Juan Cole: Dear Foreigner-Haters: Immigration is Good for You

[pampango]

http://www.juancole.com/2011/07/12832.html

Why is there such strong anti-immigrant sentiment in the industrialized democracies, and why does it get focused on Muslims? The shooting rampage and bombing by anti-immigrant Islamophobe Anders Breivik has raised these questions to a fever pitch. But the answers are just not obvious.

It is mostly a myth that immigrants take jobs away from locals. The places in the US with the highest immigrant populations are not the places with the highest rates of local unemployment. ... Remember that labor demand is elastic, not fixed. Sometimes immigrants do labor that just would not get done otherwise (California would have to import strawberries and pay more for them). The evidence is that immigration actually benefits the host economy pretty much across the board.

Even by 2006, former East Bloc immigrants to Britain were estimated to be contributing over $4 bn. a year to the British economy. The British response to this windfall? The government has now implemented a cap on the immigration of skilled workers that is likely to hurt economic growth! The number of high-skilled workers in a society is predictive of economic growth there, and all the countries that ever amounted to anything brought in a lot of them from abroad. Of course, it is desirable that the wealth they help create be taxed and used to educate and train people of the country for the future, as well. But, again, it is not a zero sum game. Sullen, poor, nationalist little countries that keep out foreigners seldom generate the resources to educate their own high-skilled workers and entrepreneurs, and so they stay sullen, poor, little nationalist countries.

Societies with sophisticated economies and fair economic growth naturally attract labor immigrants. Keeping the latter out will just stunt the growth of and make the country poorer and weaker. Most immigrants in European countries are not Muslims, as the Indian and Polish cases in Britain demonstrate. Likewise, contrary to Mike Huckabee, there is relatively little Muslim immigration into the US, comparatively speaking (about half of US immigrants are Latinos from the New World). Even where immigrants are Muslim, there is no good evidence that they are less assimilable than other ethnic groups. Even their extremists are less prone to carrying out attacks in Europe than European separatists, the looney left, or the Right Wing.

Hatred of immigrants is for all these reasons counter-productive. It is another piece of evidence that human beings are perfectly capable of messing things up, big time, just because they entertain funny ideas divorced from reality.

[jwirr]

1. I am already out of food money by the 3rd week in the month. I for

one welcome immigrants who are willing to work in the fields for less. I will have real trouble if and when the food prices are raised either from crops rotting in the fields or from higher priced labor.

[Romulox]

2. Wow: "one welcome immigrants who are willing to work in the fields for less."

I think you may have confused cause and effect with regard to cheap labor.

[jwirr]

3. You mean that letting the crops rot in the fields is not going to raise

prices. I do not believe you - I grew up a farmers daughter. We did not use immigrants but we did use kids who also worked cheap. Many of us in the USA cannot afford higher prices. We are already hungry. Not sure what you mean.