American has documented the need for immigrants to support labor needs, now as much as ever!

Immigrants and refugees improve America!  

Here's how they do it in Michigan!

Echo opinion published by John Hiner in MichiganLive

Every story is ultimately a people story, no matter how complex the topic may be. And immigration and migrant labor in the United States is as dense, controversial and multifaceted as topics come.

But the topic comes alive when you meet the worker who mowed the lawn at a Mackinac Island hotel with tears in his eyes, two days after his mother had died in Jamaica.

Or the Syrian refugee who owns an assessing business in southeast Michigan, but still carries a toilet brush to school speaking engagements to illustrate what she had to do to get established in America.

Crossing the international bridge between Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, May 1937.  America has documented the need for immigrants to support labor needs. 

Or the Mexican young adults whose pursuit of the American dream means staying here to build a life years after their parents were deported.

“We need the real personal stories, because that’s what drives it home for everyone – to see yourself in someone else and to walk in their shoes,” said Lindsay Moore, an MLive reporter who joined colleague Malachi Barrett over the past two weeks in publishing a project that dives deep into the sprawling story of migrant labor.

“There’s a lot of research, there’s a lot of data, and there are a lot of experts willing to talk about this,” Moore said. “But a lot of it was finding people and just being there, being present.”

For Moore, that meant two trips this summer to Mackinac Island, whose businesses rely heavily on a lottery for a limited number of work visas for foreign workers to take service jobs that Americans aren’t willing to do.

For Barrett, that meant interviews with farmers, who have a critical need for migrant labor, as well as trips to southeast Michigan, which has a rich immigrant history and still relies on it to fill sectors ranging from retail to high-tech jobs.

On all those trips, our reporters sought out real people with real stories that illustrate what is at stake – for our country, and for the workers themselves.

“They’re willing to give whatever they’ve got, because they know how good the opportunity is,” Moore said.

The politics of immigration are fraught with contention, and that has touched every part of American culture and community for years: Political, social, economic, business and industry. Everything about it seems tangled in debate and bureaucracy.

But Barrett and Moore’s project cuts through that to show clearly that there is a shortage of labor in general, there are lots of jobs that Americans don’t want to take, and that domestic employers are desperate for changes to the system in order to open the flow of foreign workers.

“Immigrants are more likely to be business owners, they’re more likely to go to college,” Barrett said. “Michigan has long history of bringing in people from outside its borders to fill the gaps in the labor force. Everything from cherries to electric vehicles and everything in between is built on the backs of immigrant labor.”

And in case you think the topic is too complicated or doesn’t affect your day-to-day life, consider the restaurants that close early – or entirely – in your towns because they cannot find workers. Or note the price of produce going up at the grocery store. Or at a macro scale, that Michigan is losing political clout.

“Michigan lost a seat in Congress because our population gains haven’t kept up with the rest of the country,” Barrett said. “Without the stream of immigrants that we have had, Michigan would have actually declined in population.”

That explains why MLive would write these stories: It’s our job to bring context and meaning to important topics and societal shifts. But on this immigrant worker package, Barrett and Moore showed that how we tell the stories is just as important.

“I think we’ve shown through data and through personal stories that this is the future of what our labor force is going to look like,” Moore said. “You can ignore immigration policy because you think it doesn’t affect you, but you can’t escape this.