Wait! Before You Vote…

…there’s one more thing you need to know.

Actually, you should know it regardless of the election, as something you keep in your stash of important facts. Because conversations inevitably come up where you want to dig in your fact-stash and pull out something that will make people take notice.

That’s what happened to me when I read the headline in the New York Times. In the business section, under Economic View it said:

How Immigrants Create More Jobs

That’ll get my attention any day, especially in the midst of a contentious election where immigration is being used both as a wedge to divide voters and the hammer that drives it in.

It turns out that a pair of economists, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano of Bocconi University in Italy and Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, did a study titled “Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs,” in which they conclude that (according to the NYT article) “when companies move production offshore, they pull away not only low-wage jobs but also many related jobs, which can include high-skilled managers, tech repairmen and others. But hiring immigrants even for low-wage jobs helps keep many kinds of jobs in the United States, the authors say. In fact, when immigration is rising as a share of employment in an economic sector, offshoring tends to be falling, and vice versa.”

Yeah, it’s a mouthful but it makes sense. Immigrants actually compete with offshore workers for jobs. Of course the implications are not too good. It means that we can keep jobs here, in the United States, if we keep hiring immigrants to work for offshore wages.

But that’s fodder for another conversation. To the point, immigrants don’t take jobs from American workers. On the contrary, they help create more jobs.

Bring this up when you get a chance, hopefully before election day.