Many of us are processing and wondering about the future of work with and for immigrants here in the United States. Privately, we have been having conversations with colleagues all over the country in the immigration and refugee resettlement space about the election results, and we have heard a lot of fear, confusion, and concern.
For Patchwork Indy, however, in the next four years we will continue to move forward not from fear, but with enthusiasm, awareness, and hope.
We should be mindful that regardless of the rhetoric used during the Trump campaign, the results of their support paint a far more complex image. The Trump campaign made massive inroads with almost all non-white voting groups. Asian American support for Trump was 5 percent higher this election cycle than the previous. Support from immigrant Muslims rose in Minnesota and Michigan. And Latinos support increased by 13%, beating George W. Bush’s record of Latino voters for Republicans in 2004. The increased diversity of Trump’s support is also a stark reminder that the diverse communities in our country are incredibly complex and diverse in themselves, and the labels we have imposed on them are far too general to be useful for understanding them meaningfully.
Migrant communities are not inherently republican or democrat. To take it as such would be to ignore critical cultural understanding of where many of these communities come from and what they value.
What will continue to be accurate, regardless, is the staggering contributions made by immigrants to federal and local economies. An HHS (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) study released this year found that refugees and asylees contribute a net fiscal impact of nearly $124 billion between 2005 and 2019. According to a Congressional Budget Office report this year, increased immigration could reduce the U.S. federal budget deficit by $897 billion over the next decade.
Above all, refugees, asylees, and immigrants of all statuses embody the American spirit and have been a cultural cornerstone of this country. From English Puritans in the 1600s, Irish refugees escaping the Great Famine in the mid 1800s, Polish refugees fleeing Prussian and Russian ethnic persecution in the early 1900s, Cubans who fled Castro’s Communist regime in the 1980s, and Venezuelans who today flee Maduro’s socialist dictatorship, America’s history is a history of migrants who came here because they saw a beacon of hope, opportunity, and security for their families and survived and worked till the bitter end to make that hope a reality.
We do not know what the next four years will bring. But it would be negligent to claim that change and uncertainty won’t come. Uncertainty and change are not necessarily bad, however. The next four years can be a time when we create new understanding, connections, strategies, and models that will flourish for years to come. We recognize that the future is uncertain and that our collective understanding of each other has a long way to go. However, we are cognizant that immigrant and immigration is not a partisan identity but an American identity since its founding, and it will continue to be so.
The next four years can be a time when we create new understanding, connections, strategies, and models that will flourish for years to come.
To our colleagues, leaders in immigrant and refugee communities, and U.S. government employees who work in immigration, we urge you to be adaptive, defiantly open, and defiantly hopeful. Because Americans and future Americans need us to be.
Comments