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IMMIGRANTS MAKE AMERICA STRONGER AND RICHER  
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Paul Krugman
February 5, 2024
New York Times
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_ Negative views of the economics of immigration are all wrong. Far
from taking jobs away, foreign-born workers have played a key role in
America’s recent success at combining fast growth with a rapid
decline in inflation. _

Minneapolis protest against Arizona immigrant law SB 1070, credit
Fibonacci Blue (CC BY 2.0)

 

Modern nations can’t — practically or politically — have open
borders, which allow anyone who chooses to immigrate.

The good news is that America doesn’t have open borders, and there
is no significant faction in our politics saying we should. In fact,
immigrating to the United States legally is fairly difficult.

The bad news is that we’re having a hard time enforcing the rules on
immigration, mainly because the relevant government agencies don’t
have sufficient resources. And right now, the reason they don’t have
those resources is that many Republicans in Congress, while
fulminating about a border crisis, appear determined
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deny the needed funding.

Their position is rooted in extraordinary political cynicism, and they
aren’t even trying to hide it: Donald Trump has intervened
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Republicans to block any immigration deal because he believes that
chaos at the border will help his election prospects.

While blatant sabotage explains the current immigration impasse,
however, there’s something else lurking behind it: Trump and those
around him are profoundly hostile to immigration in general.

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

But it’s not just that. People close to Trump have a zero-sum view
of the economy, in which every job taken 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 Trump’s
immigration policies, told
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supporters that one of the goals was to “turn off the faucet of new
immigrant labor.” Remarkably, Trump issued an executive order meant
to deny visas to highly skilled foreigners
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many working in the tech sector. Miller and his boss apparently
believed that this would mean more plum 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 negative views of the
economics of immigration are all wrong. Far from taking jobs away,
foreign-born workers have played a key role in America’s recent
success at combining fast growth with a rapid decline in inflation.
And foreign-born workers will also be crucial to the effort to deal
with our country’s longer-term problems.

About that recent success: It has taken a while, but many observers
are finally acknowledging that the United States has done
extraordinarily well at recovering from the effects of the Covid-19
pandemic. Inflation has faded away
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the world, but the United States stands out for its ability to combine
disinflation with vigorous economic growth
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And one key to that performance has been rapid growth in the U.S.
labor force, which has risen by 2.9 million
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eve of the pandemic four years ago.

How much of that growth was due to foreign-born workers? All of it.
The native-born labor force declined slightly
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past four years, reflecting an aging population, while we added three
million
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workers.

Did those foreign-born workers take jobs away from Americans — in
particular, native-born Americans? No. America in early 2024 has full
employment, with consumers
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that jobs are “plentiful” outnumbering those saying jobs are
“hard to get” by almost five to one. The unemployment rate among
native-born workers
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3.7 percent in 2023, as low as it’s been since the government began
collecting the data.

In fact, I’d argue that the influx of foreign-born workers has
helped the native born. There’s a large research literature on the
economic impact of immigration, which consistently fails to find the
often predicted negative effects on employment and wages. Instead,
immigrant workers often turn out to be complementary
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the native-born work force, bringing different skills that, in effect,
help avoid supply bottlenecks and allow faster job creation. Silicon
Valley, for instance, hires a lot of foreign-born engineers because
they bring something additional to the table; the same is true for
workers in many less-glamorous occupations.

And immigrant workers have probably been especially important these
past few years, as the economy has struggled to resolve disruptions
caused by the pandemic.

Foreign-born workers are crucial to America’s fiscal future. To a
first approximation, the federal government is a system that collects
taxes from working-age adults and spends much of the proceeds on
programs that help seniors, such as Medicare and Social Security. Cut
off the flow of immigrants, who are largely working-age adults
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and our system would become much less sustainable.

So while the mess at the border needs to be fixed — and could be
fixed if Republicans would help solve the problem instead of exploit
it for political advantage — don’t let that mess obscure the
larger reality that immigration is one of America’s great sources of
power and prosperity.

_Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a
distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate
Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for
his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
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_Get the best of the Times in a free email newsletter
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Opinion section on Facebook
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* Immigration
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* Immigrants
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* economics
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