Tell Donald Trump That Immigrants Are Making Michigan Great Again: New at Reason

Michigan is the only state to lose population in the 2000s, but it’s rebounded in large part thanks to immigrants.

J.D. Tuccille writes:

But it’s not just bodies that new arrivals contribute to Michigan—it’s prosperity, too. While 7 percent of the state’s population was born abroad, new arrivals make up 8.3 percent of entrepreneurs, who have started new businesses that create jobs instead of taking them from Trump supporters. Whether they’re making Michigan’s economy great again is an open question, but immigrants are making it a damned sight better than it would be in their absence.

How much better? Immigrants earned 7.7 percent of all income ($19.6 billion) generated by Michiganders in 2014, says the report.

And yeah, immigrants are taking jobs that many Americans don’t want, though not always in the ways that we might expect. At a time when government and industry leaders complain that not enough Americans show interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), immigrants represent 15 percent of all STEM workers in Michigan—more than double their share of the population. Their ranks actually include one in four computer system designers.

View this article.