The Best Argument against Immigration
July 29, 2015 in Economics
Alex Nowrasteh
Volumes of research and centuries of experience do not bear out claims that immigrants “take our jobs,” don’t learn English, and fail to assimilate. But the idea that immigrants could vote to upend our relatively free economy has an air of credibility. It is arguably the best argument against liberalizing immigration.
Although immigrants are a boon to our economy and their children do reliably assimilate, immigrants could kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by undermining our free market institutions. In other words, will they come here, become citizens, and vote socialist, populist, or worse?
Fortunately, there is little evidence that immigrants make countries less free.
The United States has the 12th freest economy in the world, but most immigrants are from societies that are markedly less free than ours: the top three immigrant—sending countries in 2013 were China, India, and Mexico, ranked 115th, 110th, and 91st, respectively. If immigrants bring the impoverishing institutions of their homelands with them, the long—run economic impact of immigration could turn negative.
“Testing the most plausible argument for closed borders.”
In a recent academic paper, my coauthors and I compared economic freedom scores with immigrant populations across 100 countries over 21 years. Some countries were majority immigrant while some had virtually none. We found that the larger a country’s immigrant population was in 1990, the more economic freedom increased in the same country by 2011. The immigrant’s country of origin, and whether they came from a poor nation or a rich one, didn’t affect the outcome.
These results held for the United States federal government but not for state governments. States with greater immigrant populations in 1990 had less economic freedom in 2011 than those with fewer immigrants, but the difference was small. The national increase in economic freedom more than outweighed the small decrease in economic freedom in states with more immigrants.
A related worry is that immigrants and their descendants would vote to expand welfare benefits for themselves. State governments can set the benefit and spending levels for welfare programs in their own states, and they also have varying levels of immigration and ethnic diversity. This provided a perfect opportunity for economist Zac Gochenour of Western Carolina University and me to test how immigrants affect welfare.
A state’s population of immigrants, illegal immigrants, Hispanics, Asians, ethnic or racial diversity caused by immigration, or any combination of the above did not affect the size …read more
Source: OP-EDS
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