comprehensive, fixing our legal immigration system and protecting Dreamers: The Southern Baptist Ethics Coalition, Russell Moore from there; the Mormon church; the Pope; President Bush; first President Bush; members of the Washington state delegation like [Republican] Congressman [Dave] Reichert; companies like Caterpillar, Boeing, Walmart. This is something that has incredibly broad support, so I just reject the idea entirely that that’s what this is.
If you want to talk specifically about the role that having an immigrant workforce plays in the economy, every single economic study will show you that increasing the number of high-skilled immigrants coming to the United States not only creates more jobs for native-born Americans, but raises the wages of native-born Americans.
For every H-1B visa, that creates a job for 1.8 native-born Americans. For every high-skilled immigrant who graduates, gets a green card from an American university with a master’s in a STEM field or a PhD in a STEM field, will create between 2.6 and 5.2 jobs for a native-born American.
This is an incredible economic multiplier for our country. And if we want to lead the economy, if we want to be the leading nation for the next 100 years like we have been for the last 100 years, there’s nothing more important that we can do than have a fixed and working immigration system.
X: There’s a large part of the country that voted for anti-immigrant rhetoric and doesn’t believe those statistics—
TS: Can I push back on that for a second? I think that assuming why people voted if they voted for a candidate, teasing out the particular policies that they voted for, is hard. Do I think that everybody shares my worldview that a growing economy and these things are good for everybody? I don’t. But there isn’t an economic argument that says the economy is zero-sum. Politicians can pretend it is, but you can’t find an economist who’s willing to say that cutting legal immigration in half would be good for the economy.
X: What are you doing to convince people who aren’t already convinced of this?
TS: People make mistakes in having these conversations. I think you’ve got to explain to people about why this is good for them.
Washington state is a fantastic example. Washington state’s ability to import talent from around the world—show me a city that has grown more [than Seattle], by saying, “Hey, we can bring people in who can help us innovate here.”
The economic multiplier effect for Washington state—whether it’s Amazon, whether it’s having the biggest companies and the smallest startups in the world all benefitting from that—but everybody else is benefitting from that too. There’s other issues—there’s housing costs, there’s things like that. But the state’s booming because of it. Wages have gone up because of it. The reason that you can pay people more in the service sector is because you have a more vibrant economy with more money coming in, in the tech sector.
The conservative argument that a rising tide lifts all ships is one that we’ve heard Republicans make for a long time. I’m not a Republican, but I think you can look at it and see here, growth creates more businesses, growth creates more opportunities, it puts more dollars back into the system, and that has an incredible economic multiplier effect here.
I’m from St. Louis and we would kill to get that second Amazon headquarters there, not because it gets people moving in there, but because people who don’t work anywhere near Amazon are going to benefit hugely from it, right?
Growth brings up everyone and that’s what we should be focused on here. That’s also why we’ve seen over the last five and 10 years, all these old Rust Belt cities are now competing to be the most immigrant-friendly cities in America. Places like Dayton, Ohio; St. Louis; and Milwaukee, are all sitting around saying, “How can we attract talent from around the world?” They want to be more like Seattle. They want to be growing. It’s good for everybody.
X: What do you make of the uptick in interest that Canadian tech companies are seeing from job applicants from around the world, and from the U.S.?
TS: It means that the United States isn’t going to win the war for talent by default anymore. It means that places like Canada that are saying “we want to be in the business of attracting the best and the brightest from around the world”—they’re running aggressive programs to do that while the United States is sending some very mixed messages, would be the diplomatic way to say it. And I’m very concerned about that as an American. I want us to continue to be the hub for the best and the brightest.
The other part of this is, it’s not just Canada being aggressive and being a good place, it’s a lot of other places in the world where it used to be really impossible to be an entrepreneur, you can do it now. France is a perfect example. France was not exactly a pro-business environment for the last 100 years or so, and yet today you have somebody who runs the country who is aggressively marketing France as a nation of entrepreneurs and wants to attract more entrepreneurs. The same thing is true in China. The same thing is true in India.
X: What message do you plan to deliver to the tech industry here in Washington state?
TS: It is a lot of what we talked about. The two things I would add: No. 1, just giving a broad overview of immigration policy from a workforce perspective and how we view it in Washington, and the second, just kind of advocacy 101—how to engage with members of Congress, how to have these conversations.
X: Are you finding more demand from individuals and companies in the tech industry for that kind of training?
TS: Yes. People are fired up and they want to know where to plug in and have these conversations.
Photo credit: An exhibit at Ellis Island, photo by Colin Howley via Flickr used under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license.
