The numbers tell the story: We need more immigrants.

Sometimes a statistic can run so counter to a person’s perceptions that it pushes the mind in new directions. I add such statistics to my list when I stumble across them.

Sometimes, a bunch of such varied statistics, taken together, can entirely upend the way we see the world, as these do:

• In the United States, job openings have exceeded job seekers since November 2017. We now have 10 million open jobs but 6 million unemployed workers.
• The workforce participation rate, 67% in 2000, is now 62%, implying a massive worker shortage.
• The average cost of child care increased 214% from 1990 through 2020, outstripping inflation by 100%.
• The average cost of a home health aide increased 12.5% in 2021, to almost $62,000.
• Annual legal net immigration to the United States, which exceeded 1 million in 2015 and 2016, has declined every year since, to 247,000 in 2021.
• The United States ranks 161st in population density, at 36 people per square kilometer. That’s about half the population density of Mexico, one-quarter that of China, half of Tanzania’s, one-third of Ethiopia’s, Syria’s and Iraq’s, half of Afghanistan’s, and half of Ukraine’s.
• More than 50% of all Americans live within 50 miles of an ocean.
• The median price of a home on Long Island surged 60% in 10 years, from $350,000 in 2012 to $560,000 in 2021.

Now, let’s apply these dry statistics to the meaty reality of daily life.

Supermarkets can’t hire. They’re now trusting us to ring ourselves up and self-certify whether our apples are cheap Red Delicious or $9.99 per pound organic Honeycrisps that come with adoption papers.

Restaurants? I’m still waiting for a text to let me know when my 2021 St. Patrick’s Day corned beef and cabbage order is ready.

Factories? Nursing homes? Child care centers? Janitorial services? Basically, nobody can hire anyone anywhere to do anything, and they particularly can’t hire anybody to do stuff we don’t want our kids to have to do. Which is the stuff our grandparents and parents did when they came here.

And this nation is mostly empty once you get 50 miles east of the Pacific or west of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the countries people are trying hardest to leave are both horrible and crowded.

We need help, to care for our parents and our children. We need more legal immigration, and a path to citizenship for those here illegally that allows them to openly do the work we need done.

We need to see the middle of this nation, beautiful and habitable, as an easier place to build more units than New York. We did it with Florida and the Carolinas and Arizona and Virginia. Now it’s time for Kentucky and West Virginia and Oklahoma and Arkansas and two dozen other great states to shine.

And we need to calibrate our politics to our desires, and the facts. If you’re not voting for politicians who support increases in legal immigration, amnesty for Dreamers, and a path to citizenship for those here illegally, you’re voting for no child care, no elderly care, economic stagnation, long lines in restaurants, and self checkout.

And I personally could do without the invitation to sin that is a cash register demanding I pick my own produce prices.

Columnist Lane Filler's opinions are his own.

By Lane Filler

lane.filler@newsday.comlanefiller

Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.