In public discourse, immigration is often talked about as a direct threat to national security, with a majority of criticism coming from Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who advocate for heightened security along the US-Mexico border. The reelection of former President Donald Trump and his hardline immigration stance—reinforced by the mistaken belief that immigrants “steal” American jobs—has brought these criticisms to the forefront. Right-wing narratives portray immigration as an economic disadvantage to American citizens, deploying these criticisms as a counterpoint to simpler paths of legalization and misapprehending the significant economic advantages of immigration.
Ultimately, many people are accusing immigrants of a crime they never committed. It is a fallacy to believe that there are only a certain number of jobs and that someone filling a job directly takes it away from another person. Immigration’s impact on the job market defies the traditional supply-and-demand model. Individuals entering the workforce, including immigrants, contribute to economic vitality by actively participating in job creation rather than engaging in zero-sum competition.
While immigrants do fill job vacancies, their contribution goes beyond simple labor supply dynamics. They stimulate job creation and economic growth through entrepreneurship and diverse skill sets, consistently expanding the market. For example, when looking at the output of nearly 880,000 Americans who patented inventions between 1990 and 2016, researchers found that immigrants were behind 23 percent.
Immigrants fill vital roles in sectors with talent shortages, like technology and healthcare, fostering innovation as diverse perspectives contribute to problem-solving. As a result, immigration helps prevent problems such as stagnation. In addition, with 1.3 million more Americans unemployed since 2022, the American labor shortage has been worsening annually. This shortage results from a myriad of issues, such as an aging population and a declining birth rate. But Americans often overlook a crucial factor in our declining labor supply: the net rate of international migration decreased between 2020 and 2021, leaving lasting damage to the US economy.
While many are concerned with the price of legalization, deportation also has an expensive price tag—a particularly relevant concern now, as Trump has pledged that he would conduct the largest deportation in American history, potentially costing billions each year. There are fiscal costs of enforcing tight immigration laws and economic impacts of removing the immigrants who are already here.
In order to remove all undocumented immigrants, the federal government would have to go through an extraneous process of localizing, detaining, legally evaluating, and finally, deporting all undocumented individuals. This process bears a heavy burden, costing $3 billion in 2016 alone, with each deportation costing American taxpayers an average of around $11,000.
While issuing green cards is also expensive, at around $40 billion to put Dreamers and those eligible for TPS on a pathway to citizenship, it would promote significant changes in economic activity over a decade as the country continues to grow. Namely, it would boost the total cumulative GDP by nearly $2 trillion, create almost half a million new jobs, and increase the annual wages of legalized workers—benefiting those already here, too!
As more people obtain green cards and transition to lawful permanent resident status, they become eligible for federal benefits and services. These include access to social security, medical aid programs, and education assistance. In addition, the pathways to citizenship would protect our workers. As of 2018, there were an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. As of 2023, five years later, that number may have doubled. Although they already contribute to the labor force, unauthorized immigrants are at higher risk of deportation and are unequally represented in issues of worker rights. Creating more opportunities for immigrants to become citizens will not only secure benefits for the economy but also protect workers’ welfare across the United States.
Despite these benefits, it remains challenging for immigrants to seek employment. They face various obstacles, such as trouble gaining recognition for foreign education or training and obtaining the necessary work authorization.
The green card is the most efficient way for immigrants to live and work safely in the United States. However, acquiring a green card is an extensive process—and one with many issues. To begin with, the service that issues green cards, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), operates under a flawed “fee for service” funding model, meaning USCIS covers its operating costs through service charges. This is inefficient for a variety of reasons, such as inflexible fees, slow responses to demand changes, reliance on application volume for funding, and staffing challenges that lead to backlogs.
Extending permanent legal status to immigrants will result in a much-needed boost to long-term trends in the economy, helping ease a tight labor market and filling jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. The federal government should reconcile its budgets and allocate money to provide more pathways to citizenship, though any reform is unlikely to occur under the Trump administration. The only way forward is through a policy that facilitates the distribution of more green cards to combat systemic issues. But in the absence of political progress, the least we can do as citizens is to dismantle fallacies that misrepresent the immigrants who so tirelessly contribute to our country.
Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs; they are saving them, and it is a courtesy to give them a green (thank you) card.
