Immigrants Are Good For The Economy

The US economy was built by immigrants. Forty-two percent of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Even more important for the future, 60% of our 25 largest tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Without them we wouldn’t have Apple, IBM, Google, Oracle, Amazon, Intel, Ebay, EMC, Texas Instruments, VMware, ADP, Yahoo!, or any of the jobs they created. Without them, not only would you probably be unemployed but you couldn’t use LinkedIn to look for a job. It was founded by an immigrant.

Politicians have always tried to blame immigrants for our economic problems. Otherwise we might blame the politicians and their bailout-dependent corporate backers. Once they blamed the Irish, Italians, and Jews. Now the words of the song target others for ethnic cleansing, but the tune remains the same.

Thanks to human psychology, immigrants make great scapegoats for the ills actually perpetrated by upper-class twits. Pat Buchanan (one o’ them troublemakin’, hard-drinkin’, crime-ridden Irishmen) suggests that we should discriminate against certain ethnic and religious groups, and only let the “good people” immigrate. So Pat would have put up “No Irish Need Apply” signs back when the Irish were refugees from British oppression. More recently, Pat would have kept out the founder of Apple (Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian, a troublemaking Arab nationalist who fled his country).

Anti-immigration laws distort our economy and make it hard for innovators to “start up” here. While our universities still train hundreds of thousands of technical experts, only 85,000 per year are allowed to get H-1B visas and stay here. The rest are forced to take their expensively acquired skills (and future businesses) overseas.   

Nineteenth and early 20th Century Americans would find our fear of immigrants puzzling. . . since we have so few. There were more than twice as many Irish immigrants per native-born during the years after the Potato Famine as Mexican immigrants today. There were more Germans during the late 1800s. By 1910, 14.7% of Americans were foreign-born. Yet it was then, when an unending stream of every ethnic group passed under the Statue of Liberty, that the US economy (and real wages) grew.

The proportion of foreign-born in the US today is less than 10%. And now that the Permanent Recession has been institutionalized, many Americans are actually fleeing for nations with freer economies, or at least smaller bank bailouts. The young and ambitious today move to Singapore or Dubai, not to Detroit.

But What about Illegal Immigrants?

Illegal immigrants are like other illegal substances: insofar as they are harmful, it is because they are illegal. Illegals come here to work; estimates are that something like 96 percent of immigrant men are working. (Don’t look up the employment percentage for native-born US males; you may be frightened into emigrating). If illegal workers could get work visas, they would. Legal status would let them leave the country when there wasn’t work, own real estate securely, and not worry about being arrested if they went to a PTA meeting.

Even while being legally harassed and intimidated, “illegals” are shockingly productive and law-abiding. Everyone knows that even illegal immigrants pay sales and gasoline taxes. They also pay property taxes (incorporated into their rents) and corporate income taxes (in the price of every product they buy). More surprising is the fact that two-thirds of illegal immigrants pay Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes. Starting in 1996, the IRS began issuing tax numbers to about 8 million illegals. These workers will never collect Social Security or Medicare. This robbing of the poor to give to the rich collects around 50 billion dollars per year.

Even poor tomato pickers help the economy (and eliminate those machine-picked atrocities from the produce aisles). They would help the economy a lot more if they could freely travel between jobs, have secure property rights, etc. Their children won’t all be tomato pickers, either; some of them will be the next Jobs, Brin, Ellison, or Grove.

Phobia of “foreigners” is fear of something that no longer exists. In a world less than a tenth of a light-second across, there are no foreigners. Hollywood programs stream into eyes in Brazil, India and China via fiber optics faster than the news in 1776 made it across a large meeting hall. In a lot of ways, the whole world is already America. No one comes here who doesn’t know Bart Simpson and Eric Cartman. Unlike the peasant Germans, Italians, Poles, Russians, Japanese, etc. of previous generations, nearly all immigrants today speak some English. 

The Founding Fathers were solidly pro-immigration. As the Declaration states, they revolted against King George in part because he restricted immigration. “…He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

Americans of the 1700s wanted more people to move here; more people to hire, more people to whom to sell goods and real estate. Those smart, self-educated 18th-century farmers knew that you don’t get rich by walling out your customers, employees, or co-workers. The Minutemen in 1776 fought for free immigration and free trade, not for crony socialism or Berlin Walls on our borders.

You can hate immigrants because you fear their religion (admittedly, they are predominantly Christian), their skin color, or their superior command of English (it is true that those Indians dominate spelling bees). But you can’t hate immigrants for destroying the US economy. That’s all done by the native-born, old-money types that lie you into meaningless wars and tax you to pay for their corporate welfare checks.