Utahns must not let the increasingly hostile dialog of national politics poison their historic attitude of welcoming immigrants to our state.
Utah was founded by religious and political refugees. Its predominant faith welcomes people of all races and nations. Even though Utah is overwhelmingly Republican, in recent years our elected leaders have stood against the national party’s increasing hostility to immigration.
But this year so much of the Republican Party’s national campaign is based on an open and unjustified hatred of people from other nations, going as far as to knowingly accuse legal migrants of being here illegally and to spread false stories about American towns lost to pet-eating and machine gun-carrying foreigners.
Spreading lies about any group of human beings doesn’t help to solve our problems. It just increases hostility, foments bad feelings and violence, divides communities and destroys trust.
Too much of that is spilling over into Utah politics.
Gov. Spencer Cox, like Gov. Gary Herbert before him, had personified the welcoming Utah attitude, with Cox going so far as to call on the paralyzed federal government to allow Utah to sponsor legal immigrants to add to our stretched labor pool.
But this year, with MAGA xenophobia dominating Republican politics, Cox has sadly shifted toward the GOP’s build-the-wall camp, even sending a detail of Utah National Guard soldiers to show the flag at the Texas-Mexico border.
We saw how the poison of national politics has filtered down to Utah recently when a member of the Legislature posted a video of a local Muslim observance on social media and complained that he’d never seen such a thing, “in the small town of Taylorsville Utah.” State Rep. Trevor Lee later added, “Not a single American flag in sight.”
Small town? Taylorsville is a city of 60,000 people, very much part of a Salt Lake City metropolis of more than 1 million. American flags? The observance, an annual parade to honor the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, happens all over the world and had nothing to do with the U.S. or any other nation.
The online response was a clash of Islamophobia on one side and criticism from those who thought that Lee’s original post was an attack on Muslims. Even if that’s not how Lee meant it, the social media flare-up was just another example of how our political leaders are able to add more heat, but no light, to the subject.
The national Republican wish to keep pounding the controversy, rather than working to solve it, blocked the best chance for a congressional compromise we’ve had in the last 30 years. Congress was ready to pass, and President Joe Biden to sign, a border security bill. But that blew up when Donald Trump called on Republicans in Congress to block it rather than give Democrats a success to run on.
America does have a problem with too many migrants crossing our borders illegally. It puts social and financial strain on border areas and other places where those in search of a better life congregate.
But our economy also depends on the labor, the energy and entrepreneurial spirit of newcomers — legal and otherwise. It always has. It always will.
Research published by the American Immigration Council shows that Utah’s nearly 300,000 foreign-born residents paid $2.5 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022 and had $8.3 billion in spending power. They start businesses and employ workers at higher rates than native-born Americans and pick up the labor slack in sectors of the economy from construction to health care to hospitality.
The argument that those here illegally — estimates run at around 90,000 to 100,000 in Utah — don’t pay taxes is false.
Even if they aren’t on the books the way they should be, they have taxes withheld from their wages, pay property taxes as owners or through their landlords, and, like all of us, can’t avoid paying sales tax every time they buy something. In 2022, estimates put those tax revenues at something north of $309 million in Utah.
For their pains, undocumented workers live and pay taxes in a country where they aren’t eligible for Social Security payments, Medicaid or Medicare or other social and support programs. If anything, the money undocumented workers pay into the Social Security Trust Fund helps to keep it solvent.
Solving the illegal migration problem requires cleaning up our legal immigration system. We need the workers. We also need to enforce our laws. Creating and managing a system that attracts and monitors the flow of immigrants through legal channels is key to reducing the flow of illegal migration and the strain it puts on our communities.
None of that will happen in a political atmosphere of falsehood and hostility.
Utah had been a bright light of hope for our nation to solve this problem reasonably and humanely. It could be again, if our leaders measure up to our history.
