The politicians who have made anti-immigrant backlash a central feature of this year’s election may not want you to know this, but the economic impact of immigration is actually well-studied — and it’s clear that areas with more immigrant workers do not have lower wages, and that increases in immigration do not harm the economic prospects of other workers. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that increased immigration actually makes everyone better off.

When growth is robust and inclusive, the economy is not simply a zero-sum game. Immigrant workers aren’t just competing for jobs — they’re also creating demand with their spending, which creates more jobs. And they’re opening new businesses too. That is why the more immigrants are included in the economy, the more growth we see, and the better off everyone is. So why is that despite this clear and compelling story, there aren’t many voices out there making this affirmative case for how immigrants contribute to our communities and help create shared prosperity? Why are so many people in the political world inclined to duck & cover instead of speaking out against the xenophobic backlash when it’s a good story, and good economics too?

Make it make sense.

The United States is well-known to spend dramatically more money on healthcare than other rich countries — and to have dramatically worse outcomes in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, and other areas. But it’s still striking to see just how many more resources we put into our healthcare system, and how the spending disparity just isn’t shrinking.

As the graph below from a recent Commonwealth Fund report shows, the gap between American healthcare spending and spending in peer countries really began to take off in the 1980s, and accelerated dramatically in the 2000s before leveling off around the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. But the gap remains enormous, with the US spending about 50% more of our economy on healthcare than the likes of Canada, Germany, France, and Australia. If we got better results, there would be nothing to complain about — is there any more valuable use of our economic resources than our health? But instead, what we seem to get is a highly inefficient care delivery system, constant hassles for doctors and patients alike, a less healthy population…and a highly profitable healthcare industry.

Lina Khan has become the most important FTC commissioner in years by aggressively tapping the agency’s authority to blunt corporate power by blocking anticompetitive mergers and advancing consumer-friendly rules. For exactly the same reasons, corporate lobbyists have identified her as a top target who they are desperate to delegitimize and hope to hound out of office.

But Khan is keeping at it. She’s suing big tech companies for unfair business practices, recently forced drug companies to cut the price of inhalers, is going after junk fees of all kinds, and just last week announced a new “click to cancel” rule requiring companies to make it just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one. As detailed by John Eidelson and Max Chafkin in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Khan has become “the face of a fresh backlash against concentrated corporate power” — and whether or not she gets to continue carrying out her pro-consumer agenda for the next four years will be a key test in the battle between corporate power and popular common sense middle-out economics.

Civic Action
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