They Get the Job Done

Immigrants leave their existing homes to make new homes for so many different reasons and those reasons are as varied as the people themselves. A commonality they overwhelmingly share is the desire to rebuild, to recreate their lives, a drive and a need to build a new life for themselves and their children. In fact, nothing could be more quintessentially “American” than the yearning to build a better life. Regardless of how or when our ancestors arrived here, willingly or not, those of us who are descended from immigrants and those of us native to this land share that desire.

Well, building takes work.

Time and time again, across American history, immigrants have demonstrated that they understand this, that they embrace this fact, and that they eagerly seek out opportunities to work, to do that building. The Germans, the Irish, the Africans torn from their homes unwillingly, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Greeks, Jewish people from across Europe, the Salvadorans, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Nigerians, the Guatemalans. All the immigrant waves that have come to the United States, folks have come here to work, to build. We were happy to see an acknowledgement of that in a report on the state of the Maryland economy issued by the Comptroller of Maryland. The most recent data available shows that while immigrants represent only 16.7% of Maryland’s population but they make up 21.1% of Maryland’s labor force (page 2). That’s a larger participation rate (72.2%) than our neighboring states of Virgina (70.9%) and Pennsylvania (69.0%) and the United States (66.7%) as a whole (page 3).