The Truth About Immigration: Economics

Arturo Dominguez
7 min readNov 5, 2018

Many armchair experts have been espousing a lot of misinformed rhetoric regarding migrants based on the divisive language used by our current President, Donald Trump. I’m here to clear the air with facts that some of them may not like.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23912576@N05/3010067161/

In this day and age, everyone seems to be an “expert” on immigration. Well, they like to act like experts anyway. But it seems like all they do is spread nonsensical hyperbole that they themselves deem to be factual. They do this without ever even looking anything up because it feeds their conscious, and sometimes unconscious, bias towards any non-white folks.

It’s the same logic and thinking that goes into nearly every conversation about police brutality disproportionately affecting people of color. Most of the responses to the actual statistics come from a place of black-on-black crime in an attempt to deflect from the facts. The same type of fallacious logic is used in regards to immigration and the reams of misinformation on the topic.

Lucky for us, there are truckloads of information in the way of bi-partisan studies conducted by many institutes and think-tanks. It’s an issue that finds an overwhelming consensus because of the historically positive economic impacts of immigration. In fact, immigration is needed to prevent looming economic stagnation while continuing to boost the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States and maintaining much-needed tax revenue.

Immigrants increase GDP

One of the major talking points of the far-right, which includes Donald Trump and the majority of the Republican Party, are the negative economic impacts of migrants coming to the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth here. There is no negative impact of immigration worthy of discussion.

Despite the positive impacts of immigrants on the United States’ economy and society, the tenor of the new administration threatens to move the United States to a more restrictionist policy environment. It’s all part of an anti-immigrant rhetoric that has its roots white supremacy. Some folks argue that this language isn’t racist. But a quick look through history dictates otherwise.

The truth is that increased immigration enforcement — as well as potential…

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Arturo Dominguez

Journalist covering Congress, Racial Justice, Human Rights, Cuba, Texas | Editor: The Antagonist Magazine |