Modern states are practically and politically unable to open their borders to those who choose to immigrate.
The good news is that America does not have open borders and there is no significant faction in politics that advocates for open borders. In fact, it is quite difficult to legally immigrate to the United States.
The bad news is that it is struggling to enforce immigration rules, mainly because the relevant government agencies do not have sufficient resources. And the reason we don’t have those funds right now is because many Republicans in Congress, while furious about the border crisis, appear to be flatly refusing to provide the necessary funding.
Their position is rooted in extraordinary political cynicism, and they make no attempt to hide it. Donald Trump is intervening with the Republican Party to block any immigration deal because he believes chaos at the border will help his election prospects.
But while blatant sabotage explains the current immigration impasse, something else lurks behind it. It’s that Trump and those around him are deeply hostile to immigration in general.
This is partly xenophobia, if not outright racism. Like President Trump, who has repeatedly declared that immigrants “contaminate our nation’s blood,” and doesn’t really care if they came here legally, what matters is whether they’re white. I’m just claiming that.
But that’s not all. Those close to Mr. Trump take a zero-sum view of the economy, believing that every job taken away by someone born outside the United States is a job taken away from someone born here.
Back in 2020, Stephen Miller, one of the architects of President Trump’s immigration policy, told Trump supporters that one of his goals was to “turn off the spigot on new immigrant workers.” . Notably, President Trump issued an executive order denying visas to highly skilled foreigners, many of whom work in high-tech fields. Mr. Miller and his bosses likely believed this meant more jobs for Americans, but what it actually did was undermine America’s competitiveness in advanced technology.
So it seems like a good time to point out that all the negative views about the economics of immigration are wrong. Far from displacing jobs, foreign-born workers have played a key role in the United States’ recent success in combining rapid growth with rapidly declining inflation. And foreign-born workers will be critical to efforts to address our nation’s long-term problems.
On recent successes: It’s taken a while, but many observers are finally beginning to acknowledge that the United States has done a very good job of recovering from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While inflation has disappeared in many parts of the world, the United States stands out for its ability to combine disinflation with strong economic growth. And one of the keys to that performance has been the rapid growth of the U.S. workforce, which has grown by 2.9 million people since the eve of the pandemic four years ago.
How much of that growth is due to foreign-born workers? All of it. While the mainland-born workforce has declined slightly over the past four years, reflecting the aging of the population, we have added 3 million foreign-born workers.
Have these foreign-born workers taken jobs away from Americans, especially mainland-born Americans? No. America will be at full employment in early 2024, with consumers who say jobs are “abundant” outnumbering consumers who say jobs are “hard to find” by almost 5 to 1. The unemployment rate for mainland-born workers will average just under 3.7% in 2023, the lowest since the government began collecting data.
In fact, I would argue that the influx of foreign-born workers is helping the native-born. Although there is a vast research literature on the economic effects of immigration, the often predicted negative effects on employment and wages have not been consistently found. Instead, immigrant workers often bring different skills that complement the native-born workforce and actually avoid supply bottlenecks and enable faster job creation. For example, Silicon Valley employs many foreign-born engineers. Because they bring something extra to the table. The same is true for workers in many less glamorous occupations.
And migrant workers are perhaps especially important in recent years as the country struggles to resolve the economic disruption caused by the pandemic.
Foreign-born workers are critical to America’s financial future. Broadly speaking, it’s a system in which the federal government collects taxes from working-age adults and spends much of the revenue on programs that help seniors, such as Medicare and Social Security. Our system would be far less sustainable if the flow of immigrants, mostly working-age adults, were cut off.
So the border chaos needs to be resolved, but it could be resolved if Republicans cooperated with solving the problem rather than exploiting it for political gain, but that disruption also means that immigrants are a huge source of revenue for the United States. The great reality of being one of the sources must not be obscured. power and prosperity.