Immigration Into America Has Made It The World Power It Is Today

As in every election, hot topic political issues tend to come up which split people’s ideas about what policies we want our future leader to work on. However this election specifically seems to have a much larger focus on immigration and immigration policy. Not only in the US, but with events like the Syrian refugee crisis going on in Europe, immigration is heavily being debated world wide. As economies also seem to get worse around the world, and unemployment rates increasing, many are turning to more extreme ideas and adopting policies with xenophobic ideals. Especially in the US where Trump is running his immigration campaign on deportation and exclusion of immigrants from American society, I think it is important to look at our history and see how immigrants have helped turn America into the world power it is today. I want to give a few examples of how both unskilled and skilled immigrant laborers helped America develop into an industrial and military power.

Chinese “Coolies” And The Transcontinental Railroad

In the mid 1860s, America, still a fledgling country in the eyes of the world , was gearing up to industrialize the country in the wake of a massive civil war that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. In an attempt to catch up to England, which at the time was still a huge economic force to be reckoned with, America decided to lay down the foundation for a transcontinental railroad that would help populate various parts of the country and increase economic production. However by the time construction was meant to start, there was a problem. The companies that had planned to construct the railroad, lacked a sufficient labor supply to get it done. Even the newly free slaves knew what types of conditions they would endure if they chose to work on the railroads and many chose to pursue other work.

In an attempt to find a sufficient labor supply, Chinese “coolies”, or unskilled workers, were contracted to come to America, usually under deceptive circumstances and employed to work on the railroads. The Chinese were often tricked into coming with lies of how much income they would be making or how great the job would be and when they arrived in America were often treated as disgusting by other Americans. Even if they wanted to go home, they couldn’t and were stuck in America undertaking a unthinkable job, no other American wanted to do. It was basically indentured servitude with Chinese workers making near nothing despite being promised more by contractors in China. Many of these Chinese workers died due to the grueling labor conditions and overwork. However without them the transcontinental railroad would not have been finished in the time it was and America would have fallen behind in the race to industrialize.

German Immigrants in WWII

There is a saying among historians as to why we were able to win the war against Germany, “We won the war because our German Scientists were better than their German scientists”. As it became quite clear in the 1930s that Germany was planning on working towards strengthening its military, cracking down on personal freedoms and entering another war, many Germans sought to flee the country and in some cases America took them in. Although these people were immigrants, they were usually highly educated and massive assets to the scientific community in the US. Most notably , Albert Einstein who came in 1933 to escape the escalating problems in Europe.

More importantly, after the war, many ex Nazi scientists immigrated to the United States to help further improve the technology in the aerospace industry, which would ultimately help America win the Space race to the moon. Specifically Wernher Von Braun, who created the V-2 rocket for the Germans was brought over and his direct work helped created the Saturn V rocket for the US. There are a plethora of other cases of famous German immigrants who came and made our aerospace industry the best in the world at the time. Without these German Immigrants who knows if we would have been as successful or advanced at the time.

Indian Brain Drain

The famous Indian brain drain is a form of immigration that not only helped put Sillicon Valley on the map, but has continued to help keep America as a prosperous economic power for the last 100 years. A brain drain, is the idea where a more advanced country immigrates the smartest and brightest people from a lower quality of life country and gives them jobs and educations in the hopes that they will settle and provide value in the future. Although America does this with almost every third world country on the planet, India is notorious for being brain drained over the past 50 years. Intelligent Indians are usually sought after, given high paying jobs or research opportunities that wouldn’t be available in India and come to the US to pursue them. In the early days of computers and Silicon Valley , the Indian brain drain brought some of the smartest engineers and programmers to the United States, who would help make prototypes and advance the industry years into the future. Competitive companies like Intel sought after employing these newly immigrated Indians and used them to grow Silicon Valley into the economic beast it is today.

It is no surprise that in many of the tech fields you see Indians with high level positions or startups with second generation Indian children of the initial brain drain wave. The level of success the brain drain has give America can basically be summed up with this quote by Sunainaa Chadna from firstpost “The biggest surprise - or should I say shock - is that Indians are dominating immigrant entrepreneurship. Indians now outnumber the next 7 immigrant groups combined. Our research has shown that they start 32.4 percent of all immigrant-founded startups in the US," Neesha Bapat, lead researcher, Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University, and co-author of the report, said.” There is little doubt that without the Indian brain drain we as a country would be as competitive in the information technology field as we are today.

Todays Immigration And Conclusion

To finish this article off I just want to talk a little bit about bringing unskilled workers to America and how it still benefits you in an economic sense. The majority of the jobs that these immigrants are taking are low skilled jobs that pay under minimum wage because they are off the books and eventually are going to get replaced by machines in the near future. The jobs they are doing at low costs are benefiting most Americans daily by keeping the cost of their products cheaper and allow a higher quality of life. We as a country specialize in technology, information and output that requires higher education. Creating jobs in manufacturing for the sake of creating jobs isn’t how the free market works. We as a country are better off outsourcing and using immigrants to do undesirable work because we as consumers reap the rewards.

So if you are saying they are taking your job, your job isn’t going to be there in the future anyway or not. What you need to do is go back and get further training or education so that you can become an asset in the labor force. Stopping illegal immigration needs to be done, but to go to the level of deporting people who have been here and established their lives here already is inhumane. A better approach would be to give them a chance to bring them into the system so they can pay taxes and if they choose not to do this, then they can be eligible for deportation. Immigration has made our country competitive and the world power it is today and to stop partaking in it would be foolish.

-Calaber24p