A number of prominent politicians have proposed increasingly harsh anti-immigration measures which range from restricting access to public assistance to mass incarceration and deportation of undocumented immigrants (and potentially their U.S. citizen relatives). Any version of these policies would be harmful not only to the tens of thousands of immigrants who call Maine home, but to our shared economic prosperity and wellbeing.
1. Immigration to Maine takes many forms
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, there are approximately 56,000 Mainers who were born as citizens of other countries (about 4% of the population). This number probably undercounts the immigrant population as immigrants are more likely to belong to groups who are harder to count — children, people with low income, and renters who change their address more frequently. In addition, undocumented immigrants are sometimes reluctant to respond to surveys or accurately report their immigration status for fear of the information being shared with immigration enforcement. Nonetheless, most sources agree the uncounted population in Maine is relatively small.
Many of Maine’s immigrants have been in the United States for decades, and more than half the foreign-born population in Maine have become naturalized U.S. citizens. They come from all regions of the world, with the most common country of origin being Canada, followed by United Kingdom, China, the Philippines, Germany, and Somalia.
Immigrants can come to Maine in several ways. A limited number of immigrant visas are issued each year through a lottery system, but the most common forms of visas issued are for relatives of U.S. citizens, students, or for workers sponsored by their employer. Some immigrants also arrive in the U.S. as refugees, and are granted residency after U.S. immigration authorities have vetted them and determined that they cannot safely return to their home country.
A significant number of people arrive in the United States each year without a formal immigration status. They are known as “undocumented immigrants,” a category encompassing a wide range of circumstances. It can include people who have overstayed their original tourist or student visa, as well as those who entered the U.S. without permission. Many are also in the U.S. seeking asylum. Like refugees, asylees are fleeing dangerous circumstances in their home country and are granted residency in the U.S. to preserve their safety. People can apply for asylum “defensively” once they are already in the U.S., or “affirmatively,” by applying at a port of entry such as a border crossing. Applying for asylum is a protected right under U.S. law, but these immigrants are classified as “undocumented” until their application is formally approved.
Estimates of the total undocumented population in Maine are regularly given as 5,000 or fewer.
2. Immigrants contribute to the entirety of Maine’s economy
According to data from the Immigration Research Initiative, immigrants make up 1 in every 25 workers in Maine and contribute throughout Maine’s economy. They are particularly important in sectors like home care, where one in five home health aides are immigrants, as well as high tech jobs like computer programming where they make up a similar share of the workforce. Many immigrants are also entrepreneurs; one in twelve Maine businesses is owned by an immigrant.
3. Like most Mainers, immigrants need help in times of crisis, and pay taxes that help others
Immigrants, especially those who arrive to the U.S. as refugees or seeking asylum, are more likely to use public assistance programs than U.S. citizens. This is because a significant number of them arrive in the U.S. with little or no resources of their own, and they are prohibited from working for at least several months. But research shows immigrants’ need for help diminishes over time as they are able to find work and build new lives. What’s more, even the relatively small number of undocumented immigrants in Maine (some estimates put this number at 5,000) pay millions of dollars in state and local taxes each year, as well as contribute to federal programs like Medicare and Social Security, despite being ineligible to claim the benefits of these same programs.
The largest public expense associated with immigration is K-12 education, and because immigrants tend to be younger than native-born citizens, they are more likely to have school-age children. Educating children is undeniably expensive — state and local governments spend an average of $17,700 per year to educate each public school student in Maine — but since its founding, Maine has approached universal public education as a moral obligation and an investment in our collective future. Wherever Maine children are originally born, a quality public education ensures they can reach their full potential and thrive as adults. From an economic point of view, public education also equips children to become the college students, workers, and business-owners of the future.
4. Immigrants create jobs
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is sometimes based on the belief that restricting immigration or removing migrants will create job vacancies for native-born Americans to fill. Not only does historical evidence show this premise is false, but it is a particularly irrelevant concern in Maine, where our aging workforce means there are two open jobs for every unemployed worker.
There is not a fixed pool of jobs available for native-born Americans and immigrants to fight over. Instead, immigrants help create more jobs by increasing the amount of activity in the economy. They spend their paychecks on groceries and gas and haircuts and health care, all of which creates demand for those products and supports more jobs. This theory is backed up by real-world evidence. When 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami in 1980 during the “Mariel boatlift,” there was a 7% increase in the supply of available workers, yet this influx did not reduce wages or increase unemployment. On the other side of the equation, when the United States ended the bracero program for Mexican agricultural workers in 1964, employment for Americans did not increase, even as the hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers were barred from working on farms. Instead, the end of the migrant labor pool sped up mechanization and automation in the farming sector. One study that looked at more recent immigration enforcement between 2008 and 2013 found communities with more removals of unauthorized immigrants saw wages and employment of U.S.-born individuals decline.
5. Immigrants need housing — and they help build it
While it may seem logical that reducing the immigrant population in an area would reduce the demand for housing, this overlooks the fact that nationwide almost one third of construction workers are immigrants and any program to exclude or deport large numbers of immigrants will make houses more difficult to build. In fact, research shows counties with higher levels of immigration enforcement have seen reductions in homebuilding and increases in house prices as a result. On the other hand, we know that unlike the labor market, the housing market is artificially constrained by zoning laws and other regulations which make it difficult to quickly build new housing as prices rise. And at least one study does show that with the near-fixed supply of housing, an inflow of immigrants equal to 1% of a metropolitan area’s population results in a 1% increase in housing costs. To put that into perspective, between 2013 and 2023, the increase in Androscoggin County’s immigrant population would suggest an increase in prices of 3%, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development shows fair market rents have risen 28% over that time. In other words, any impact from immigration has been only a tiny component of total rent increases, and efforts to make housing more affordable should focus on actions like reducing regulatory barriers, increasing the supply of construction workers, and subsidizing affordable housing units.
6. Mass deportations would be incredibly harmful — at all levels
Among the most extreme anti-immigration measures being proposed by politicians include the mass deportation of approximately 13 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and potentially using a 1798 law designed for wartime to detain and remove these people without due process. In addition to being a humanitarian disaster and a violation of civil rights, such an action would be economically devastating.
As we have already seen, removing undocumented immigrants from the U.S. has historically neither increased wages nor created more job opportunities for Americans.
Meanwhile, the American Immigration Council (AIC) recently estimated a large-scale mass-deportation operation over ten years would cost almost a trillion dollars to cover the cost of arresting, imprisoning, processing, and transporting 3% of the country’s population. The overall economic impact would be much larger. Federal, state, and local governments would lose tens of billions in tax revenue and the economy would shrink as a result of removing 7.5 million workers from the labor force as well as millions of consumers from the economy at large. AIC estimates the country’s Gross Domestic Product would shrink between 4.2% and 6.8% as a result — equal to or larger than the impact of the 2008 Great Recession.
7. Immigration is not a zero-sum proposition
The anti-immigrant rhetoric pervading politics today is anchored in the belief that immigration is a zero-sum proposition, where one person’s gain is another person’s loss. Immigrants are villainized for “taking away” from Americans — but this is simply not true. Time and again, evidence and history show us immigration is America’s best asset, and immigration is what makes our economy strong and dynamic. Without tens of millions of immigrants over the past 250 years, the United States would not have become a global superpower and the world’s most successful economy. Indeed, those places with the highest rates of historic immigration have stronger economies today.
There are certainly ways policymakers can improve our current immigration system — for example, opening more authorized pathways to entry, and removing barriers which stop new arrivals from working and contributing immediately — but restricting or reversing immigration won’t make us stronger. It will only divide our communities, undermine our prosperity, and lose America’s greatest strength.
This commentary was first published by the Maine Center for Economic Policy blog.
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