Do we need immigrants?

In my twitter feed this morning:

if you think robust immigration is necessary for growth, Russia is bad, the FBI is good, democratic norms should be respected you'll need to leave the GOP or the GOP will need to rid itself of virtually all its elected leaders

— Jen 'now @jenrubin9' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) February 3, 2018

which got me to thinking about her claim, “robust immigration is necessary for growth”:

In the first place, I suspect, though admittedly without digging out the data today, that what’s being claimed as “immigrants cause economic growth” is really “a growing economy is a magnet for immigrants”; in other words, that the causation runs in the other direction.  In a recent column, David Brooks claimed,

About 500 counties, mostly in metro areas, have embraced diversity — attracting immigrants and supporting candidates who favor immigration. About 2,600 counties, mostly in rural areas, have not attracted immigrants, and they tend to elect candidates who oppose immigration and diversity.

. . . Between 2014 and 2016 the counties that embrace diversity accounted for 72 percent of the nation’s increased economic output and two-thirds of the new jobs. The approximately 85 percent of counties that support restrictionists like Donald Trump accounted for a measly 28 percent of the growth.

Never mind that the math is goofy because not all counties have equivalent population, and, as we all saw from those maps of votes for Trump vs. Clinton by congressional district, there are enough sparsely populated, pro-Trump areas as to make it visually appear as if Trump won the majority of the country, when the loss of the votes in the densely populated urban areas produced a very close vote instead.

But beyond that — well, consider Detroit.  Detroit’s boosters are very eager to welcome immigrants — they celebrate their positive contributions and, indeed, the greater Detroit area, especially Dearborn and Hamtramck, is a popular destination for Arabs.  But the jobs which, elsewhere, are filled by immigrants, are filled in the Detroit area by poor Detroiters, taking buses out to the suburbs.  The immigrants are not coming because there is no “pull factor.”

Other claims of “economic growth” really seem to be the trivial statement that, the more people there are living and working in a given locality, the higher its total GDP will be.

That’s the claim made, for instance, in the New York Times, when Ruchir Sharma argued bluntly that economic growth comes directly from population growth, and that America therefore needs immigrants in order to grow its population, and, consequently, its GDP.

Since 2005, per capita gross domestic product has grown on average by 0.6 percent a year in the United States, exactly the same rate as in Japan and virtually the same rate as in the 19 nations of the eurozone. In other words, if it weren’t for the boost from babies and immigrants, the United States economy would look much like those supposed laggards, Europe and Japan.

And, when you look at the World Bank’s charts on the subject, it doesn’t really seem obvious to me that low-immigration countries such as Korea and Japan are mired in stagnation or decline.

Yet it’s considered an established fact that immigrants boost the economy because they have more energy, entrepreneurship, vitality, drive, determination, grit, and so on.  Here’s Kristie de Peña at Real Clear Policy last year:

Countries with higher levels of immigration do better than those that close their borders. The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada take in the most immigrants worldwide and have the strongest economies. By comparison, even historically wealthy countries such as Japan have been struggling for nearly a decade with a steadily declining workforce and an aging population because they do not accept immigrants.

In fact, according to the World Bank charts, Japan’s GDP per capita continues to increase.

What’s more, to claim, “robust immigration is necessary for growth,” pretty much has a corollary:  countries without “robust immigration” cannot grow.  Which further says that countries which are experiencing high levels of emigration will be doomed to stagnation, even though they are precisely the countries which urgently need growth, to lift themselves out of poverty.  Does this make any sense? Why bother with development, then?  Why not just say that these sh**hole countries are nothing but people-farms, forever doomed to poverty.

Of course, there’s a toned-down version of the pro-immigration argument.  Either immigrants are meant to remedy the decline in population because we otherwise won’t have enough workers to fund the care the elderly need, or developed-world societies are too complacent and need immigrants to remedy the complacency.

But the latest Pew forecast predicts an increase in population of over 1/3 by 2065, from 324 to 441 million, based on current immigration patterns. Is this the right amount of growth?  Too much?  Too little?  Is there an end point to population growth?  It seems to have become taboo to ask this.

Image:  By Lewis W. Hine(Life time: 1874-1940) – Original publication: Photo-studyImmediate source: Brooklyn Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51292180