The Case for Immigration
Why immigration restrictions are wrong
Introduction
There’s often lots of dispute about immigration restrictions. This shouldn’t be — the case for immigration is incredibly strong. Just like free markets of goods are a good thing, the same is true of free markets for labor. Immigration benefits both immigrants and the countries to which they immigrate.
These claims are controversial — some will find them absurd even. Yet a sober look at the evidence makes it very clear; we should have much, much more immigration. Our anti-immigrant laws are immoral, inhumane, inefficient, and (pretend there was some synonym of economically harmful that started with an I).
There is only one argument that people present against immigration that has any force — immigration provokes extensive backlash. This is a real risk. Yet this is only a risk caused by those that oppose immigration. A world where we supported open borders would be a much better one.
1 Immigration restrictions are worse than Jim Crow laws
The impairment argument against abortion goes something like the following.
If it’s wrong to impair a fetus — for example, by giving it fetal alcohol syndrome — it’s wrong to kill a fetus.
It’s wrong to impair a fetus
Therefore, it’s wrong to kill a fetus.
In my view, the most forceful version is the following.
If abortion is permissible, then it would be permissible to conduct an abortion by painlessly chopping off all of a fetus’s arms and legs.
If it’s permissible to conduct an abortion by painlessly chopping off all of a fetus’s arms and legs it’s permissible to painlessly chop off one of a fetus’s arms
It is impermissible to painlessly chop off one of a fetus’s arms.
Therefore, abortion is not permissible.
But I think that we can make the same argument when it comes to immigration. Specifically, we can show that anti-immigration laws are worse than Jim Crow laws. (This point is not original to me — Caplan made it here; however, the specific argument for it is somewhat original).
Immigration laws are strictly worse than Jim Crow laws applied to immigrants would be. After all, they’re are a far greater impairment. Rather than merely prohibiting people from entering various places — restaurants, for example — people are prohibited from entering an entire country. Trivially, banning someone from an entire country is worse than banning them from some subset of the country.
Suppose you think that Jim Crow laws for immigrants are impermissible but anti-immigrant laws aren’t. Then you think that, for example, we can ban immigrants from being in certain restaurants — but we can only do that if we ban them from the rest of the country. If we just ban them from some places, that would be terrible — but we can ban them from all places.
Here’s one other way of seeing this. There is not a single immigrant who, if given the choice between having Jim Crow style laws imposed upon them while in rich countries and being barred from entering rich countries, would choose the former. This is because Jim Crow style laws trivially restrict them less than prohibitions on immigration — it restricts them from all places, not just some!
Thus, if you support immigration restrictions, you should be willing to bite the bullet on banning immigrants from entering the same restaurants as non-immigrants, while expanding immigration, if it produced the same benefits as immigration restrictions. Notably, I don’t think there are benefits — US natives would benefit from immigration. But we’ll get into that later.
2 Restricting immigration makes people poor and miserable
People vote with their feet. People do not immigrate to terrible countries because of their aforementioned horribleness. Life in the US is better than it is in Haiti, for example — especially for the types of people that want to immigrate.
It’s hard to realize just how much worse life is in many other countries. Roughly half the world lives on less than $5.50 per day. As conservatives often note when talking about welfare — the United States poor are the global rich. The median US income is in the top 1% of incomes globally.
Think about what we’re doing when we pass immigration restrictions. We are using the power of the state to keep very poor people out of rich countries, where their quality of life would be much higher, in order to keep down the poor.
Imagine if we were doing this in the US. A person lived in the ghetto — it was very poor, crime was rampant, and there were few job opportunities. Then, state power moved in and made it illegal for them to leave the ghetto, leaving their kids to have much worse lives and their income to be much lower. When people search for greater opportunities for themselves and their children, suppressing them with state power is downright malevolent.
Using state power comes with a hefty burden of justification. We are threatening to jail people — every state action comes with the threat of violence. Using state power to prevent poor people from immigrating because we’re worried about marginal economic effects is not justified.
According to estimates by Pritchet et al, who examined a data set of more than 2 million workers, the average Peruvian can make 2.6 times as much in the United States as in Peru, while a Haitian can make seven times more. There’s an obvious reason for this — there are way more good job opportunities in the US.
And it’s not just the immigrants that benefit — it’s also their families overseas. Immigration opponents frequently lament the horrors of remittances which are when immigrants send their money overseas to their families. But remittances are actually incredibly important — one of the biggest upsides of increased immigration.
As Tu et al note remittances account for about 27% of the GDP of developing countries. Thus, if remittances ended tomorrow — as many would like — this would wipe out 27% of the GDP of developing countries. 27%. Let’s put that in perspective. US GDP declined around 20% due to covid. This means that we’d be inflicting worse economic damage on developing countries than covid inflicted on us by ending remittances. And this is all because we’re worried about slightly lower wages.
The UN notes
It is estimated that three quarters of remittances are used to cover essential things: put food on the table and cover medical expenses, school fees or housing expenses. In addition, in times of crises, migrant workers tend to send more money home to cover loss of crops or family emergencies.
The rest, about 25 per cent of remittances – representing over $100 billion per year – can be either saved or invested in asset building or activities that generate income, jobs and transform economies, in particular in rural areas.
They later note that “Half of the money sent goes straight to rural areas, where the world’s poorest live.”
800 million people are financially reliant on remittances. Cutting off remittance flows results in children dying of malnutrition.
This is what Julian Hazel discusses in his excellent article “The uncomfortable moral implications of opposing immigration.” While there are some complex empirical questions surrounding immigration, if you support immigration restrictions, you support laws that will cause children to starve because you’re worried about domestic ramifications.
As he notes
Nearly three quarters of the population lives in poverty, and life expectancy is just 62 years on average.
Many people in Burundi would like to move to countries like Canada or the US — doing so would dramatically increase their economic standing almost instantaneously. Even if the highest they reached is what the US considers the poverty line, that would still be around 18 times higher than what the average Burundian earns in a year.
But because of restrictive immigration laws, the millions of Burundians who would prefer to move can’t. And so they languish. They have no choice but to endure abject poverty, political violence, and preventable disease. All because high-income countries have by and large decided that it’s not fair for them to share in the resources, opportunities, and institutions that make high-income countries so prosperous.
There’s a reason that global open borders would roughly double global GDP. You read that right — the world would become roughly twice as rich. It turns out that moving people from desperately poor countries with few opportunities to very wealthy ones dramatically boosts the economy.
Condemning people to die overseas in miserable, horrible conditions, that’s not just. We do not have the moral license to do that — to wipe out a quarter of the GDP of poor countries — because we’re worried about depressed wages.
3 Immigration and innovation
A huge amount of innovation comes from immigrants. Immigrants tend to be hardworking and want their children to do well. Many of these children become world-class innovators — and many high skilled immigrants do too! Roughly half of important innovations come from the children of immigrants. More than 17% of the most important innovators in the US are not US citizens. There’s a reason that immigrants tend to be more innovative than comparable US workers. There’s a reason that microsoft wants to more immigration — immigration benefits innovation a lot.
Hunt notes that “college–educated immigrants are twice as likely to patent as college–educated natives, due to their concentration in science and engineering.”
Hathaway notes in an article titled “Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by American immigrants or their children” that the innovation doesn’t just come from high-skilled immigrants.
But, the issue is much bigger than targeting only well-educated immigrants or those backed by venture capitalists. Many foreign-born founders of iconic American companies—those in the Fortune 500—wouldn’t have met such thresholds. They were poor, young, and fleeing harsh economic and political conditions. A recent Harvard Business School study found that among foreign-born entrepreneurs, those who come here as children have among the best business outcomes (growth and survival rates).
Maybe you think something like the following: “okay, so immigration causes innovation, but do we really need so much innovation. How does it benefit us?”
It turns out that answer is a lot! Innovation is hugely important. Innovation dramatically boosts wages and life expectancy, and brings about improvements in the standard of living. Since 1990, cancer research has added an extra 43 million years of human life in the US.
Over $127 billion in additional productivity is attributed to the 15% decline in cancer deaths between 2000-2011.
Innovation gave us the internet and kickstarted the green revolution, saving roughly a billion people. The reason the economy grows is because of new innovation generally — getting rid of a huge portion of innovation has devastating effects.
4 Pension Crisis
Frazee importantly notes
The U.S. birth rate is 1.8 births per woman, down from 3.65 in 1960, according to the World Bank. Demographers consider 2.1 births per woman as the rate needed to replace the existing population.
According to the Pew Research Center, if not for immigrants, the U.S. workforce would be shrinking. That would create a host of problems for the federal government.
If not for immigrants, the U.S. workforce would be shrinking.
Social Security, which is paid for by current workers, would be in even more serious budgetary trouble than it already is. Economic growth would also likely stagnate or even contract, as it has in Japan, a country where the population is shrinking and does not attract many immigrants.
Automation can buttress economic growth for a while, but investment in new technology only goes so far, said Betsey Stevenson, an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan.
Plus, immigrants increase demand for goods and services, which further boosts economic growth, she added.
And Frazer’s not the only one. But this is a pretty straightforward point, so I won’t belabor it too much. We really, really need immigrants if we want to get social security money.
5 Immigration is probably good for wages
Immigration probably increases wages. The economic reason for this has to do with comparative advantage — immigrants fill niches that they’re better at, so do native workers. Because immigrants fill important niches, prices go down and real spending goes up. Immigrants also consume things, creating more jobs.
Thus, while it’s true that immigrants do increase competition, this isn’t a bad thing. This does, by itself, lower wages, but that’s counterbalanced by other effects like lower prices. Thus, we need to look at the empirical data on the impacts of immigration on wages.
The renowned economist David Card finds that there’s no negative effect of immigration on wages overall, nor is there an effect on the wages of the native population. A 2019 paper by Portes concludes “Economists broadly agree: the political backlash against immigration in many countries is not economically rational. The evidence strongly supports immigration as, overall, a clear benefit to destination countries.”
A meta-analysis concludes
While the literature reports a range of wage effects of immigration, most estimates are small and, on average, essentially zero. Recent evidence shows that immigration is likely to boost firm productivity and the wages of native workers in the long run by stimulating firm growth and contributing a range of skills and ideas. More open immigration policies, which allow for balanced entry of immigrants of different education and skill levels, are likely to have no adverse effects on native workers’ wages and may pave the way for productivity growth.
The effect on innovation is really important here — innovation creates jobs. As a result of this, restrictive immigration has cost 500,000 jobs and it costs roughly one job every 43 seconds.
Foged and Peri find empirically that native workers often do better in the presence of more migrants in the labor force. They say
The inflow of low-skilled migrants may encourage natives to upgrade their skills, taking advantage of immigrant-native complementarity. This column uses exogenous dispersion of refugees in Denmark to investigate this issue. The findings confirm that for low-skilled native workers, the presence of refugee-country immigrants spurred mobility and increased specialisation into complex jobs.
A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found immigration “has an overall positive impact on the long-run economic growth in the U.S..”
It’s most often Borjas’ research that’s cited to argue against immigration. But his research shouldn’t make us oppose immigration. As Alex Nowrasteh notes
New research by Harvard professor George Borjas on the effect of the Mariel Boatlift—a giant shock to Miami’s labor market that increased the size of its population by 7 percent in 42 days—finds large negative wage effects concentrated on Americans with less than a high school degree. To put the scale of that shock to Miami in context, it would be as if 22.4 million immigrants moved to America in a six‐week period—which will not happen. Some doubt Borjas’s finding and Borjas’s response. Even if the Mariel Boatlift had such a large and negative effect on the wages of native‐born high‐school dropouts in Miami, it had a large positive impact on the wages of natives with only a high school education, to such a degree that the wages of lower‐skilled Miamians actually increased. The rapid recovery of Hispanic wages in Miami also produces some doubt as to Mariel’s effect on native wages as Hispanics were the most likely to suffer wage declines from competition with the new Cuban immigrants. Economists Michael Clemens and Jennifer Hunt have the most devastating response to Borjas: His response was due entirely to a different sample collected in Miami over the years where he observed the wage decline. Thus, the data collectors made Mariel look like it had a large negative wage effect by changing whom they surveyed.
Thus, even the economists who are most opposed to immigration are probably wrong — and even if they’re not, they find the effects are mixed. Most studies find that they’re beneficial to the economy. This concern ought be put to rest.
6 Immigration doesn’t erode our culture
I’ll just quote Alex Nowrasteh’s response, because it’s devastating.
There is a large amount of research that indicates immigrants are assimilating as well as or better than previous immigrant groups—even Mexicans. The first piece of research is the National Academy of Science’s (NAS) September 2015 book titled The Integration of Immigrants into American Society. It’s a thorough and brilliant summation of the relevant academic literature on immigrant assimilation. Bottom line: Assimilation is never perfect and always takes time, but it’s going very well.
The second book is a July 2015 book entitled Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2015 that analyzes immigrant and second‐generation integration on 27 measurable indicators across the OECD and EU countries. This report finds more problems with immigrant assimilation in Europe, especially for those from outside of the European Union, but the findings for the United States are quite positive.
The third work, by University of Washington economist Jacob Vigdor, compares modern immigrant civic and cultural assimilation to that of immigrants from the early 20th century (an earlier draft of his book chapter is here, the published version is available in this collection). If you think early 20th century immigrants and their descendants eventually assimilated successfully, Vigdor’s conclusion is reassuring:
While there are reasons to think of contemporary migration from Spanish‐speaking nations as distinct from earlier waves of immigration, evidence does not support the notion that this wave of migration poses a true threat to the institutions that withstood those earlier waves. Basic indicators of assimilation, from naturalization to English ability, are if anything stronger now than they were a century ago.
Griswold amusingly notes
More than two centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin worried that too many German immigrants would swamp America’s predominantly British culture. In the mid‐1800s, Irish immigrants were scorned as lazy drunks, not to mention Roman Catholics. At the turn of the century a wave of “new immigrants” — Poles, Italians, Russian Jews — were believed to be too different ever to assimilate into American life. Today the same fears are raised about immigrants from Latin America and Asia, but current critics of immigration are as wrong as their counterparts were in previous eras.
According to a report by Forrester and Nowrasteh
Empirically immigrants are as patriotic as non-immigrants.
Seventy‐one percent of all immigrants agree that America is a better country than most other countries compared to 73 percent of native‐born Americans.
Immigrants are more likely to be proud to be Americans that non immigrants
Immigrants are more likely to be proud of America’s equal treatment of everyone than non-immigrants
Immigrants are less likely to be ashamed of aspects of America than non-immigrants
Immigrants are more confident in US institutions than non-Americans
But also, let’s just imagine that immigrants were less patriotic than non-immigrants. The same, according to most who oppose immigration, is no-doubt also true of liberals. But no-one would support banning liberals from entering states because of worries of cultural erosion. You don’t get to trap people in poverty-ridden hellholes because you think they might not be patriotic, sorry.
7 Immigrants don’t commit more crime than others
I have nothing to contribute beyond quoting Nowrasteh.
This myth has been around for over a century. It wasn’t true in 1896, 1909, 1931, 1994, or more recently. Immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated for violent and property crimes and cities with more immigrants and their descendants are more peaceful. Some immigrants do commit violent and property crimes but, overall, they are less likely to do so.
The most contentious debate concerns whether illegal immigrants are more likely to be criminals than natives or legal immigrants. A recent finding on this issue shows that illegal immigration is not correlated with violent crime rates nor is it causal. Data limitations on the federal government force researchers to estimate the incarcerated illegal immigrant population using the residual estimation method which finds that illegal immigrants are much less likely to be incarcerated than native‐born Americans but more likely than legal immigrants. The state of Texas actually recorded arrests and convictions for specific crimes by the immigration status of the arrestee and convict. In 2015 in Texas, there were 1,794 convictions against natives per 100,000 natives, 782 convictions of illegal immigrants for every 100,000 illegal immigrants, and only 262 convictions of legal immigrants per 100,000 of them. For all but four crimes that accounted for 0.18 percent of all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, there were fewer convictions against illegal immigrant than against natives. The year 2016 shows even lower criminal conviction rates for illegal immigrants relative to natives in Texas.
Conclusion
The objections to immigration are empirically wrong and morally dicey. Immigration should not be a difficult issue. Once informed of the relevant facts, it becomes obvious that political fearmongering surrounding the issue is utter trite. A free market in people should exist, just like it does for other goods. We should not restrict people’s free movement because we’re worried about marginal declines in wages — particularly given that those fears are misplaced. As Hanania amusingly quips
Republicans do make one major exception to their greater trust of markets, and that’s in the areas of immigration and sometimes trade. Many seem to believe that the laws of economics are different depending on whether one is interacting with someone born in the United States or another country.
As people often say, we are a nation of immigrants. If my great great grandparents hadn’t immigrated to the United States, they would have been wiped out by the nazis a few decades later, and I wouldn’t be writing this article. I wouldn’t exist. Nearly everyone descends from immigrants at some point down the line. America would be deeply impoverished by the absence of most of us who descend from immigrants.
Let’s not mince words. Immigration restrictions hamper the greatest engine of prosperity in world history, trap people in poverty overseas, push hundreds of millions into poverty, and cause covid-like damage to the poorest countries. They are a good candidate for the worst class of laws in the history of the world.