The Midwest Needs International Immigration

America has welcomed the can-do, entrepreneurial spirt of immigrants for centuries. The Midwest needs another jolt.

Source: gettyimages.com

Does America even believe anymore in the saying on the Statue of Liberty’s plaque: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free?” Maybe in a political sense they do, but if it’s economic freedom they’re seeking, many Americans are fine with telling potential migrants to keep yearning.

This became explicitly clear at last month’s presidential debates between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. It’ll be quite some time before anyone forgets Trump’s demonization of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH by saying, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” despite this being debunked in the days prior to the debate – and by the moderators at the debate itself.

If you thought immigration was a key issue in the 2016 and 2020 elections, think again. Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made immigration the absolute critical issue in 2024. This cycle, however, there’s a very important difference. In the earlier cycles, the focus was on keeping out those crossing over our southern border. This time they threaten mass deportation of those who entered the nation illegally, and dehumanizing them in the process. Trump points to the failure of Democrats, specifically Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, as the reason we stand to “lose” our nation to “illegals”.

Interestingly, what parts of the nation lead in this kind of anti-immigrant sentiment? It seems to be the small city, small town and rural parts of the Midwest. Places just like Springfield, OH. Yes, the ones that have been most ravaged by the loss of people, after suffering the loss of jobs and employers.

Why are these communities the ones seemingly most fearful of immigration? I don’t know. But I do know they’re the ones that stand to gain the most from effective immigration reform. I made the point in a piece last month that manufacturing decline in Rust Belt communities resulted in much more than lost jobs, lost economies and lost residents. It also resulted in the loss of networks, the social infrastructure, which is crucial to community restoration.

Economics professor Michael Hicks of Ball State University rightly pointed this out in an article he wrote about Indiana, but is applicable for the entire Midwest. Regarding the social infrastructure point above, Hicks says:

“There’s no easy way to say this, but migration is almost exclusively among residents with high human capital. This phenomenon of high human capital migration is among the best-documented facts in the social sciences. So, healthier, better-educated people and those more likely to start a business are the very people most likely to migrate. This is true between and within nations.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the folks who stay near home have low human capital. It does mean that, if “leavers” outnumber “stayers” over time, the average resident will have less education, poorer health and be less likely to start a business.”

Hicks goes on further:

“There is one magic elixir that can reverse population decline: international immigration. Immigrants who come to the U.S. are almost wholly motivated by economic opportunity or freedom. They are also possessed of very high human capital. Of course, for many, it is not well measured. In the developed world, education is a good measure of human capital. Not so among less-developed nations.

Someone who walked here from Guatemala to Logansport has a lot more human potential than the average human anywhere. We would be foolish to ignore it. And just to be clear, I’m not hypothesizing here. The kids of immigrants are probably the single most successful demographic group in America today. That has been true for more than a century and a half.”

Noah Smith, writer of the Noahpinion newsletter, makes the same case:

“Whose American dream is to stay in their small Midwestern town and work in the local meatpacking plant? Young people with even a modicum of talent, ambition, and wanderlust packed up and moved to New York City, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, etc.

If you’re a poor immigrant from a low-income country like Honduras, or Somalia, or Haiti, or Laos, or even the poorer parts of Mexico, the chance to live in a first-world country like America and work in a relatively clean, relatively safe factory for $14 an hour is the chance of a lifetime. You’ve really made it, if you can do that.”

Smith also questions why anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise, despite evidence that small towns would benefit greatly from it:

“(W)hy have we seen an upsurge in anti-immigration attitudes in America since 2021? There are two clear answers here. First, people get temporarily upset when there’s a flood of new immigrants, as there was from 2021 to 2023. Second, a lot of people are upset about the immigration they read about in the news, rather than the immigration happening in their own cities and neighborhoods. It’s a lot easier to fear people when you don’t meet them.

But in any case, if you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions? Would you starve them of the only resource that they could possibly use to revitalize themselves? Would you just tell all the people in those towns to pack up and move to New York and Chicago? What’s your alternative plan? Because I honestly don’t see any other way those places are going to get saved.”

Let’s take a look at the migrations that fed Midwestern cities following the Civil War and through the 20^th century, when manufacturing employment rapidly rose and hit its peak. One significant source was the outflow of people from southern and eastern Europe, another from the Deep South, and a lesser one from Appalachia. Of course, economic opportunity was what propelled migrants in each wave. The European wave was strongest between 1890 and 1930, the Deep South wave between 1910 and 1930 and again from 1950-1970, and from Appalachia from 1950-1970. 

I think most people with any familiarity with U.S. historical migration patterns would agree that the migration waves had their greatest impact on Northeastern as well as Midwestern cities, big and small. That pretty much came to a close by the 1970’s. Cities in the South and West became more reliant on domestic migration that came from the Northeast and Midwest at this time.

The surge in Latino population growth in the U.S. that started in the 1960s, via natural increase and immigration, was slow to reach the Midwest. Latino population growth was able to stabilize, and later reverse, population loss in the Northeast, while adding to domestic migration in the West, and later the South. Midwestern locations simply weren’t the destination for many Latinos at the time, with notable exceptions in Chicago and Milwaukee.  

The impact of smaller migration chains in Midwestern cities became more visible as a result. Migration flows that had started early in the 20^th century but were slowed by the restrictions put in place with the Immigration Act of 1924, took off again when the Immigration Act of 1965 went into effect. Arab Muslims and Christians from the Middle East flowed into the Detroit area, Hmong and Somalis in the Twin Cities. However, international migration in the Midwest has yet to produce growth rates equal to other regions of the nation.

The days of believing that the next big factory opening would turn around a community are long gone. They will never again approach the employment levels of fifty years ago. A lot of Midwestern human capital has been lost because of out-migration, and needs to be replaced. I’d much rather see a reemergence of can-do, entrepreneurial spirit fueled by immigration than a return to the past. Let’s establish new migration chains to revitalize the Midwest.