How Deportations Will Hurt Milwaukee

Primitivo Torres at Day Without Latinx and Immigrants March. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Across America, the secret sauce for cities looking to grow their populations and economy has been simple: embrace immigration.

As birthrates for the native population have declined and the percent of senior citizens has grown, an influx of immigrants has become the only way to maintain or grow the population, as a forecast by the Congressional Budget Office shows.

Immigrants have also become the main source of new workers. That can be important in rural areas as well: undocumented workers do 70% of the work on diary farms in Wisconsin, for instance.

But most immigrants have settled in cities. As a 2021 study by the Brookings Institution found, “The cities with the fastest growing immigrant populations over the period 2010 to 2019 were all medium-sized cities with thriving economies, led by Charleston (SC), Des Moines (IA), Louisville (KY), Columbus (OH), and Nashville (TN). In many of these cases, immigrants reversed long-standing population declines. More importantly, immigrants’ high rates of entrepreneurship and labor force participation helped boost local economies that had been stagnant for decades.”

This has led to efforts by cities to attract more immigrants. Take St. Louis, which by the early 2010s had greatly declined: the city had lost more than half its population since the 1950s, dropping to 319,000 in 2010 and continuing to shrink after this, as the New York Times reported. In a 2012 study, city leaders identified their biggest problem: they were not getting their fair share of immigrants. And so St. Louis began making efforts to change this and in 2023 alone “the region added 30,000 foreign-born residents, amounting to a 23.2 percent increase in the immigrant population.”

This pro-immigration approach also worked for other metropolitan areas losing population, like Detroit and Philadelphia, which got started around the same time as St. Louis, the story noted.

Milwaukee has never attracted as much immigration as most cities. In 2022, fewer than 8% of those living in metro Milwaukee were born outside the U.S. compared to about 14% of Americans nationally, according to Marquette University Law School Research Fellow John Johnson.

Still, the impact of immigrants and their offspring on Milwaukee has been clear for a long time. A 2016 study by the UW-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development looked at just the impact of Hispanic residents, which accounted for nearly all the net population growth in the city of Milwaukee over the prior quarter century. Milwaukee’s population declined from 628,088 in 1990 to just over 600,000 in 2014, but would have dropped to about 500,000 without the growth in the Hispanic population of 100,000 people. More than 27% of that Hispanic growth came from immigrants, the study noted.

“We have maintained our population in the city primarily because of the growth of the Hispanic population,” then-Mayor Tom Barrett noted in an Urban Milwaukee story.

They also boosted new business. The study found the number of Hispanic-owned businesses in metro Milwaukee grew from 2,296 to 4,185 between 2007 and 2012, an 82% increase, “the 10th highest rate of growth in Latino business ownership among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas.”

Johnson’s 2023 analysis of Census Bureau statistics offers a more current and complete portrait, finding that roughly 119,000 immigrants live in the four-county Milwaukee metropolitan area. About 46,000 are from Latin American countries, with most from Mexico. About 44,000 are immigrants from Asian countries, led by India.

Those 119,000 immigrants provide a huge workforce for metro Milwaukee. Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has noted the contribution of immigrants to the local economy and points to their work in agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism. “They are contributing significantly to our community,” he noted in an interview on WAUK radio. “Disrupting their lives would harm the city’s economy.”

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley expressed similar sentiments in comments to Urban Milwaukee: “We stand in solidarity with Milwaukee’s immigrant and diverse communities who keep our economy moving and our neighborhoods vibrant,” he said.

A 2022 study by The George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative found that metro areas and counties with relatively large immigrant population perform better than other places in household incomes, innovation, productivity, startup businesses and “Foodie culture and other measures of cultural appeal.” Immigrants also commit far fewer crimes on average than other Americans, studies have found.

In Wisconsin, there are now over 11,000 immigrant entrepreneurs. These immigrant-owned businesses generated nearly a quarter-billion dollars in revenue.

In short, the policy pushed by President Donald Trump, to have mass deportations of immigrants, would be tremendously destructive to the economy of Wisconsin, particularly the city and metro area of Milwaukee, deporting countless thousands of workers and entrepreneurs. Take it from Dale Kooyenga, the President and CEO of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, many of whose members likely voted for Trump. Milwaukee needs immigrants, he says.

His members, he noted to Urban Milwaukee, say that “instituting smart immigration policy and leveraging that policy to mitigate the demographic and talent shortage issues is paramount – especially in metro Milwaukee. Figures from 2023 show that the Metro grew just 0.08%, putting it in the bottom third amongst metros throughout the country.”

“If we want to grow our economy, we need to attract and retain talent to make it feasible. MMAC is advocating for several policy measures related to immigration that would benefit our pool of talent, including the protection and expansion of H-1B visas, the EB-5 program (we own a regional center) as well as providing Wisconsin occupational licensure opportunities for noncitizen “Dreamers.’”

Milwaukee, in short, doesn’t need less immigrants. It needs more, many thousands more, if we want to see our city and economy grow.