Immigration Expert: Immigration And Economic Growth Are Linked
Philadelphia (CBS) - Jeremy Robbins, the Executive Director of New American Economy, spoke with Dom Giordano on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT about Immigrant Business Week, saying that immigrants play a vital role in our economy and help create higher end jobs.
"We want to protect American workers and we want to create jobs but there are lots of industries, I think, we have a $100 billion agriculture industry and the reality is there simply aren't enough Americans that do those jobs. That's true if you look at some other industries as well. No industry exists in a vacuum. If you can't find the right worker to pick the crops and pick the fields, you don't have shippers, you don't suppliers, you don't have jobs at the port, you don't have manager jobs. Our economy is interconnected and so if we can be smarter about getting a more diverse workforce, filling in gaps at the low and high skilled end, we can actually help and create more American jobs."
Robbins stated that if the goal is to fix the immigration process, we have to factor in who exactly is part of it.
"We want a system that doesn't have 11 million people working in the shadows. But again, saying the system is broken, that's what you believe and that is what I believe and I believe it's what most people believe, then the answer has to be to fix it. Right? Having people come here illegally is a problem for America, but the reality is that we have employers who are hiring them. So, we want a system that makes sure American employers are not hiring them illegally. We want a system that secures our border."
He hopes more people realize that immigration and the economy are tightly connected and decision makers will factor that in to policy decisions.
"Obviously we want people to become Americans. We want to encourage more people to come here. The reality is that immigrants are much more likely to be of working age. They're more likely to be entrepreneurial. They fill different gaps in the workforce but it's not a perfect system. It's not that if we opened the borders, all of a sudden, now it would be better. It wouldn't. But we have to be smarter about it and we have to think about our immigration system in a way that thinks about economic growth instead of having the economy and jobs be an afterthought."