The Virtues of Immigration

Commentary Magazine (Opinion)

By Max Boot

September 2, 2015

The Virtues of Immigration 

If you listen to Donald Trump — and, judging by the polls, a surprisingly large number of people are — immigration is an abomination. In The World According to the Donald, migrants, especially from Mexico, are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” who have been sent by the Mexican government to undermine the United States, with a few “good people” accidentally tossed into the mix.

In the real world, immigration is one of the biggest reasons for America’s economic success. Immigrants, legal or illegal, skilled or unskilled, Mexican or otherwise, are an important contributor to our economic growth. One doesn’t have to imagine that the U.S. actually tries to implement Trump’s proposed roundup and deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants to see the negative effect of having fewer immigrants around to power the American economy.

Farmers are already feeling the effect of a drop in immigration brought about by improvements in the Mexican economy, which means fewer people are willing to take back-breaking jobs as farmhands. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “the decline in workers is reducing fruit and vegetable production by 9.5 percent, or $3.1 billion, a year, according to a recently published analysis of government data by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonpartisan group that supports a looser immigration policy.” The Journal notes that “farm companies are wooing employees by raising wages faster than inflation and enhancing medical and other benefits. Even so, many farms say these efforts have failed to meaningfully address their worker shortfalls.”

The situation is far more dire in Japan, which faces the imminent prospect of a population implosion brought about by an aging populace with a below-replacement-level birth rate. As another Journal story notes, “hundreds of thousands of jobs [are] going unfilled.” Faced with this dire situation, Japan is loosening up on its long-held aversion to allowing foreigners into its homogeneous society. “In 2014,” the Journal writes, “there were some 788,000 legal foreign workers in Japan, up 15% over a two-year period to about 1.4% of the legal workforce, according to the Ministry of Labor.”

Keep in mind that Japan has little history of assimilating outsiders. The U.S., by contrast, has been doing it ever since the birth of the Republic. That very ability to integrate immigrants has been, and remains, one of our key competitive advantages over the other advanced industrialized economies of Europe and East Asia. It would amount to a monumental act of self-sabotage to throw away that advantage by making war on immigrants as Trump advocates.

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