The Corrupt Economics of Immigration
25th September 2024
The common refrain among supporters of the Democratic Party’s open borders policy is that immigration helps the economy. A very recent example of this was published in MSNBC Daily last month, where the author, David Bier of the Cato Institute, claims that “The Congressional Budget Office finds that the surge will boost the economy by $7 trillion and reduce the federal debt by nearly $1 trillion by 2034.” That’s actually an unimpressive statistic since the cumulative GDP of the United States over the next decade will easily exceed $300 trillion, but Bier is probably not wrong in his assertion that immigration increases GDP.
What Bier and most libertarians fail to emphasize in their analysis is not merely the quantity of economic growth caused by immigration but the quality of that growth. We should not be surprised. Adhering to orthodox dogma at the expense of real-world consequences is just another trait libertarians share with socialists, who are their equally doctrinaire, equally out of touch supposed ideological antagonists.