Immigrants make America stronger and richer

Modern nations cannot (practically or politically) have open borders that allow anyone who decides to immigrate.

The good news is that USA It has no open borders and there is no major group in our politics that says we should have them. in fact, Immigrating to the United States legally is very difficult.

The bad news is that we are having a hard time enforcing immigration rules, Mainly because the relevant government agencies do not have enough resources. And right now, the reason they don’t have those resources is because many Republicans in Congress, while critical of the border crisis, seem determined to deny needed funding.

Their position is one of extraordinary political arrogance, and they don’t even try to hide it: Donald Trump has intervened to block any immigration deal with Republicans Because he believes that chaos on the border will improve his electoral prospects.

partially This is xenophobia, if not outright racism. If you repeatedly declare, as Trump has said, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” you don’t really care whether they came here legally, you’re practically saying what matters. is that they are white.

But that’s not all. Those close to Trump have a zero-sum view of the economy, in which every job held by someone born outside the United States is a job taken away from someone born here.

In 2020, Stephen Miller, one of the architects of Trump’s immigration policies, told his supporters that one of the goals was to “turn off the spigot of the new immigrant workforce.” Unsurprisingly, Trump issued an executive order aimed at denying visas to highly skilled foreigners, many of whom work in the technology sector. Miller and his bosses apparently believed this would mean better jobs for Americans, when what it would actually do was undermine American competitiveness in advanced technology.

So this seems like a good time to point out that the negative views about the economics of immigration are completely wrong. Far from taking jobs, foreign-born workers have played a key role in the United States’ recent success in combining rapid growth with rapid declines in inflation. And foreign-born workers will also be crucial in trying to solve our nation’s long-term problems.

About that recent success: It’s taken some time, but many observers are finally recognizing that the United States has done exceptionally well in recovering from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Inflation has subsided in much of the world, but the United States stands out for its ability to combine disinflation with strong economic growth. And key to that performance is the rapid growth of the American workforce, which has grown by 2.9 million since the eve of the pandemic four years ago.

How much of that growth was due to foreign-born workers? All this. The local workforce has declined slightly over the past four years, reflecting an aging population, while we’ve added three million foreign-born workers.

Did those foreign-born workers take jobs from Americans, especially native-born Americans? No. By early 2024, the United States will have full employment, and consumers who say jobs are “abundant” outnumber those who say jobs are “hard to find” by nearly five to one. The unemployment rate among native workers averaged just under 3.7 percent in 2023, the lowest since the government began collecting data.

In fact, I would say that the influx of foreign workers has helped the natives. There is a large body of research on the economic impact of immigration, which consistently fails to find the often hypothesized negative effects on employment and wages. Instead, immigrant workers often prove complementary to the local workforce, bringing a variety of skills that, in fact, help avoid supply bottlenecks and allow for faster job creation. Silicon Valley, for example, hires many foreign-born engineers because they bring something extra to the table; The same is true for workers in many less attractive occupations.

And immigrant workers are likely to be especially important in recent years as the economy struggles to deal with the disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Foreign-born workers are critical to America’s financial future. At first glance, the federal government is a system that collects taxes from working-age adults and spends most of the revenue on programs that help seniors, such as Medicare and Social Security. If the flow of immigrants, who are mostly working-age adults, is cut off, our system will become much less sustainable.

So while the mess at the border needs to be fixed (and can be fixed if Republicans help fix the problem instead of using it for political gain), let’s not let that mess obscure the broader reality that immigration is a great source of revenue. In America. Power and prosperity.

© The New York Times 2024