Smarter Immigration Critics

Forbes (Opinion)

By Adam Ozinek

May 25, 2015

Smarter Immigration Critics 

As someone who thinks the case for more immigration is strong, I don’t often find myself with lots of praise to heap on pieces that are critical of immigration. However, I do want to draw attention to a piece by Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg View that I think is quite admirable for several reasons.

First, despite his general conclusion being that we should “we should refrain from increasing immigration and should perhaps even reduce it”, Ramesh starts his piece by explaining why popular arguments against immigration are wrong. Arguing among those on our own side is something that I think is vastly undersupplied, and also critically important. We are more likely to be persuaded by those we generally agree with, but more rewarding and usually strategically smart to argue against those we disagree with. For that reason we end up ignoring or making excuses for the sometimes massively wrong claims those on our own side make, and instead focus on much more marginal errors of those on the other side.

Second, Ramesh’s piece deserves praise for calling out by name immigration restrictionists who are overstating the downsides of immigration. This paragraph is crucial, and something that smart immigration critics know but too rarely do they emphasize:

If you want to know why middle-class living standards aren’t rising as fast as they used to, in other words, don’t look to immigration for an explanation.

Finally, he doesn’t bury this claim deep inside a piece that is otherwise about why immigration is actually bad. Yes, his final conclusion is in the end critical of immigration, but he goes out of his way to put the wrongness of his fellow conservatives front-and-center. For this honesty and a good faith attempt to move the debate away from falsehoods, immigration proponents should be praising Ramesh.

All that said, I would also like to make an attempt to persuade Ramesh that he is underestimating the potential upside to high skilled immigration. There are a variety of studies that suggest high-skilled immigration has a significant and positive effect on productivity, and that a lot more of this could be a pretty big deal for the economy and not just the “modest benefits” to society as a whole that Ramesh cites. Here is a presentation from Giovanni Peri that summarizes several good studies on this. And from a paper from Peri, Shih, and Sparber, they find the following decidedly not modest result:

The estimated elasticities imply that foreign STEM growth can explain one fourth of the aggregate productivity growth in the 1990-2000 decades, and possibly 40% of it in the 1990’s. Our calculation attribute to foreign-STEM a yearly TFP growth by 0.30% per year in the 1990’s and by 0.10% in the 2000’s. Just to give an idea, such yearly growth implies that income per capita in 2010 is 4% larger in the US that it would have been without foreign STEM contribution.

Now immigration critics will often cite shortcomings of the H1-B visa program, and there are valid points to make there about this program which is admittedly imperfect. But the fact is, the evidence shows that even our imperfect H1-B visas appear to be boosting productivity significantly. Imagine what a better designed high skilled program could do.

In any case though, my main point here is to praise Ramesh’s piece. I would be very happy to see immigration critics sounding more like Ramesh and less like the politicians he chides. It’s much easier to presume good faith and have a productive disagreement when arguing with someone who has a nuanced and smart criticism of immigration than with someone who is exaggerating, villainizing, and repeating falsehoods.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com