Kathryn Anne Edwards

for things like paid family leave, that if you maintain a worker in the economy, you've made the economy larger.

Immigrants are people.

It's not as if the labor market discerns from them in the way that policymakers tend to when they're trying to drum up nativism.

If it's a person doing a job, it's not as if the economy is like, nope, this is a separate person or this is a different kind of worker.

It is a worker, they're doing a job, they add to the economy.

Immigrants rarely come as children.

And they rarely come as the elderly.

Most immigrants come in the prime age of their working years to earn money here.

And immigrants have, given their age distribution, a relatively high labor force participation rate.

So when we lose immigrants, we're not necessarily losing any random person.

We're losing people who are highly attached to the labor force, so we're losing workers, which means the way that you think about immigrants

say, how childcare would improve the economy is that it has a similar kind of through line for immigration.

More workers equals bigger economy.

Lower the number of workers equals lower economy.

What a lot of anti-immigrants will, policymakers and shills will say is that they're taking jobs.

That rests on the notion that there are a fixed number of jobs in our economy and it's slotted to whoever's there.

We're not communist.

It doesn't work like that.

We're a market-based economy.

The market is a function of the people in it, not what the government dictates or how those jobs are allocated.