Business Leaders To Legislators: Tennessee Can’t Afford To Be Unwelcoming To Immigrants

Business leaders swarmed the Tennessee capitol Tuesday to talk about a topic dominating the national news — immigration. Advocates range from the Nashville Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to the Tennessee Farm Bureau.

These groups acknowledge that the federal government is in charge, while suggesting there are smaller ways the state could act.

“Rather than criticizing each other — the natives and the immigrants — let’s look at what we can do together to help this great country,” said Ming Wang, a Nashville ophthalmologist and entrepreneur who heads the Tennessee Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce president Ralph Schulz says he’d like to see a revival of legislation that would have given any immigrant student who graduates from a Tennessee high school in-state tuition to four-year schools.

“We believe that it’s really important for those young immigrants to have access to that higher level of education that’s going to create a more qualified workforce for us in the future.”

That legislation
fell one vote short of passage in 2015 and didn’t make it nearly as far last year. However, such a bill, offering in-state tuition to immigrant students, hasn’t been revived yet this year, at a time when the nation is taking a more restrictive stance on immigration.

Primarily, business groups say they’re playing defense, and they have some new data in hand from the New American Economy think-tank.
It shows that Tennessee now is home to at least 21,000 foreign-born entrepreneurs and immigrants who paid $2 billion in taxes for 2014.

“Prosperity grows when the population grows,” Schulz says. “The immigration and in-migration to Tennessee is part of what’s causing that prosperity that we’re feeling all around us. So we are here to talk to legislators and take this information, and put it in people’s hands.”

Schulz, who is known as a Republican defender of immigrants, says they “fill gaps in the economy” that are “important to maintaining our ongoing prosperity.”

“That’s why at the state level we’re focusing on making sure that the state of Tennessee stays a friendly and welcoming place for all immigrants,” he says. “That just makes good business sense.”

WPLN’s Chas Sisk contributed to this report.