Matthew Yglesias on Immigration and the Economy

The perception that immigration is economically harmful to the working class is not actually true.

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Matthew Yglesias never ceases to amaze me. Not only is he incredibly prolific, but every day he dives deeply into a new topic and manages to make himself an expert. I don't always agree with him, but I appreciated a recent post in his Substack newsletter where he wrote about immigration (not for the first time), focusing on a topic I've often written about myself — namely, the myths we tell ourselves about the supposedly negative impact that immigrants have on the U.S. economy. 

In fact, the economic impact of immigration to the United States is overwhelmingly positive. As Yglesias makes clear, it's really unproductive to worry, for example, about immigrants taking away factory jobs from U.S. workers when the factories in the United States have mostly closed.

But in "Hostility to immigration isn't about economics" Yglesias also addresses the real elephant in the room: that the economic argument is really just a polite cover story. "The biggest (though by no means exclusive) thing driving people to Trump," writes Yglesias, "was a dislike of immigrants, especially scenarios that conjoined immigrants with crime, chaos, or receipt of public assistance."

Such opinions are not fact-based, but are fantasies derived from misinformation, since (1) most immigrants are banned from receiving most forms of public assistance; (2) immigrants commit crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens (it turns out that it is being American that increases the propensity to commit crimes – go figure); and (3) any perceived "chaos" is mostly associated with stories of a purportedly open border (spoiler alert: the border is not open), with such chaos in fact being a result of U.S. government policy.

“I think people who worry about immigration are worried primarily about border security, about law and order, and about cultural and demographic change. And I think a political strategy [on the part of the Democrats] that doesn’t address those concerns will fail, as will an economic strategy based on the presumption that immigration restriction will be an economic boon.” – Matthew Yglesias

Policymakers, and presidential candidates, ignore the importance of immigration to everyone's peril. We have seen in recent years how public fears about immigration — largely false fears stoked by far-right forces — have played a huge role in advancing the authoritarian agenda. This was true in the Brexit vote, and in the 2018 reelection of Hungary's Viktor Orbán, not to mention in the election and presidential administration of Donald Trump in the United States.

Anyway, if you'd like to better understand why it's simply not true that immigration is bad for the economy, read Yglesia's recent piece. It's always a pleasant surprise when an intelligent layperson gets things right about immigration.