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Free Flow
The economic imperative for restoring immigration and labor movement in the wake of COVID-19
As many western industrial nations drifted towards protectionism if not outright nationalism in the last decade, an already constrictive environment had developed for the free movement of the labor market. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, gave such nations just the hammer they needed to further nail immigration constraints into place.
COVID-19 triggered mass unemployment globally with The Brookings Institute estimating that approximately 11.9 percent of workers were out of a job across the 20 countries they studied. That number reached almost 15 percent for the United States. And early this year, the IMF forecast that the global economy would contract by 3 percent in 2020, a worse contraction than we saw as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. But there’s little indication these immigration restrictions have helped any of the players in the global economy resolve their economic woes. Companies, for example, which have previously relied on mobile immigrant workers have themselves been stricken immobile.
Now, rather than retreating further into protectionism, the world’s economies must embrace immigration as a means to rebuilding their economies. To ensure a speedy economic recovery, the United States, in particular, should reverse its abandonment of the immigrant workforce and play a prominent role in restoring the movement of labor in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
Immigrant Contributions During COVID-19
It’s worth noting that this constriction upon international labor movement continued even as immigrants — both documented and undocumented — often functioned as essential workers during COVID-19, supporting the economies of these same nations. In the United States, 78 percent of undocumented immigrant workers are employed in essential jobs during the pandemic. Immigrants are also 5 percent less likely to be working from home. Consequently, the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact upon immigrant communities. Immigrants are more likely to be working in ERs, ICUs, long term care facilities where they may be exposed to COVID-19. For example, they make up over 40 percent of the long-term care workers in some of the states hit heaviest…
