy at large. There are even logical reasons for this, since the political party that most demonizes immigrants is one that is focused on the accumulation of massive amounts of wealth at the expense of…