Director of the Institute for Immigration Research James Witte shares how he uses immigration data, research and stories to combat misinformation and disinformation about immigrants. He also discusses the challenges of communicating accurate, data-based information in the current media ecosystem. Listen to hear an academic’s take on the positive impact of immigrants on the United States.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: What’s the total foreign-born share of the U.S. population? What do you think it is? It’s 13.7 percent. That’s a fact. Now, do you believe me? Misinformation and disinformation about immigration in the U.S. is ubiquitous, and it’s easy to fall victim to the short, false soundbites we keep hearing from politicians. For Professor James Witte, director of the Institute for Immigration Research, getting the facts about U.S. immigration out to the public is one thing, getting them to believe facts is another. The Institute for Immigration Research is a joint venture between George Mason University and The Immigrant Learning Center of Malden, Massachusetts, the co-producer of this podcast. One of the goals of the Institute’s work is to position the immigration data, research and stories within a framework of inclusiveness where Americans will be able to see that they are not disconnected from immigration. We all, U.S.-born and foreign-born, help power this country’s economy, enrich its culture and make it the powerhouse that it is. Professor Witte also helps explain the resistance to immigrants and facts about them, and how we can counter that, in this week’s JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: Professor James Witte, Jim, welcome to JobMakers.
James Witte: I’m very glad to be here, Denzil, it’s a pleasure.
Denzil Mohammed: Thank you for joining us. Tell us a little bit about what you and the Institute for Immigration Research do and why this work is important today.
James Witte: The Institute for Immigration Research was created in 2012 on the initiative and generous support of The Immigrant Learning Center. And then in partnership with George Mason University, we have grown the institute over, I guess we’re going to have our 10-year anniversary at some point soon. What we do is we really try to highlight the various types of contributions that immigrants make to America. Our focus is on America, immigrants to the United States and U.S. immigration policy. And so there we’ve done a full gamut of topics that we have addressed. Those include things at the very high skill level, like physicians or scientists, as far as the Nobel Prize winners and where immigrants have made great contributions there. But then also we think about jobs that don’t require the same degree of education and skill, like being a truck driver, or the roles that a number of immigrants, along with their native-born compatriots, played during COVID-19 as essential workers: cleaning hospitals, stocking grocery store shelves. All of that to show that the immigrants are working shoulder to shoulder with the native-born to maintain, get us through the pandemic, recover from it and then eventually to grow the U.S. economy. Our primary focus is on the economic contributions. As we went into the pandemic, unemployment in the United States was under 4 percent. That’s a real signal that without our foreign-born workers, we would have been in real trouble. Economic growth would have slowed. And now as we pull ourselves out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re still going to need those workers across the entire spectrum of the labor force. Beyond the economic, we’ve done a lot of work on civic engagement and the extent to which immigrants participate in civic life in the United States, both in very informal ways, you know, volunteering with different civic organizations, and then also politically. We’ve seen an increase in either immigrants or children of immigrants in politics in the United States in the last 10 or 15 years, and that’s really a good thing. They’re not called representatives for nothing, you know. They represent a population, and the U.S. population right now is close to 14 percent foreign-born. And then we have to consider also the children of the foreign-born who are U.S. citizens, but then also part of their cultural and social identity is tied to the background of their parents, and that strengthens and diversifies the United States. We also see important cultural contributions that immigrants, the foreign-born and their children, are making to the United States and have made throughout our history: bringing in new ideas, new dining options, new forms of art. One of our first cultural projects was looking at immigrants in the arts, and you saw after World War II that painters from Germany and Austria had an enormous impact on the art world in the United States. And so this is not just today, but throughout the course of our history, we see immigrants bringing in new ideas that strengthen and enrich our culture. The group BTS, they have revitalized McDonald’s through a promotion that they’re running built around this Korean boy band. So all of these things are influential and strengthen and build the resilience of American society. And this is all coming in through immigrants and their children.
Denzil Mohammed: You bring up a lot of great points, including the fact that immigrants have impacted just every aspect of American life, from sports, to culture, to restaurants, to the kinds of cuisines we take for granted that we have access to. As well as, you know, as your research has found, 28 percent of physicians in the U.S. are foreign-born. They make up nearly half of our agricultural workers. And especially in this moment of pandemic and the idea of recovery, we’ve really seen how immigrants have played a crucial role, and without them we would not have been able to reach the point where we are today. I mean just the fact that Pfizer and Moderna both have immigrant founders, and those are the two first vaccines that we had. And you also mentioned the fact that immigrants are less than 14 percent of our population, and every time I poll people on what is the foreign-born share of the U.S. population, they come up with 50 percent and 35 percent. They’ve been getting these messages, the idea of invasion, infestation, surge, all these kinds of terms that are used to describe the influx of immigrants to the U.S., when it’s always been a particular kind of flow. What do you think is responsible for this kind of misinformation about immigrants in the U.S.?
James Witte: When you say misinformation, I know we’ve talked about this before, there’s a distinction between misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is a lack of knowledge. Disinformation is bad information being propagated. So we can start with some of the misinformation, and this goes back into something I see as an insight from everyday sociology. People of my generation and a little bit younger, as we were growing up, the foreign-born population was about 5 percent. And so yes, there has been an increase to get us close to 14 percent, which by historical standards is fairly normal, it’s been that level before. But the perception leads people to think that there has been some kind of surge, some rapid influx in the foreign-born population, when in fact it’s been relatively gradual. The anomaly was in the 1960s when people didn’t see that many foreign-born, and as our immigration policy changed, we were able to create a new group of new Americans who were able to do exactly the sorts of things we’ve been talking about: contribute economically, civically and culturally. The fact that they’re getting it up to 50 percent, that’s where the disinformation may come in, where people then begin to throw out numbers. Over the weekend, I saw a post from someone with a college degree, a well-educated young woman, who believes that 67 percent of the deaths from COVID-19 are among the vaccinated. Because this disinformation is being promoted, people are misled and sucked into a set of false beliefs, and I think that’s where the 50 percent of the United States being foreign-born may come from.
Denzil Mohammed: You talk about being misled, and there’s this tremendous perception that one person comes into the country, gets a job, that automatically means one person in the country is denied a job. I don’t want to get into the economics of this, but it’s not a zero-sum game. The more workers you have working, the economy expands and provides more jobs for more people. Is that right?
James Witte: Yes, that’s absolutely true. We know from decades of research that it’s small and medium-sized businesses that create jobs, and that small and medium-sized businesses are more likely to be founded by or run by the foreign-born. Again, we’re not going to go too much into the economics, but in a certain sense, when you get to be a large business, particularly a publicly traded large business, part of your aim to please your shareholders is actually to reduce employment, to think about ways to cut your costs of labor, to rationalize production, to introduce techniques of automation. And that doesn’t create jobs. So it’s not when a foreign-born individual comes here that they take jobs. They actually make jobs, and I think that’s what we have to somehow convince people, and fight against the misinformation and disinformation about what’s the role that the foreign-born and their children play in the U.S. economy.
Denzil Mohammed: And that’s really what this podcast is about. It’s about JobMakers who are immigrant entrepreneurs. Immigrants are creating jobs in the U.S. You talked about in the 60s that the foreign-born share of the U.S. population was about 5 percent, and it’s now almost 14 percent. People have seen a rise in people who look different, people who have accents, people who don’t readily know the English language. Refugee resettlement has introduced foreign-born populations to very much non-traditional gateway cities and states. We see right now the fastest-growing immigrant populations in places like West Virginia and North Dakota. So people are being introduced to immigration in a very, sometimes abrupt, sometimes dramatic way, and we get to this point of people being uncomfortable. You talk about diversity being such a net positive in such a globalized world, this exchange of ideas, the fact that so many of our Nobel Prize winners were foreign-born, but what at the core makes people uncomfortable about this whole matter?
James Witte: I think you bring up a good point with the refugees, and part of that is because refugee resettlement often happens in places where there have not been many foreign-born. And yes, that may lead to uncomfortableness in the beginning, but it actually, I think in the longer run, produces acceptance and familiarity with something that’s new. And I think that’s really one way that we can promote greater integration and understanding of the foreign-born is through exposure and contact with one another. There’s a lot of research that shows that the more contact you have with immigrants, and immigrants of different types, and you’re absolutely right that the immigrants of yesterday were often white and from western Europe, and that’s very different today, but when you think about the contact people begin to have with the foreign-born, that’s what breaks down some of these barriers. I think where there is a real potential is some of these refugees that are coming now who have completely different religious beliefs, they often are of a different race, clearly a different ethnicity. I think that provides an opportunity for people who have had little exposure, when in a small town in West Virginia, you have some refugees there who in a sense become unavoidable, that you have contact with them, that they’re working in the community, and you begin to realize this sense of commonality and common humanity that I think can only be broken down or introduced through daily contact.
Denzil Mohammed: People seem to forget that families, no matter where they are or where they come from or what their background is, they have the same desires and ambitions. Parents want their children to be healthy. Parents want their children to do well at school. Parents want their children to do better than they did. Children just want to have friends and be social, and that is something that is common no matter what your background is, no matter what your religion is. People seem to not recognize that, and I think this idea that you have of more contact, more visibility, and seeing how these families operate, will help to mend that, I hope. Awareness is one thing, but inclusiveness is another. This idea of inclusiveness, of not just knowing about your neighbor and his family, but feeling as though you have this commonality, feeling as though you can do things together, and this is both social and cultural, as well as economic. Immigrants are not a separate entity, they are part of our society, they are part of our economy, they are part of the wheels that turn and make us an innovation hub and make us the greatest economy in the world. People seem to forget that when you talk about immigrants, you’re talking about yourselves as well. So talk a little bit about this idea of inclusiveness.
James Witte: Inclusiveness, I think, is so important. I think we’re seeing, in the United States and around the world, a renewed emphasis on inclusiveness. I would say, in the U.S. at least, it really got a large push from the #MeToo movement, and the fact that women were not being accorded the same respect and opportunity in the workplace, were being exploited and taken advantage of. And then we also saw it with the Black Lives Matter movement and the revelations with #MeToo. It began with revelations, most notably with the George Floyd killing, but also other incidents of abuse of African Americans at the hands of the police. There, people began to say, why are we not given and accorded the same privileges and rights, and also responsibilities, of the mainstream population? And so that led to a call for inclusiveness, and I think it’s very important that if we think about immigrants, and the inclusiveness of immigrants in American society, that we can look back at what worked and what didn’t work with the #MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. There were certainly ways that people called attention to exploitation, to things that were not working, that people were excluded, and at the same time there was an understanding that if these people were included, we would all benefit. I think that’s really the fullness of inclusiveness that we should focus on.
Denzil Mohammed: Even when presented the facts about immigration and these stories and these images … you know, I think about George Floyd, and support for Black Lives Matter skyrocketed, I think primarily because there was this visual, there was this video, and it sort of reminds me of the migrant kids in cages. When people saw these images, it forced a real emotional reaction, and there was tremendous backlash against the kinds of policies that would allow something like that, which led to actual change in the rules. So #1, does it take something as dramatic as that to force a change in people’s thinking? And even when presented these facts, these stories, these images, some people still interpret it in a different way or refuse to believe. What causes that?
James Witte: I think that’s a good point. As you know, at the Institute for Immigration Research, we’ve had this discussion for years, almost since our very beginning, about the relative value of facts and data and stories. I think through our work and the work of many others, we’ve developed what should be, and I say should be, convincing facts and convincing stories. But as you point out, they don’t always work. And this is why we’ve been talking and thinking a lot about inclusiveness. As dramatic as the facts may be (’cause I believe in numbers, facts are often dramatic, but also the stories can be very, very dramatic), if I can’t put myself into that situation, if I can’t imagine my child in that cage or my partner as the person being abused and killed by the police, then it’s still a bit remote. We really need to accept these convincing facts and stories as part of our own lives, and we have to include ourselves into what’s happening to these groups, whether they’re immigrants, immigrant children or minorities.
Denzil Mohammed: We are the greatest economy in the world and we are a nation of immigrants. We’ve always had immigration to the U.S. and somehow we became the greatest economic power in the world. I think one thing probably has to do with the other.
James Witte: I absolutely agree. You had talked a little bit about the Irish. When the Irish came to the United States, they were considered to be a different race. Perceptions of race even change overtime. But as the Irish, the Italians, other southern Europeans became integrated in the United States, over time their descendants have become the native-born, and I think that’s the point you’re trying to make. Somehow we have to emphasize that there is almost a circular process where immigrants come into the country, they gain a footing, often that footing is accomplished through their own initiative, other times it’s facilitated through people who are already here. But then once we move through the circle a little bit further, the people who are already here are those same immigrants and their children, and they’re the ones who are going to facilitate and benefit from the next group of new Americans. We should be celebrating the full diversity of our country, and again, that’s part of what inclusiveness is about is understanding our strength comes through that diversity.
Denzil Mohammed: Our strength comes from our diversity. Very well said. Professor James Witte, Jim, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers.
James Witte: It was a pleasure to be with you, Denzil. Take care.
Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurs produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center of Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thank you again for joining us for this week’s fascinating story about immigrants and their contributions. If you know someone we should talk to, email denzil@jobmakerspodcast.org. And leave us a review on your favorite streaming service. I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers podcast.