Caffeinated Politics

The 2024 election cycle was used by the Republican Party to promote a harsh level of racism against Brown-skinned people. and to ramp up the culture war against transgender people. If we thought the campaign season was absurd, it does not compare to the mean-spirited, nasty, and ugly season in our country since Inauguration Day 2025. The best way to combat the toxic, racist atmosphere is to look at data that clearly refutes the rhetoric from this White House.

While nations must have border security and control of immigration (the very type House Speaker Johnson refused to put up for a vote in 2024), it is also true that those new faces among us have greatly benefited our nation. While there are pressure points at times where the number of migrants outpaces the ability of public resources to meet the needs, we also must know that migrants from over the past 20 years were central to why the U.S. job market rebounded with more power and juice following the COVID pandemic than any other country in the world. Castigating migrants for partisan gain was mean-spirited during the 2024 election season. What the Trump Administration says about migrants, however, is undercut by data that proves their merit to the national economy. This article from The Washington Post in February 2024 makes the case.

That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.

Let’s add some more facts and data to showcase what will not be read or talked about by Trump and his inner circle.

There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented vs. undocumented. But estimates from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2021. That’s down compared with previous decades: Between 2007 and 2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found. Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.

Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, thanks especially to net immigration. The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants, according to the CBO.

The larger issue of migrants and the absolutely needed bottom line of treating them with respect and dignity is one that we must not allow to get trampled by the ridiculous and callous policy missions over the past year. Some in this nation have lost moral awareness about the human components to this story. When we hear a politician demean a man who wishes to secure a better life and the ability to raise his family, we need to listen to what the migrant wants most. A job. Would it not be smarter for the angry pol to aid our federal government in speeding up the process and assist in expediting work authorization for migrants? Every sector of the economy in every state is begging for workers. There is an abundant amount of data to prove the worth of these men and women in helping drive our economy to a higher and healthier place. Why would we not embrace immigrants for the vital role they play in our everyday economy?