As an economics professor and researcher, David Kallick has studied the many ways that immigrants and refugees contribute to our economy. In this episode of JobMakers, Kallick shares how immigrants revitalize metros, combat economic decline, reverse population loss, create jobs and more. Tune in to hear an academic’s take on the positive impact of immigrants on the United States economy.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I am Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers!
There’s a lot of misinformation about immigrants in the U.S, and leaders have exploited this ignorance for political gain. We often forget that the United States is a nation of immigrants founded on the idea of behaving for those seeking freedom and opportunity. And this immigration was such a bad thing for the country or do we continue to have it, but David Dyssegaard Kallick deputy director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, the Fiscal Policy Institute and assisting visiting professor at the Pratt Institute. His work focuses on the impact of immigrants in local and national settings, and what he’s found should come as no surprise. Immigrants and refugees are a net benefit to the U.S, and always have them.
In fact, we owe a lot to immigration for revitalizing metros in USA after population loss of economic decline since the 1960s, enriching our culture and cuisine, making our communities safer, creating jobs and businesses, and giving us a competitive edge when it comes to innovation, as you’ll find out in this week’s JobMakers podcast.
David Dyssegaard Kallick, thank you for joining us on JobMakers!
David Kallick: Thanks for having me!
Denzil Mohammed: Tell me a little bit about the kind of research that you do.
David Kallick: So, we look at immigration, especially the economic aspects of immigration in the United States. We focus on New York State in particular because we’re based here. It’s also a very particularly interesting story about immigrants in New York. But we also look at immigration around the country, and we have partners in most of the 50 states, think tanks that are based at the state level, looking at state level immigration issues around the country.
Denzil Mohammed: And what have been some of the successes of the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York City in terms of how you’ve been able to influence policymakers?
David Kallick: So very recently we’ve been involved in this campaign to allow for undocumented immigrants who were excluded from any of the benefits that were recently extended to other workers during this pandemic. To be able to include them in an excluded workers’ fund in New York State, that was really exciting. A $2.1 billion fund that allows for people to get basically the same level of benefits as other workers would have gotten if they got unemployment insurance last year. So that’s a pretty substantial amount, and really something that can sustain a family in these really tough times. So that was a very exciting thing to be part of.
Denzil Mohammed: The undocumented population of Massachusetts. It’s about 20 percent of the total immigrant population, and you spoke about that victory with New York City when it came to COVID relief for undocumented immigrants. What’s in the documented population of New York City?
David Kallick: So, it’s about 400,000 in New York City. It’s about 600,000 in New York State. That’s out of 4 million in the state, so, it’s not the majority by any means, but it’s not a trivial portion of the population either, and of course when we’re talking about people, we’re also talking about families, and as you know, people live in these many different kinds of households and many different kinds of families, and it’s very common that a person who’s undocumented, it might also be living with another person who’s not undocumented, or even with kids who were born in the United States. So, the number of people affected is even bigger but 60,000 is also a substantial number.
Denzil Mohammed: So, tell us about your own immigrant experience. You know you were born in New York City, but your journey didn’t really start there.
David Kallick: I was born in Western Massachusetts actually.
Denzil Mohammed: Oh, really?
David Kallick: But that was a long and maybe not terribly relevant story. I grew up in Connecticut, and then I moved to New York City as an adult. My family is from Eastern Europe and I’m really kind of across Eastern Europe and a little bit from other places as well. Most of them were Jewish, mostly they came after pogroms in Eastern Europe and came essentially as refugees. That was at a time before we had the current refugee resettlement policies but came fleeing horrible situations in the villages and towns that they came from, and really not a lot of other choices and not a lot in their pockets, and arrived here and made their way. I will say that even though it was some generations back, very deeply embedded in my own families’ experience of who we are and how we fit in America was in a positive way. I feel like we’re very conscious of the idea that this was a place where we could come we as a family with nothing or leaving everything behind and living by my parents’ generation quite comfortably, also with some sense of appreciation for the idea of the immigrant experience. To me feels like there’s a great radio program you may know called The Feet in Two Worlds and I love that title. I think it’s a very nice way of saying, you’re on the inside and you’re on the outside, and I think if you think of American literature for example, there’s this huge tradition, especially in the 20th century of the person who’s on the inside and the outside, writing about what is the experience of growing up here, but also having your head in a different kind of consciousness and in a positive way like some stuff, and how they have a culture that other people don’t have access to. And in a negative way that you feel maybe like you’re not entirely always included or when people say things you’re not entirely always thought of as part of what they mean when they say American.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s almost a quintessential American kind of thing though. Just having these different traits are not always fully belonging, because we have such tremendous diversity.
David Kallick: I think that is totally to me, that is very much what America is about and in fact, if you think of it, I am gonna say in somewhat philosophical terms, I think there’s like a process. It’s not so much about being, as it is about becoming, but it’s always a question of becoming like what we’re always integrating, we’re always having one foot in and one foot out. I think that’s a very creative and exciting kind of thing. And it is part of the tragedy to my mind of the way that the immigration debates have been so polarized today is, if you go to other countries and hear them talk about America, they are very much aware. I think that America is a country that’s always been about immigration. It’s always been reshaped as people come here, and it’s always been a process of becoming, and we still are in all the complicated ways. It’s still happening today.
Denzil Mohammed: I want to get into your research head right now, our audience really wants to know certain things about immigration. This podcast is based on the idea that immigrants are inherently entrepreneurial and so they start businesses and create jobs at a higher rate, but there is net benefit to our economy. Can you tell us definitively if immigration benefits us economically?
David Kallick: Of course, it does. I will say at the overall level, I really don’t think there are any economists who seriously doubt that idea that there is an overall benefit, and even you can talk to George Borjas, or maybe you will admit that in the overall there’s a positive benefit to immigration. So, there may be people raise questions about details and whether or not what we want our policies to look like would be better. But overall, one of the things that we’ve been quite interested in is that idea. So first of all, when we’re talking about immigration as I said, we’re talking not just country of origin, we’re talking in a much more diverse group than I think people often appreciate. So, immigrants work in all kinds of jobs. Of course, it’s well known that people worked in landscaping and construction, and some of the lower wage jobs. But they also work in health care and in engineering and in some of the higher wage jobs as well as many accountants and architects and people in the middle. So, I think immigration is much more diverse than people recognize, and in that sense, people are contributing. I also think if you’re talking about entrepreneurship, it is one of the rare areas where people will generally acknowledge. Immigrants are more entrepreneurial. I will say for good reasons and bad reasons, I think that immigrants are more entrepreneurial. You could say by nature they’re a self-selected group who decided to take a big risk, go somewhere else, try to make something new, that is an entrepreneurial kind of decision to be making, so it’s not too surprising that those are people who might be more entrepreneurial in general, they come up with a set of ideas and even potential products and potential services that they may have from the countries that they came from. They may in fact also be in many cases able to sell those products or services to people from their communities to begin with, and then expand to a bigger world. So, I think in that way it all kind of makes sense and out the battle and the kind of positive column of why immigrants more entrepreneurial. I mean, the negative column is that people are also often excluded from jobs that they might otherwise be able to do, and might be preferable for them, at least in the initial stage. So, if you’re an accountant, and you apply for a job at an accounting firm, and they don’t accept you because you might not look like what they think an accountant should look like. Or maybe your English is not perfect. Or maybe you don’t have references because you just came to this country. What do you do? Well, you might start your own accounting firm, which might be just you. You are hanging up a shingle. That’s what I would say is a more negative kind of entrepreneurship. Sometimes those turn out to be very good. So, there are plenty of stories of people who were kind of forced into that by being excluded. But then who made good and did great, but I think no matter how you parse it, it’s true that the rates for immigrants are higher than for U.S born. And the rates for some groups are pretty off the charts compared to others.
Denzil Mohammed: So, you were looking at numbers here and under the Trump administration. For instance, let’s say refugee admissions were ended up being capped at 15,000. We didn’t even get anywhere close to that, partly because of the pandemic under the Biden administration has been increased to 62,500 this year. For the next 50 years, these numbers just seem very arbitrary. When I think of the economy, it was not a zero sum game. It’s not like one person comes and takes a job from another person and then that’s it. As an economist you know these things well, but these sort of arbitrary number, like is there any way to determine an optimal number of immigrants particularly from an economic standpoint?
David Kallick: It’s a hard question. I think you definitely start with what you said, which is right idea of a zero sum game is just misguided, when people sometimes think it’s all just a kind of simple supply and demand as if anybody took an economics class might remember that if you have more supply this can be less, we must know it’s gonna be bad for the other workers. I think that’s true. If you only read page one of that textbook, you know if you go on to page three and four and five what you see is the important thing that’s in that part chart is all else equal. If that’s the only thing you’re talking about, is more workers and nothing else changes, then sure, they’re going to be fewer opportunities for other workers. But of course that’s not the case, what happens is when more people come, that also means that they have families that they buy stuff, but when they take the money that they earn and they invest it, so they’re expanding the overall economy in the same way as it does if you or I have kids and they grow up and you want the economy to be expanding. You don’t necessarily have more people to do that, but it’s certainly a possibility to have a bigger economy. At the same time, as you have more people and more workers, I think that’s what we see over and over again. The optimal number I would say that there are many things we’re achieving through immigration policy, and so you mentioned the refugee resettlement numbers. One of the things is clearly a sense of moral obligation, like what we do. Refugees are people, so we have different categories of people coming as immigrants or people who apply to get a green card. People who come on temporary visas. People come undocumented. People who come across illegally and stay in the country over time, and refugees are people, asylum seekers who come to this country seeking asylum people. Refugees are people who come from some of the most horrific situations in the world and leave those places because they have no other choice wind up often in resettlement agencies, and then surrender settlements in refugee camps for years and then some tiny fraction of them out there. I think after 20 million people in refugee that the UN High Commissioner refugees identifies as in need of resettlement of the 20 million. I think 1 percent of them have been resettled, so there’s some vast number of refugees looking for resettlement and the United States through the refugee resettlement program. Primarily, I would say is trying to fulfill a humanitarian obligation to do its part as other countries also do to welcome refugees to this country. It’s also true that when they come here, they benefit us, they benefit society. We see this in New York State where most of the resettlement is in upstate cities, in Buffalo and Rochester and Syracuse and Albany and Utica. You see a revitalization of the downtown areas that comes from refugees moving into areas that U.S-born people have often moved out of. So, I think there is a benefit to us, but I would just underscore that to my mind with refugee resettlement in particular, the goal is to be part of a global effort to fill this humanitarian mission. Other important categories to me are family unification is really important if you are in this country. You may have been here for many years and you have a wife, kids, parents in another country. Being able to have that family come and be reunited in this country is, I mean that was the story of my family. I think it is a great part of American culture, it adds to America as well. Of course, if you have a family to come to, then they’re going to support you as you get rooted here and start to become part of American society and the American economy.
Denzil Mohammed: A lot of actions at the state level though over the years many restrictive, but others also allowing undocumented immigrants to have in-state tuition in states like, Kansas, allowing them to have driver’s license. During the pandemic we saw that certain states adjusted their credentialing and licensing requirements for health care workers so that they could have more health care workers in the hospitals. One thing you brought up with family reunification, and that is the cornerstone of American immigration policy as it is our own research has shown that for high skilled professionals, immigrant professionals, social capital is extremely important in their ability to climb the ladder to be able to succeed. If you’re here in our country alone, it’s much harder if you don’t have family with you obviously. But in the past few years’ discussion has come up on immigration based on skills. There are certain countries that have point systems. Maybe we want to look at just immigrants who have the skills needed in industries where we are lacking workers. What is your position on that?
David Kallick: I feel like I’m very appreciative of how well we do with the immigration that we have, and I feel like to my mind a much better focus on skills would be how do we develop skills among the U.S. farm workers and immigrants who already are here, which we don’t do a great job for either group. I think I’m skeptical about the idea of filtering by certain skill levels, I mean, for one thing you leave out lots of people, and people who want to come here and have been as we’ve seen do well over time in the United States. Otherwise, there are lots of examples of super entrepreneurs as well as the kind of people who open stores and do regular kinds of more bread-and-butter economic development work who would not have qualified under those kinds of programs. They might have been kids for example. They might have been people who didn’t have the educational background, but that might be required, so I feel like there’s a question about who gets left out. I’m also not so convinced that we can do a great job of figuring out who the right people are to let in. I think there might be times when there are shortages of nurses and so do we want to think about having people who already have a nursing degree admitted, that seems like a good idea, but let’s also then recognize what is that telling us? It tells us that we’re not producing enough nurses, and so how do we make sure that we’re investing in the American system for educating nurses, make it open to everybody who wants to do it. So, there’ll be lots of immigrants to be part of that, but also lots of people who aren’t immigrants. I think I’m skeptical about the idea that a skill system is the best way to do it. I also mentioned George Weyerhaus before. I don’t want to pick on him in particular, but I can’t help remembering that he once did this calculation, and I guess thought about what it would be like, and he was at the time quite in favor of the idea of a skills-based system, but he also acknowledged that if we had a skills-based system, he would not have been able to come.
Denzil Mohammed: It’s a different type of selection. We talk about immigrants as being self-selected to have this ambition and this drive to determination to take the risk is a very different kind of selection in this way, and as you say, who knows if we will really get it right. Another thing you brought up is revitalization of neighborhoods and economies. This is a part of the conversation that I think gets really ignored. So as an example, when the census data came out and we saw which states were gaining and losing congressional seats, the Boston Business Journal reached out to find out what role immigration played in Massachusetts being able to hold all its congressional seats. And I dug into the data a bit and saw that immigration to Massachusetts increased by 50 percent since 1990. Domestic migration increased by 10 percent, and so migration was what allowed Massachusetts to be able to hold on to its congressional seats. And your research has consistently shown that for many metro areas, immigration is what saved them.
David Kallick: Absolutely, I think that’s extremely clear. If you look at the 50 largest cities in the States, many of them lost population in the mid-20th century. So, like 1960 to 1980, I think 20 to 27 percent lost population. There were a number that rebounded and all of the ones that rebounded did. So, with immigrants playing a very substantial role in that rebound, even more than what you’re describing in Boston. How many cities were there that rebounded without immigrants? Zero. So, I think that doesn’t prove that immigrants cause a population rebound. But I would say if your idea is that you’re going to see the population of a city rebound without immigrants, there are zero examples of that happening in the 20th century.
Denzil Mohammed: It’s such an excellent point and I’m glad that the research has found that.
David Kallick: If you want to talk about disproportionate levels of immigrant entrepreneurship, we really focused there on what we called Main Street businesses. So Main Street businesses are the kinds of businesses that have given the neighborhood its character, have a storefront, this place you can walk into. And it is very important question of revitalization of cities that have seen declining populations because when you have a Main Street that has boarded up storefronts and feels unsafe or uncomfortable to walk through, that causes a lot more negative repercussion than just in that storefront. It obviously affects the sense of whether people want to be in that neighborhood, live in that neighborhood, work in that neighborhood. So, what we see over and over again, is the story in a place like that, an immigrant family comes in seasonal opportunity, the storefront is pretty inexpensive to rent because it’s been boarded up. They start a restaurant, maybe people start to come to that restaurant next door. Somebody opens a food shop, then next door to that maybe somebody opens a clothing store, and little by little the area becomes revitalized, and it becomes a place people want to come to. If you’re going to look at the economic impact of that, of course it matters how many jobs are created there and what are the revenues and putting the properties back on the property tax rolls. So, seems all counts, but I would say that those are a small part of the economic impact, what really has happened is that the whole neighborhood has begun to get to be more appealing and you see ripple effects through the housing market and through safety. And in some ways New York is such an extreme example of that, but people forget it. But in 1970s that was the story of New York City, but New York City population dropped by 1,000,000 people from 8,000,000 to 7,000,000. Sometimes there were a million people worth of empty apartments. The Bronx was burning people. Landlords were setting fire to their apartment buildings in order to collect on the insurance. Like it was fairly unimaginable from today’s perspective at New York State real estate, but that’s some New York City real estate, but that’s what it was the case then. I think what changed the immigrant population in the difference before and after 1970 to 1980 the U.S-born population stayed basically the same. In fact the U.S-born population is today about the same in New York City as it was at the beginning of that period when it was low. What’s different is we today have 3,000,000 immigrants in New York City. So, they more than made-up for that population loss.
Denzil Mohammed: You make me think of Field Corner in Boston, which was in heavy economic decline for several decades. The rent was cheap, so Vietnamese immigrants moved in. They started some nail salons and some restaurants and some food stores as you mentioned and now the area has been totally revitalized with beautiful storefronts. Sidewalks that don’t need repair anymore, streetlights, it’s safe. And that’s a really vivid example of the kind of revitalizing you’re talking about. I think what the population growth in the cities and even this idea of excluding immigrants, undocumented immigrants from COVID relief speaks to the point I want to get at finally with you. Is that immigration seems to be considered very separate issue of American politics and American culture? This is a thing we talk about over there, about people over there. And the fact of the matter is, immigrants are and have always been all across this nation. In every state we see some of the biggest growth in places like, the Dakotas not a traditional gateway state for immigrants, so it’s not a separate issue. And the undocumented immigrants as an example providing these goods and services, delivering home health aides, you name it, up at the forefront in many essential services and industries. If you want economic rehabilitation, you can’t just exclude one route like that because they’re immigrants.
David Kallick: In some ways I feel like in recent years that line between undocumented immigrants and other immigrants has softened some, maybe partly because undocumented immigrants have been here so long at this point. And I think we’ve recognized maybe that we need to live with this issue for a long while, and hopefully we will also address it at some point, but in the meantime, we’ve also lived with it a long while. But I also think that the attacks on immigrants have not usually been very nuanced, it’s been attacks on immigrants overall, and in fact not even just immigrants. I would say anybody who looks different, who looks like they might be an immigrant too. That’s been especially true about Latinx populations, but also, we see the attacks on Asians. There’s not somebody looking and saying, hey, are you actually an immigrant? Were you born in another country? Are you undocumented? I think they’re saying, we assume a lot of stuff about you based on what you look like, what their skin color may be, and I think it feels to me like not the America I know or love. I mean I feel like it should be not what we stand for, and I feel like there’s some hope maybe in how far we’ve gone down that road that we can begin to look in the mirror and recognize ourselves and say, wait a second, that’s not really the way we see. And we’re not really talking about what people’s legal status is or what people’s immigration status is, we’re really kind of talking about what their racial identity is, or things that we may not want to be as open about, and I think we just have to be able to get past that and say, people are people. I think there’s value in maintaining your own distinction and having one foot in and one foot out. I think that’s a very positive thing about America, but also about being able to live together and say now, we are the sum of our parts. That is a purpose.
Denzil Mohammed: It’s a wonderful way to contextualize this whole discussion about immigration when it comes to our present day, our past, and our future, David Kallick, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers! It was a real pleasure to talk to you.
David Kallick: Thank you, likewise.
Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and The Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants voice. I’m so happy that you joined us for this week’s incredible podcast. If you know someone else, we should talk to, email Denzil, that’s D E N Z I L at jobmakerspodcast.org, and please leave us a review. I’m Denzil Muhammed, and please join us next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers podcast.