Who Will…
A prayerfully-offered reflection for those who spew
and those who are buying the
“they’re replacing good Americans” and
“poisoning the blood”
bovine-digestive-process-by-product.
We were so lucky.
No.
Our mother was so lucky!
She was a proud - not arrogant but proud - woman. Meticulous. Polished. (A friend who used to attend Sunday Mass at 7740 often complimented her fashion, style and color choices.)
Well more than a decade after Daddy’s death and a year after she entered hospice for “palliative” – not “end-of-life” – care, Evelyn entered Mommy’s life.
Mrs. Flynn was not happy about “a stranger” in her home, especially one speaking “recent immigrant” level English. And she immediately began teaching rudimentary phrases and sentences. When “Mrs. Flynn” – out of respect and “carino” (genuine affection) always “Mrs. Flynn” to Evelyn and her family - was still healthy and mobile, Evelyn was there in case of nighttime emergencies and to help with morning dressing and routines.
Eventually, nighttime hours expanded and Evelyn brought on other, newly-arrived-from-Cuba family members. It wasn’t cheap; Justice demanded that we pay genuinely fair wages, taxes and social security. But Cuban coffee and Spanglish became the rule of the day and Evelyn and her family became part of ours.
Why do we tell this story?
Because we grew-up in a changing Miami, when hate-fill screeds on bumper stickers – “Will the last real American leaving Miami please bring the flag” – polluted our streets and stores posted notices “NO DOGS. NO CUBANS.”
Because Mrs. Flynn was especially proud. She would never have accepted being bathed, clothed or cleaned after the toilet, or having her nightgown and linens changed during the night by her sons, both of whom lived just ten minutes away. Nor would she have accepted them living with her or living in their homes.
Because we will forever be grateful for Evelyn and her family of recent immigrants who cared for Mrs. Flynn and allowed her a decade of dignity and carinoso care.
We were more fortunate than many American families. Our parents’ simple lifestyle and frugality and help from generous friends gave our mother benefits other Americans will not know. Other Americans will either be broken – physically, emotionally and financially – through care for elderly family members, by Alzheimer’s disease and dementia or, in many cases, search desperately for recent immigrants to provide the tasks-of-daily-living help their parents may need.
But, in a land that once took pride in the strength and contributions of our immigrant neighbors, self-interested fear-mongers breed hatred of “foreigners.”
The hate-sowers seem to have blindfolded themselves to some critical issues. Nearly two decades of Americans’ increasing life expectancy began to unravel in recent years, - falling from 78.8 in 2019 to 77 in 2021 and 76.1 in 2022. Those drops put the U.S. far behind Japan, Korea, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Italy - all with life expectancies of 80 years or more. Even Turkey (78.6) and China (78.2) fare better.
The picture is even more bleak for American men whose life expectancy at the end of 2023 was 73.2 years, compared with 79 for women - the widest gap (5.9 years) since 1996. And genetics and higher vulnerability to chronic diseases aren’t the only factors. Add in the opioid epidemic, mental and chronic health issues, and suicide.
Americans are dying younger.
But that’s not all the news.
While U.S. Census Bureau statistics released in mid-December 2023 indicate that the population gained more than 1.6 million people in the year leading up to July 1 – growing by 0.5% to 334,914,895, that’s still an historically slow growth rate and barely a tick up from the 0.4% increase in 2022 and 0.2% in 2021; birth rates decreased but were tempered by the near 9% decrease in deaths after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eleven states – New Jersey, Ohio, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Kansas, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Mississippi, and Alaska all lost populations in 2022 and began to see slight upticks in 2023.
California, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia lost 249,161 in 2023 – less than half the 509,789 loss of 2022. Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia accounted for 93% of the nation’s population growth in 2022, but only 67% in 2023. South Carolina and Florida were the fastest growing states in the nation in 2023 – growing at rates of 1.7% and 1.6% respectively.
U.S. Census Bureau data released on Thursday, December 28 notes that, while the worldwide growth rate in the past year was just under 1%, growth in the United States was 0.53% - about half the worldwide figure – and the U.S. would reach a population of 335.8 million on New Year's Day – meaning that the 2020s might result in the slowest growing decade in U.S. history. The previous slowest-growing decade was in the aftermath of the Great Depression in the1930.
During the decade of the 2020s, the U.S. will have to rely on international migration to maintain its population.
Wow! In the era of the immigrant-hating for votes, that’s a dangerous thing to say.
One-hundred years ago, more than one-fifth of the nation was born outside the United States. According to 2023 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, even adding 10 million immigrants to the population would not result in 20 percent of the population being born outside the country.
Changes in immigration laws in the 1960s have resulted in changes in the immigrant population. Rather than the majority of immigrants coming from Europe, in recent years there’s been a shift to Latin America (particularly Mexico) and Asia, while immigration from Europe has been relatively low.
One-hundred years ago, the anti-immigrant backlash was against new arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe – especially large numbers of Italians – triggering anti-Catholic tirades and violence in large measure because they were often perceived as physically distinct from “White” Americans – just as Hispanic and Asian immigrants are viewed today.
It’s a BS throw-away line to complain that immigrants are “replacing” “true Americans.” It’s especially difficult to justify the so called “immigrants are replacing us” theory when we consider that about 15 percent – at least 81 - voting members of the 118th Congress are foreign-born or have at least one parent who was born in another country. Seventeen members of the House of Representative and Japan-born Senator Mazie Hirone represent only three percent of both legislative chambers. At least 63 other lawmakers – 47 representatives and 16 senators – have one or more immigrant parents. In total, these children of immigrants make up 12 percent of the 118th Congress.
In 2017, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine reported in The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration:
“[T]he long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concluded that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S.
“More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns,, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education and health care, to federal, state, and local budgets.”
Concerned about immigrants – documented and undocumented – “stealing Americans’ jobs”?
Consider:
One former New York hotelier and real-estate developer was a big fan of foreign – sometimes undocumented or “illegal” - workers. In fact
During the busy winter season at his beach club in Palm Beach, he regularly applied for special visas for foreign workers to work as housekeepers, waiters and cooks. He explained “It’s very, very hard to get people in Palm Beach during the Palm Beach season.” In August 2017, while running for the highest office in the nation, he sought permission to hire 70 “foreign nationals” for his winter headquarters.
He also sought H-2A temporary work visas for foreign laborers in his Vineyard Estates in Virginia.
His Model Management firm used foreign born models – before he entered the wicked world of politics and that became a bad look.
A Vox analysis of hiring records for seasonal workers at three of his properties in NY and Florida found that from 2016-2017 only one out of 144 jobs went to US workers – 143 went to foreign “guest workers.”
When constructing his eponymous NYC tower, he relied on the back-breaking labor of 150-odd Polish immigrants – most working illegally, some without full pay, NBC News reported in February 2016.
A February 2023 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges revealed that approximately on-in-five U.S. physicians were born and attended medical school outside of the U.S. These “non-U.S. international medical graduates” totaled more than 203,500 physicians in 2021 and their numbers have increased by more than 30 percent since 2004. That’s important since the U.S. lacks more than 17,000 primary care practitioners and more than 8,000 mental health practitioners and is expected to face a shortage of 124,000 physicians by 2034.
The agricultural sector contributed $1.055 trillion to the US gross domestic product in 2020, with $143.7 billion coming from farms. The agricultural sector relies on foreign workers and 86 percent of agricultural workers in the U.S. are foreign-born and 45 percent are undocumented and comprise roughly four percent of the undocumented workforce in the U.S.
In 2021, nearly 2.8 million immigrants were employed as health-care workers – more than 18 percent of the 15.2 million people in the United States in a health-care occupation and slightly higher than immigrants’ share of the overall U.S. civilian workforce (17 percent). Moreover, female immigrants were more likely than U.S.-born women to work in direct health-care support occupations known for low wages, such as home health aides and nursing assistants, according to an April 2023 report from the Migration Policy Institute. Nationwide, foreign-born registered nurses (RNs) account for 16 percent of RN jobs and the numbers are higher in California (37%), Nevada (34%), New Jersey (32%), and Florida and the District of Columbia (29%).
While a Gallup Polle in 2023 points out that Americans consistently rate nursing as the most trusted profession, a State Department decision to halt access to green cards for foreign workers will exacerbate a shortage of nurses that was only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. “American hospitals, particularly those serving rural populations, would have collapsed long ago without the contributions of international nurses," notes registered nurse Patty Jeffrey, president of the American Association of International Healthcare Recruitment. The consulting giant McKinsey & Co has predicted that the U.S. will experience a shortage of 200,000 to 450,000 nurses by 2025.
Our family was beyond fortunate in being able to rely on the kind, generous and truly loving care Evelyn and her family of recent arrivals provided to Mrs. Flynn.
We will not – at least not right now – offer solutions to the immigration problems at America’s borders. But we have a response to our nation’s professional immigrant-haters – most of whom are politicos or influenced and affected (infected?) by politicos concerned with keeping themselves in office (and avoiding being “primaried”).
Put bluntly: The next time you hear someone complaining about immigrants – documented or otherwise, ask yourself and them “Who’s going to do the back-breakingly cruel work of tarring your roof, rebuilding your home destroyed by hurricanes and tornadoes, repaving our highways destroyed by floods; who will harvest your corn, slaughter and prepare your chickens, butcher hogs and cattle for your dinners? If you experience a major heart attack or cerebral aneurism, who’s going to operate and save your life?
“Who will wipe your ass when you’re no longer able to?”