We Can Take Eleven Million Immigrants a Year?

When I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather . . . struggle with his own prejudice. . . . But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He had no time for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. After all, this wasn’t a matter of bigotry. It was plain economics. These immigrants were stealing jobs from ‘Americans.’. . . Few of us are calling for the thing that basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically open borders. . . . it’s possible that we could absorb as many as 11 million immigrants annually. – Debunking the Myth of the Job-stealing Immigrant, Adam Davidson, New York Times Magazine.

Fact Check: Eleven million a year. That’s 110 million in just ten years, more than a third of our total population today. Could such a tidal wave of humanity possibly have an effect on our national cohesion, already stretched to the limit with diversity? Could it stress to the breaking point our already overburdened infrastructure? Could it severely deplete such resources as water, as California and other Western states face record drought?

Simply to ask these questions is to answer them—which is probably why Davidson ignores them. Instead, he focuses on the alleged economic benefits of 110 million more people in a decade. In support of this fanciful notion, he cites a 25 year-old study by economist David Card which found that the influx of Cubans into Miami during the 1980 Mariel boatlift did not cause a negative impact on wages and employment in that city, compared with other cities.

The idea of using one study to justify such an absurd level of immigration is problematic to say the least, especially when that study took a small sample for its data. Other research also indicates that measuring the impact of immigration on one city does not given an accurate reading because it ignores the movement of American workers to other cities to escape that impact.

Davidson further maintains that immigration always boosts the economy by increasing its size, measured by gross domestic product. That is true, but that is totally irrelevant for the economic wellbeing of citizens. What matters is whether immigration increases wealth on a per capita basis.

Seen from this perspective, is it conceivable that 110 more people in ten years would not have a negative impact on wages and jobs? Is it just a coincidence that since mass immigration began in the Sixties, that median wages have not significantly risen, but stagnated. Research shows that Immigration has depressed wages and job opportunities for unskilled and low income American workers. And it appears that temporary visa programs to admit foreign workers are having the same effect on American workers in high tech fields.

If immigration is indeed such an economic elixir, as Davidson maintains, then why has California, the state with the highest percentage and number of immigrants, declined economically since the Sixties? Prior to mass immigration, it was a prosperous state with a solid middle-class base. Now it increasingly resembles a classic Third World society, with a relatively few rich on top with a great many poor on the bottom.

Davidson doesn’t seem to be too encumbered by factual matters. He even states that our current level of legal immigration is less than half a million, when in fact it is twice that. He also doesn’t seem to have a particular empathy for his fellow countrymen, as opposed to foreigners, which probably explains why is why he puts a parenthesis around the word Americans. One interesting admission he makes is that we citizens don’t mind immigration as long as immigrants are “not in the same profession [as] themselves.” One can be sure that few immigrants compete for jobs as writers for the New York Times magazine.

 

 

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