Andrew Yang said: "If you go to a factory here in Michigan, you will not find wall-to-wall immigrants, you will find wall-to-wall robots and machines. Immigrants are being scapegoated for issues they have nothing to do with in our economy."
Facts First: Yang is right that robots have displaced more workers than immigrants.
Many studies have shown that immigrants generally create more net jobs in the US, although there may be some displacement and wage stagnation in low-skilled industries where more immigrants compete directly with native-born Americans.
But all kinds of manufacturing industries in America, from steel to tractors, have incorporated technology that reduces the number of people needed to create a given amount of stuff. The automotive sector accounts for about half the US’ robot shipments, according to the Robotics Industry Association, though non-automotive industries have been catching up fast. And many economists, including those at Oxford Economics and McKinsey, project that automation will displace millions of jobs in manufacturing down the line.
However, manufacturing employment in Michigan has been steadily rising since the bottom of the Great Recession, and now stands at 635,000 jobs — 14% of total employment in the state. And according to the pro-immigration American Immigration Council, in 2015, 94,152 of those jobs were occupied by immigrants, a share that was higher than immigrants' percentage of the overall population.