Immigrat workers - legal and otherwise- protect Americans against recession

 How immigrant workers in US have helped boost job growth and stave off a recession. By Paul Wiseman, Gisela Salomon in Washington DC and Christopher Rugaber in Miami. Echo report published in WABI5 newsletter website, in Bangor, Maine. 

Every day we are bombarded with stories of immigration

Immigration is one of the most contentious topics of debate in Maine. Controversy aside, immigration is also America's oldest tradition, and along with religious tolerance, what our nation was built upon.

Reported in AP and published in WABI5, Bangor ME- Millions of jobs that new immigrants have been filling in the United States appear to solve a riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year: How has the U.S. economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates — normally a recipe for a recession.

MIAMI, Fl (AP) — Having fled economic and political chaos in Venezuela, Luisana Silva now loads carpets for a South Carolina rug company. She earns enough to pay rent, buy groceries, gas up her car — and send money home to her parents.

Reaching the United States was a harrowing ordeal. Silva, 25, her husband and their then-7-year-old daughter braved the treacherous jungles of Panama's Darien Gap, traveled the length of Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande and then turned themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol in Brownsville, Texas. Seeking asylum, they received a work permit last year and found jobs in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

“My plan is to help my family that much need the money and to grow economically here,” Silva said.

Her story amounts to far more than one family’s arduous quest for a better life. The millions of jobs that Silva and other new immigrant arrivals have been filling in the United States appear to solve a riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year: How has the economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to fight inflation — normally a recipe for a recession?

Increasingly, the answer appears to be immigrants — whether living in the United States legally or not. The influx of foreign-born adults vastly raised the supply of available workers after a U.S. labor shortage had left many companies unable to fill jobs.

More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings. The availability of immigrant workers eased the pressure on companies to sharply raise wages and to then pass on their higher labor costs to their customers via higher prices that feed inflation. Though U.S. inflation remains elevated, it has plummeted from its levels of two years ago.

“There’s been something of a mystery — how are we continuing to get such extraordinary strong job growth with inflation still continuing to come down?’’ said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “The immigration numbers being higher than what we had thought — that really does pretty much solve that puzzle.’’

While helping fuel economic growth, immigrants also lie at the heart of an incendiary election-year debate over the control of the nation's Southern border. In his bid to return to the White House, Donald Trump has attacked migrants in often-degrading terms, characterizing them as dangerous criminals who are "poisoning the blood" of America and frequently invoking falsehoods about migration. Trump has vowed to finish building a border wall and to launch the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history." Whether he or President Joe Biden wins the election could determine whether the influx of immigrants, and their key role in propelling the economy, will endure.

The boom in immigration caught almost everyone by surprise. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that net immigration — arrivals minus departures — would equal about 1 million in 2023. The actual number, the CBO said in a January update, was more than triple that estimate: 3.3 million.

Thousands of employers desperately needed the new arrivals. The economy — and consumer spending — had roared back from the pandemic recession. Companies were struggling to hire enough workers to keep up with customer orders.

The problem was compounded by demographic changes: The number of native-born Americans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — was dropping because so many of them had aged out of that category and were nearing or entering retirement. This group's numbers have shrunk by 770,000 since February 2020, just before COVID-19 slammed the economy.

Filling the gap has been a wave of immigrants. Over the past four years, the number of prime-age workers who either have a job or are looking for one has surged by 2.8 million. And nearly all those new labor force entrants — 2.7 million, or 96% of them — were born outside the United States. Immigrants last year accounted for a record 18.6% of the labor force, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of government data.

“If you want to boost the economy," he said, “it definitely needs to have more immigrants coming out to this country.”

Or consider the workforce of the Flood Brothers farm in Maine’s “dairy capital’’ of Clinton. Foreign-born workers make up fully half the farm's staff of nearly 50, feeding the cows, tending crops and helping collect the milk — 18,000 gallons each day.

“We cannot do it without them," said Jenni Tilton-Flood, a partner in the operation.

For every unemployed person in Maine, after all, there are two job openings, on average.And employers welcomed the help.

Consider Jan Gautam, CEO of the lodging company Interessant Hotels & Resort Management in Orlando, Florida, who said he can’t find American-born workers to take jobs cleaning rooms and doing laundry in his 44 hotels. Of Interessant’s 3,500 workers, he said, 85% are immigrants.

“Without employees, you are broken," said Gautam, himself an immigrant from India who started working in restaurants as a dishwasher and now owns his own company.

“We would not have an economy, in Maine or in the U.S. if we did not have highly skilled labor that comes from outside of this country,” Tilton-Flood said in a phone interview with The Associated Press from her farm.

“Without immigrants — both new asylum-seekers as well as our long-term immigrant contributors — we would not be able to do the work that we do," she said. "Every single thing that affects the American economy is driven by and will only be saved by accepting immigrant labor.”

A study by Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, economists at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, has concluded that over the past two years, new immigrants raised the economy’s supply of workers and allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating and accelerating inflation.

In the past, economists typically estimated that America's employers could add no more than 60,000 to 100,000 jobs a month without overheating the economy and igniting inflation. But when Edelberg and Watson included the immigration surge in their calculations, they found that monthly job growth could be roughly twice as high this year — 160,000 to 200,000 — without exerting upward pressure on inflation.

"There are significantly more people working in the country," Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week in a speech at Stanford University. Largely because of the immigrant influx, Powell said, "it's a bigger economy but not a tighter one. Really an unexpected and an unusual thing.''

Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden's immigration policy over the surge in migrants at the Southern border. Only about 27% of the 3.3 million foreigners who entered the United States last year did so through as “lawful permanent residents’’ or on temporary visas, according to Edelberg and Watson's analysis. The rest — 2.4 million — either came illegally, overstayed their visas, are awaiting immigration court proceedings or are on a parole program that lets them stay temporarily and sometimes work in the country.

“So there you have it,’’ Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director who is president of the conservative American Action Forum, wrote in February. “The way to solve an inflation crisis is to endure an immigration crisis."

Many economists suggest that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy in several ways. (1) They take generally undesirable, low-paying but essential jobs that most U.S.-born Americans won’t, like caring for children, the sick and the elderly. (2) And they can boost the country’s innovation and productivity because they are more likely to start their own businesses and obtain patents.

Ernie Tedeschi, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University's Psaros Center and a former Biden economic adviser, calculates that the burst of immigration has accounted for about a fifth of the economy's growth over the past four years.

Critics counter that a surge in immigration can force down pay, particularly for low-income workers, a category that often includes immigrants who have lived in the United States longer. Last month, in the most recent economic report of the president, Biden's advisers acknowledged that "immigration may place downward pressure on the wages of some low-paid workers" but added that most studies show that the impact on the wages of the U.S.-born is "small."

Even Edelberg notes that an unexpected wave of immigrants, like the recent one, can overwhelm state and local governments and saddle them with burdensome costs. A more orderly immigration system, she said, would help.

The recent surge “is a somewhat disruptive way of increasing immigration in the United States,” Edelberg said. “I don’t think anybody would have sat down and said: ‘Let’s create optimal immigration policy,' and this is what they would come up with."

Holtz-Eakin argued that an immigration cutoff of the kind Trump has vowed to impose, if elected, would result in “much, much slower labor force growth and a return to the sharp tradeoff’’ between containing inflation and maintaining economic growth that the United States has so far managed to avoid.

For now, millions of job vacancies are being filled by immigrants like Mariel Marrero. A political opponent of Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, Marrero, 32, fled her homeland in 2016 after receiving death threats. She lived in Panama and El Salvador before crossing the U.S. border and applying for asylum.

Her case pending, she received authorization to work in the United States last July. Marrero, who used to work in the archives of the Venezuelan Congress in Caracas, found work selling telephones and then as a sales clerk at a convenience store owned by Venezuelan immigrants.

At first, she lived for free at the house of an uncle. But now she earns enough to pay rent on a two-bedroom house she shares with three other Venezuelans in Doral, Florida, a Miami suburb with a large Venezuelan community. After rent, food, electricity and gasoline, she has enough left over to send $200 a month to her family in Venezuela.

“One hundred percent — this country gives you opportunities,’’ she said.

Marrero has her own American dream: “I imagine having my own company, my house, helping my family in a more comfortable way.”

Consequences: Fallout from Congressional support of AHCA

Congressman Bruce Poliquin - alert!

Two news reports from Maine's Second District

What was Congressman Poliquin thinking?  Obviously, when he voted to support the GOP supported AHCA, he was not thinking about his Second District constituents, in Maine.

Americans, including Maine's Second District constituents, warned Congressman Bruce Poliquin about the disastrous consequences of his vote to support the American Health Care Act (AHCA) in the House of Representatives.  

Now, the apparent consequences of Poliquin's wrong minded vote has come home to roost.  Health facilities in Maine's second district are feeling the pain. My prediction wasn't psychic, but based on rationale. You can't risk cutting patients access to health care and expect providers to afford paying for the delivery of care.  

LEWISTON, Me- Jeff Brickman, president and chief executive officer of Central Maine Healthcare, said the closing of an urgent care facility in Auburn and a clinic in Mechanic Falls is part of an overall cost-reduction effort to put the health system on a more sustainable financial footing.

Central Maine Healthcare, an integrated health system that includes Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, Bridgton Hospital and Rumford Hospital, is closing facilities in Auburn and Mechanic Falls in a cost-cutting step that will eliminate 31 jobs.

The Lewiston Sun Journal reported that CMHC will close an urgent care facility in Auburn in about a month and a clinic in Mechanic Falls in September as part of its overall effort to reduce costs. Both facilities, the newspaper reported, were losing money.

CMHC CEO Jeff Brickman told the newspaper the job reductions — which include nine physicians — would reduce the health system's expenses by 8% to 10%.

Brickman became president and CEO of CMHC last September, replacing Peter E. Chalke, who had announced his retirement earlier in the year.

Three months later, Brickman hired Illinois-based consulting firm Kaufman Hall to develop a plan for the hospital system's future in the face of a significant budgetary shortfall in 2016, telling the Sun Journal, at that time, that he was working diligently "to make sure that we can sustain this organization for the long term."

CMHC is one of Androscoggin County's largest employers, with about 4,200 employees at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, hospitals in Rumford and Bridgton, the Dempsey Center, the Central Maine Heart and Vascular Institute and medical practices throughout central, western and mid-coast Maine.

Moody's downgrades Eastern Maine Health Services (EMHS), bond rating

Moody's Investor Services downgraded the credit rating of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, to "Ba1", with a negative outlook.

Brewer-based EMHS, an integrated health delivery system with a workforce of more than 12,000 and nine hospitals throughout the state, including Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor and numerous smaller rural hospitals, issued the following statement Wednesday about the downgrade:

"Moody's informed EMHS earlier this year that a downgrade from Baa3 was being considered. Last month, EMHS senior leadership met with representatives of Moody's in New York and discussed the system's improved financial performance while also revealing a solid plan for continued improvement.

"These are challenging times for healthcare providers, both in Maine and throughout our nation. EMHS' proactive five-year strategy is both innovative and forward-thinking. EMHS is building an enterprise-wide electronic medical records system, organizing our more than a thousand employed providers into a single medical group, and continuing to advance our successful population health strategy. EMHS also continues to optimize the performance of our newest member hospitals, which were brought into the system experiencing multiple years of financial distress. Time and hard decisions have led to improved operations and we expect that trend will continue. EMHS believes that these initiatives are essential to the future of a high-performing healthcare organization serving the state of Maine. EMHS leadership remains confident in our ability to deliver increasingly positive outcomes in the months and years ahead.

"While EMHS is disappointed with Moody's decision, it will not affect care delivery, business operations, or our ongoing focus on performance improvement. Additionally, while EMHS has no plans to enter the bond market for any additional debt for the foreseeable future, we look forward to revisiting our rating with Moody's next year."

Congressman Bruce Poliquin, Maine's Second District

Congressman Poliquin must stop hiding from his wrong minded AHCA vote and express outrage at the closing of Central Maine Health Care's urgent care access. Moreover, there must be a supportive statement from Congressman Poliquin, to counter the downgraded Moody's rating. Unfortunately, neither of these responses has been forthcoming, thus far.

Ethics in News Journalism - Perhaps a Small Step in Maine

http://www.mpbn.net/News/MPBNNews/tabid/1159/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3762/ItemId/24832/Default.aspx

I've been suspicious about media manipulation during this past 2012  Presidential election.  Now, two news journalists resigned on the air to protest management interference in their work.

This story from Bangor Maine Channel 7, in my opinion, might just  be a small step to expose a much wider ethical problem in news reporting.

Media manipulation is becoming even more troublesome, as the struggle to maintain market share among media outlets is probably at cut throat status.  News followers switch their media loyalties faster than we sort through our daily junk mail.  Pressure to retain viewers and followers are intense.  Americans are likely drawn to media where the news favors their personal points of view. But, this has proven to be deceptive, as Fox News led their viewers to falsely believe Governor Mitt Romney was a pre-destined winner of the Presidential 2012 campaign.  This was certainly misleading, if not a pack of downright lies. Nonetheless, the myth that Romney would defeat the incumbent President Obama kept faithful conservative viewers bonded to Fox News anchors.

Of course, it's not a journalist's job to provide just the news people want to read. That's called "entertainment news".  Rather, news journalists are supposed to report, objectively, about what they observe, rather than what followers may want to know, especially at the expense of truth.

Perhaps, the story reported by Maine Public Broadcasting News (MPBN) is a harbinger for other ethical journalists who find the troubling trend toward "entertainment news" to  be completely irresponsible!  

As reported at link above:
"Last night, two television anchors at WVII Channel 7 in Bangor stunned audiences by tendering their resignations live on air. News Director Cindy Michaels and Executive Producer Tony Consiglio had co-anchored the evening newscast on ABC 7 for more than six years. Although neither has pointed to any specific incidents, Michaels and Consiglio both say that the station's managers have been exercising undue influence over news content. But the station's manager disagrees. Meanwhile, as Jennifer Mitchell reports, independent observers are watching to see what comes of it all."

Perhaps, this a small step in a trend toward ethics in news journalism?  I wish them all the best! Nevertheless, I suspect the issues that drove this on air resignation are more widespread than media followers realize.