Economists Love Immigration. Why Do So Many Americans Hate It?

On October 5, 1908, a hammy melodrama made its début in Washington, D.C.: Israel Zangwill’s “The Melting-Pot,” a four-act play that introduced the dominant metaphor for the American immigrant experience. The plot is thin—a New York tenement romance threatened by an Old World blood feud is mended by the salvific power of patriotism. Mostly, it’s a pretext for pontificating about a new American religion. “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!” the protagonist, a struggling Jewish composer named David Quixano, proclaims. “What is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!”

The critics were mainly contemptuous. “Sentimental trash masquerading as a human document,” the New York Times judged. Across the Atlantic, the Times of London declared the play’s “rhapsodising over music and crucibles and statues of liberty” to be “romantic claptrap.” But when President Theodore Roosevelt attended the première he was utterly smitten. (“That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play!” he is said to have shouted.) The vivid allegory—of “souls melting in the Crucible” and divine fires purging inherited rivalries—imprinted something indelible on the American psyche.

The play arrived during a heyday of immigration. Ellis Island was at peak capacity, accepting nineteen hundred newcomers a day; one in seven Americans was foreign-born. Although plenty of native-born Americans were troubled, Zangwill’s openhearted sentiments spoke to many others. Yet only a few years later the play’s hopefulness seemed dated and out of step. The First World War heightened suspicion of foreigners, who competed for jobs (maybe harboring unionist sympathies?) and dressed and spoke oddly (maybe never planning to assimilate?). In 1924, the Times published a screed complaining that “the melting pot, besides having its own color, begins to give out its own smell. Its reek fills New York and floats out rather widely in all directions.” The same year, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which set extremely low quotas on total immigration and barred people from Asia. For the next four decades, the great, godly smelting machines would largely sit idle.

Alongside that history of xenophobia, of course, is a civic creed that we teach schoolchildren and roll out for public ceremonies—the one that declares America to be a “nation of immigrants,” even if the melting-pot metaphor has been replaced with kaleidoscopes, mosaics, and salad bowls (plus a rueful acknowledgment of those whose arrival was a matter of abduction and slavery). We might exult in the economic advantages we owe to immigration, through both ordinary population growth and extraordinary entrepreneurship—then Andrew Carnegie, titan of steel, now Sundar Pichai, titan of search. The fact remains that mass migration and nativist backlash have stalked one another for more than a century. However enthusiastic the American dogma may be about immigrants past, rising migration levels invariably trigger the fear that immigrants present and future may be something different—a drag on the welfare state, a threat to native laborers, a pox on the culture.

The politics of immigration have always made for strange bedfellows. Free-trading Ayn Rand acolytes join with cosmopolitan social-justice progressives in encouraging more migration. Cultural conservatives join with old-guard trade unionists in opposition. Sorting through the thicket of questions—economic, political, and philosophical—posed by immigration has always been difficult. But those questions have gained urgency as the cycle now repeats itself. The percentage of foreign-born Americans is currently at a level last seen a century ago, and it continues to rise. Today, the Know-Nothing Party of the mid-nineteenth century has been reborn in the contemporary G.O.P.; the America First movement, once championed by the aviator Charles Lindbergh, has a new avatar in Donald Trump. Joe Biden’s policies to stanch unauthorized migration across the southern border, meanwhile, suggest Trumpism with a human face. And, in New York City, behind Lady Liberty’s back, Mayor Eric Adams is busing unwanted migrants to Canada.

Our present-day paroxysms can be traced to the reopening of America’s borders in the mid-twentieth century. This time, the arrivals were mainly non-Europeans. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 allowed migration from Asia once more; guest-worker programs greatly increased the United States’ Hispanic population; a diversity-lottery program that was started in 1990 helped enable sizable emigration from Africa. At the same time, demand for immigration far outstripped the number of available visas. Familial preferences in immigration applications meant that an individual entrant could effectively relocate an entire clan. This feature, sometimes derided as “chain migration,” is rather dear to me. My uncle, an adventurous doctor from a small Punjabi village near Sialkot, Pakistan, moved to West Virginia in 1971. As a result, all eleven of his siblings—including, in Gabriel García Márquez style, six brothers who all had the first name Muhammad—were able to wend their way to America. My mother, the tenth of the litter, ended up in Lexington, Kentucky, where I was born in 1994. With a few substitutions of place and date, many Americans can tell some variant of this tale.

What has all this global movement actually done to America? The political arguments are harder to answer than the economic ones. Although the dismal science is rife with disagreement on many topics—from microeconomists butting heads about the irrationality of human preferences to macroeconomists arguing about how to quell inflation—there is a broad consensus that immigration is largely beneficial to migrants and their hosts alike. In 2017, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a mammoth report titled “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” It found that, although immigrants tend to earn less than native-born workers and are therefore a bit more costly to governments, their children exhibit unusually high levels of upward mobility and “are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population.” For a country with an aging labor force, like the U.S., immigration can act like Botox for the welfare state, temporarily making the math of paying for promised benefits, like Social Security and Medicare, less daunting. (Eventually, age comes for the immigrants, too.)

A breezy but powerful case for the consensus view is made in “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success” (Public Affairs), by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, professors of economics at Stanford and Princeton, respectively. Many of their arguments come from their analysis of a fascinating big-data set—genealogical records collected by Ancestry.com. (When the researchers started gathering the site’s data with an Internet scraper, its lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter.) Seeing the long-run benefit of immigration requires measurement “at the pace of generations, rather than years,” Abramitzky and Boustan contend. In combination with detailed census records, the ancestral data debunk the idea that earlier waves of European migrants were more industrious and more culturally smeltable than contemporary migrants from elsewhere. “Newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past, and immigrants now are integrating into American culture just as surely as immigrants back then,” the economists write. Unlike other big Anglo countries, such as Australia, Britain, and Canada, America lacks a points-based system that explicitly advantages the already educated and already wealthy, but Abramitzky and Boustan disagree with conservative critics who argue that we should adopt one. Their analysis of a century of immigration data finds “very few countries from which the fact of upward mobility does not hold.” Even if migrants arrive poor, “one generation later their children more than pay for their parents’ debts.”

Empirical economic research has tended to affirm conclusions suggested by the discipline’s first principles: the argument for the free trade of goods, dating back to Adam Smith, implies an argument for the free movement of labor. Michael Clemens, a prominent economist of immigration, maintains that present-day migration barriers are so self-defeating that they are analogous to governments leaving trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk. The gains from looser migration, in his analysis, would be several times larger than the gains from eliminating all remaining trade barriers.

The essential question is not what size the potential windfall would be but cui bono—who benefits? The primary beneficiaries are the migrants themselves, who in rich countries can earn a multiple of their old wages. Their homelands can also benefit from transfers of money; remittances make up more than one-fifth of the national incomes of countries such as El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras. But what about their host nations, who may be effectively subsidizing this global redistribution? Ecologists distinguish between interspecies relationships that are parasitic (as between tapeworms and humans) and those which are mutualistic (like the bromance between clown fish and anemones you may remember from “Finding Nemo,” in which both parties benefit). In the domestic politics of immigration, restrictionists are convinced that immigrants are parasites; economists might try harder to correct that picture.

Consider winemaking, which, for pioneering economists like Adam Smith, was a favorite way of illustrating the benefits of trade. In America today, the wine industry provides employment to nearly two million people; it also provides revenue to the government by the billions (and semblances of personalities to people by the millions). At the same time, domestic winemaking is made possible by temporary guest workers, typically from Mexico, who harvest grapes—including at the winery owned by Donald Trump. Are foreign agricultural laborers hurting job prospects for hardworking Americans? Cesar Chavez, the famed organizer of the United Farm Workers, was inclined to think so; in the nineteen-seventies, he launched his so-called Illegals Campaign, encouraging union members to report undocumented workers to the authorities and to run unauthorized border patrols. In the nineteen-sixties, as it happened, the U.S. once eliminated a program for guest workers called braceros (Spanish for “those who work with their arms”) at the behest of American politicians worried about domestic wages, including John F. Kennedy. Yet Clemens and his fellow-researchers found that wages for native agricultural workers didn’t appear to rise in states where the suspended braceros had been most important; the farms there seemed, instead, to have accelerated their use of labor-saving machinery. Repeat the experiment today, many vignerons warn, and the whole industry would go kaput.