Excellent article. It drives me crazy when people make sweeping claims about the effects of immigration and totally ignore that immigrants have widely differing characteristics, including culture, skills, age, marital status, education, etc.
It should not be controversial to say there are differences between immigrants and some have more positive and negative effects than others. Nor that nations have the right to choose between them.
The cultural/academic/managerial elite at the apex of WEIRD societies (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic) have already made history by being the first group ever recorded as having an Out Group bias (alert National Geographic!), and our WEIRD societies also may be the first where to be a member of the ruling class you have to be afflicted with a raging case of xenophilia.
I can only guess that we live in such incredibly rich and safe countries with such stable economic and legal foundations that we are all just too fat and happy to care that our elite are trying to see other people(s) behind our backs, but also our propaganda comes in so many rich flavors and colors that we all swallow the current wisdom—questioning immigration equals xenophobia and xenophobia is a hate crime only Nazis commit—happily without thinking.
I do wonder about all those obedient Narrative Enforcement Agents of the MSM, especially now that the layoffs are flying fast and furious: do they ever wonder or worry that a Diverse Immigrant could take their job or their kids' place in school? Or do they rest their heads on the pillow every night assured that the Diverse future would never come for anyone as wise and virtuous as they are?
My feeling is that we're being led by a tamer version of one of those medieval castration cults, where you offer your genitals (meaning future, progeny, patrimony) to god as a mark of the highest virtue. If these soldiers of God get their way (their god being "the Right Side of History™"), there will be no Western future that recognizes or prioritizes any Western peoples, culture, history or tradition.
Nice discussion. As a general rule (i.e., other things being equal), the amount of capital in a country per person will be directly proportional to the standard of living. In other words, the capital/population ratio is a good guide. For this reason even immigrants who are identical in skills, education, etc., with the average worker in the country they are immigrating to will reduce the capital/population ratio and hence standard of living in that country.
I dream of the day when we can have a logical, nuanced debate about immigration. In the UK, the "debate," if that's what you want to call it is so profoundly dishonest. Facts hardly ever come into the equation.
I recently was presented with a "push-poll" which tried to gauge, and manipulate, support for mass immigration to my country. One of the methods it used to encourage positive responses was to tell survey respondents that "the Economic Council of Canada has calculated that over the the previous five years immigration has increased economic growth by 0.6 % per year". The context left out of the survey was that immigration over the previous five years had increased the population by an average of 1.2% per year.
One of the more depressing phenomena in the realm of political discourse, is watching any number of so-called new right people, disproportionately the more female elements in it ; taking this narrative of 'immigration is good for the economy', and basically conceding it. Then they merge their anti-immigration advocacy with Marxist drivel, turning the movement retarded. While it's too late to smother this kind of stupidity in it's crib, maybe we can still break it's legs. Thanks for your contribution to this cause.
The worst of the worst is the invention of the chimera known as “civic nationalism”. It’s utter drivel as it completely ignores the genetic component of the character of various peoples and nations.
1) While total GDP is not necessarily important, it's not necessarily unimportant. All things being equal, if two countries have equal levels of economic development, and one has twice the population, then it will be able to militarily outcompete the other. This, in turn, may redound to the economic benefit of the population. A fairly obvious example is the relative fortunes of the British and French empires in the 19th century, substantially as the result of the latter's birth rate dropping long before the former's. This contributed to giving the average Englishman a higher standard of living. This might not to be relevant to many countries today, but it is definitely relevant to America's competition with China.
2) A more intelligent argument for immigration is that free movement of labour leads to more economic growth, just like free movement of any other good. We all agree with this, which is why we don't stop people from Liverpool getting jobs in Manchester or vice versa. To take the example you used, if every Frenchman currently working in England, and every Englishmen currently working in France, was deported, obviously this would have a harmful economic effect, since, presumably, the reason they chose to move was because this was where their skills could be best employed. There are two rebuttals to this:
(i) People are not like other economic goods in all sorts of ways, most notably that they can choose to earn their money, not by finding the highest price for their labour, but through crime (or, what is, from an economic view, more or less the same thing, through welfare). Since this is so, the actual effects of free movement of people can't be predicted by any economic theory we have unless you plug in the missing racism data. The test here is simple: are pro immigration advocates willing to deport immigrants who commit crime or live on welfare?
(ii) Perhaps states have interests in a way that cities and regions don't. In fact, obviously they do, but economic theory assumes that they don't, which, depending on the topic, might make economic theory so irrelevant as to be useless as a guide to action.
Well, my dude, coffee with salt is quite fun. That aside, when you import dependents obviously they will do fuck all, and be a major burden on your economy. Imagine, you are in a society where the avg IQ to be involved is 110, and you are inviting people with sub 80 or so IQ. How are they not to become dependants? It is ridiculous to say the least, then promotes a disgenic effect of the lowest reproducing by the most intelligent paying for it.
I’m not sure whether this point has been made elsewhere but an important thing to remember is that for the people who say ‘immigration is good for the economy’ it’s typically true that it is good for their own standard of living: Nice restaurants and cheap labour. This is typically, I think, what they actually mean.
This in reality are captain obvious things backed with hard data the only reason it isn't like that is because the racist-xenophobe fear monguering, anyway good work
"It comprises everything from highly skilled Indian tech-workers settling in the Bay Area to penniless Sudanese refugees fleeing across the border to Ethiopia. Are both these kinds of immigration good for the economy? I’m not so sure."
I'm not so sure about highly skilled Indian tech workers, but I am pretty sure the penniless Sudanese refugees would not be advantageous to the US economy.
When comparing GDPs, one must remember that GDP is determined significantly differently from one country to another.
population is positively correlated with gdp, gpd per capita slightly negative with population, and in the DANISH context, immigration is a net negative economically.
I see immigration as inevitable, yes controllable, but inevitable. Importing immigrants for unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled gaps in the labor market is necessary. Asylum is a right.
In this context, it seems to me that the only variable that can be sharpened is the capacity of a context to integrate immigrants. This is tied to a context that is necessarily welcoming, and good institutions that facilitate integration. Discrimination, lengthy bureaucracy, and artificially high standards on the way of labor market integration are key barriers. This is especially true for first gen immigrants.
For second and third gens, the most important factor is an education system that can serve the transformation and upward mobilty of these (now of course we are assuming those that are marginalized)
Immigration as an occurrence is largely inevitable, but the degree of it can still be easily manipulated.
Moreover, the importation of labour/work at various skill levels does not have to mean a guarantee of citizenship and thus indefinite stay in and integration into a country. Look at the Gulf States.
Specifically, if we are talking about mass immigration of low IQ and largely aggressive sub-Saharan Africans as well as low class Middle Eastern populations into Europe, this is very much avoidable with stricter border control, stricter requirements for welfare payments, and active deportation policies in coordination with other EU countries.
Education may help raise someone’s IQ somewhat but only to their phenotypic maximum, which is for these Middle Easterners low and for sub-Saharan Africans considerably lower, which will prevent their integration and upward mobility indefinitely.
Numbered paragraph by paragraph -- feel free to provide your side:
1- please describe, easy manipulation
2- why not?
3- I’m sure you’re well aware of your generalization. I agree with a structured migration system, which is fair both with benefits and sanctions. Now, you’re probably itched by the benefits side -- my question is, how do you address the problems that come with an aging population?
4- well, you’re going phenomenally wild with your phenotypical theory here. Please check back with your cookie receipt if it really says so
1. Mass immigration is not a forgone conclusion. Many countries have intentionally filtered their immigration system to select for the good ones and limit it at that.
2. What do you ‘why not’? That’s not a normative argument. It’s just an argument that there are many cases where immigration and guest-work does not carry with it the guarantee of citizenship. Again, the Gulf States prove this.
3. Phased destruction of dead-end welfare programmes which subsidize low IQ people to breed and further burden the entire economy with welfare transfers, health problems, and crime. Moreover, phased deportation of useless low IQ immigrants and refugees who, again, are a net negative in their contribution to the economy.
4. Everyone has a phenotypic maximum intelligence. That is, you can only become so smart under the most optimal conditions. Middle Easterns and North Africans have a significantly lower maximum than Northwest Europeans. Sub-Saharan Africans have an even lower maximum. Meaning, by virtue of their low IQs, they will naturally fall into the lower classes of society (as is borne out empirically), and will have little socially upwards mobility.
Some kinds of immigration are probably to some degree beneficial, but there are rather good data from different countries that immigration from Africa and the Middle East is net negative for living standards and public finances.
Claims that immigration is "good for the economy" often seem to refer to pay-as-you-go pension systems. But for most kinds of immigration except immigration of very high skilled people, two counterarguments must be made:
1. In some cases, the claim of economic net benefits is wrong even in the short term. E.g. it was celebrated by some that about half of the Syrian refugees that came to Germany in 2015 are now employed (the exact figures would be more complicated because of people who are doing an education, working outside the normal labor market etc.). If about half of them even after years live on benefits ("Bürgergeld") and have little chance of being integrated into the labor market, and the other half mostly works in low-wages jobs, it is obvious that this kind of immigration has been a large net negative even in the short term.
2. For kinds of immigration for low-skilled work, it looks like it is a small benefit for pay-as-you-go pension systems in the short term. But in the long term, usually a majority of people receive more from pay-as-you-go pension systems over their life time than they pay (this is definitely the case for the pay-as-you-go system in Switzerland, the first pillar), this is compensated by a minority of high earners who pay more than they receive. Therefore, in the long run, low and below average skilled immigration makes financing pay-as-you-go pension systems more difficult, not easier.
Yes. That's the right way to conceptualize it. The classic (now offensive) example was a lawyer who types fastervthan his secretary, but they both better off if he leaves the typing to her, and focuses on more productive work.
Unless... Importantly.. she then demands a salary equal to his. That's not a great deal for him.
The real economic reason to restrict low-earner immigrants is: the welfare state.
Is it possible that even though immigrants receive more in state benefits than they contribute in taxes, that they actually do boost living standards in the West if their contribution to overall productivity is much higher than their tax consumption? This wouldn’t necessarily be captured by simply comparing the standard of living of countries with higher or lower populations. For example, productivity in the West has risen dramatically in tandem with population growth.
Can you demonstrate that productivity per worker has risen in exact tandem to population growth? Also, doesn't an economy which is growing for reasons unrelated to population changes attract immigrants, while an economy which is shrinking encourage emigration? You might be reversing causality.
Okay fine, how about this: if a larger population makes us wealthier then a smaller population should make us poorer, so it is grossly immoral to accept immigrants from any country with a lower standard of living; we are literally making poor countries poorer!
Back on Brexit fallout days Twitter I (a Remainer) posted the story of my friend, an interior designer. His business in London was a wiped out by incoming highly skilled and ultra cheap Polish interior designers, when Poland acceded to the EU. I was bombarded with spreadsheets proving that this immigration had grown the economy, which of course it had. When I pointed out that spreadsheets, with abstract numbers on them, aren't people they resorted to saying that my story was false. The funny thing was that my friend wasn't even annoyed about his business collapsing under the pressure of impossible competition. He lives here in France now. But immigration definitely made him worse off for a while.
Excellent article. It drives me crazy when people make sweeping claims about the effects of immigration and totally ignore that immigrants have widely differing characteristics, including culture, skills, age, marital status, education, etc.
It should not be controversial to say there are differences between immigrants and some have more positive and negative effects than others. Nor that nations have the right to choose between them.
Ah, but you're ... (consults notes)... perpetuating a trope about the good immigrant and the bad one. I'm quoting from a Twitter reply there.
The cultural/academic/managerial elite at the apex of WEIRD societies (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic) have already made history by being the first group ever recorded as having an Out Group bias (alert National Geographic!), and our WEIRD societies also may be the first where to be a member of the ruling class you have to be afflicted with a raging case of xenophilia.
I can only guess that we live in such incredibly rich and safe countries with such stable economic and legal foundations that we are all just too fat and happy to care that our elite are trying to see other people(s) behind our backs, but also our propaganda comes in so many rich flavors and colors that we all swallow the current wisdom—questioning immigration equals xenophobia and xenophobia is a hate crime only Nazis commit—happily without thinking.
I do wonder about all those obedient Narrative Enforcement Agents of the MSM, especially now that the layoffs are flying fast and furious: do they ever wonder or worry that a Diverse Immigrant could take their job or their kids' place in school? Or do they rest their heads on the pillow every night assured that the Diverse future would never come for anyone as wise and virtuous as they are?
My feeling is that we're being led by a tamer version of one of those medieval castration cults, where you offer your genitals (meaning future, progeny, patrimony) to god as a mark of the highest virtue. If these soldiers of God get their way (their god being "the Right Side of History™"), there will be no Western future that recognizes or prioritizes any Western peoples, culture, history or tradition.
Nice discussion. As a general rule (i.e., other things being equal), the amount of capital in a country per person will be directly proportional to the standard of living. In other words, the capital/population ratio is a good guide. For this reason even immigrants who are identical in skills, education, etc., with the average worker in the country they are immigrating to will reduce the capital/population ratio and hence standard of living in that country.
I dream of the day when we can have a logical, nuanced debate about immigration. In the UK, the "debate," if that's what you want to call it is so profoundly dishonest. Facts hardly ever come into the equation.
Same in the USA.
I think ideologues like it that way!
I recently was presented with a "push-poll" which tried to gauge, and manipulate, support for mass immigration to my country. One of the methods it used to encourage positive responses was to tell survey respondents that "the Economic Council of Canada has calculated that over the the previous five years immigration has increased economic growth by 0.6 % per year". The context left out of the survey was that immigration over the previous five years had increased the population by an average of 1.2% per year.
One of the more depressing phenomena in the realm of political discourse, is watching any number of so-called new right people, disproportionately the more female elements in it ; taking this narrative of 'immigration is good for the economy', and basically conceding it. Then they merge their anti-immigration advocacy with Marxist drivel, turning the movement retarded. While it's too late to smother this kind of stupidity in it's crib, maybe we can still break it's legs. Thanks for your contribution to this cause.
The worst of the worst is the invention of the chimera known as “civic nationalism”. It’s utter drivel as it completely ignores the genetic component of the character of various peoples and nations.
A couple of points.
1) While total GDP is not necessarily important, it's not necessarily unimportant. All things being equal, if two countries have equal levels of economic development, and one has twice the population, then it will be able to militarily outcompete the other. This, in turn, may redound to the economic benefit of the population. A fairly obvious example is the relative fortunes of the British and French empires in the 19th century, substantially as the result of the latter's birth rate dropping long before the former's. This contributed to giving the average Englishman a higher standard of living. This might not to be relevant to many countries today, but it is definitely relevant to America's competition with China.
2) A more intelligent argument for immigration is that free movement of labour leads to more economic growth, just like free movement of any other good. We all agree with this, which is why we don't stop people from Liverpool getting jobs in Manchester or vice versa. To take the example you used, if every Frenchman currently working in England, and every Englishmen currently working in France, was deported, obviously this would have a harmful economic effect, since, presumably, the reason they chose to move was because this was where their skills could be best employed. There are two rebuttals to this:
(i) People are not like other economic goods in all sorts of ways, most notably that they can choose to earn their money, not by finding the highest price for their labour, but through crime (or, what is, from an economic view, more or less the same thing, through welfare). Since this is so, the actual effects of free movement of people can't be predicted by any economic theory we have unless you plug in the missing racism data. The test here is simple: are pro immigration advocates willing to deport immigrants who commit crime or live on welfare?
(ii) Perhaps states have interests in a way that cities and regions don't. In fact, obviously they do, but economic theory assumes that they don't, which, depending on the topic, might make economic theory so irrelevant as to be useless as a guide to action.
Well, my dude, coffee with salt is quite fun. That aside, when you import dependents obviously they will do fuck all, and be a major burden on your economy. Imagine, you are in a society where the avg IQ to be involved is 110, and you are inviting people with sub 80 or so IQ. How are they not to become dependants? It is ridiculous to say the least, then promotes a disgenic effect of the lowest reproducing by the most intelligent paying for it.
Welcome to the West, or Europe.
I’m not sure whether this point has been made elsewhere but an important thing to remember is that for the people who say ‘immigration is good for the economy’ it’s typically true that it is good for their own standard of living: Nice restaurants and cheap labour. This is typically, I think, what they actually mean.
This in reality are captain obvious things backed with hard data the only reason it isn't like that is because the racist-xenophobe fear monguering, anyway good work
"It comprises everything from highly skilled Indian tech-workers settling in the Bay Area to penniless Sudanese refugees fleeing across the border to Ethiopia. Are both these kinds of immigration good for the economy? I’m not so sure."
I'm not so sure about highly skilled Indian tech workers, but I am pretty sure the penniless Sudanese refugees would not be advantageous to the US economy.
When comparing GDPs, one must remember that GDP is determined significantly differently from one country to another.
Excellent presentation, thanks.
So takeaways from the data provided are:
population is positively correlated with gdp, gpd per capita slightly negative with population, and in the DANISH context, immigration is a net negative economically.
I see immigration as inevitable, yes controllable, but inevitable. Importing immigrants for unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled gaps in the labor market is necessary. Asylum is a right.
In this context, it seems to me that the only variable that can be sharpened is the capacity of a context to integrate immigrants. This is tied to a context that is necessarily welcoming, and good institutions that facilitate integration. Discrimination, lengthy bureaucracy, and artificially high standards on the way of labor market integration are key barriers. This is especially true for first gen immigrants.
For second and third gens, the most important factor is an education system that can serve the transformation and upward mobilty of these (now of course we are assuming those that are marginalized)
Immigration as an occurrence is largely inevitable, but the degree of it can still be easily manipulated.
Moreover, the importation of labour/work at various skill levels does not have to mean a guarantee of citizenship and thus indefinite stay in and integration into a country. Look at the Gulf States.
Specifically, if we are talking about mass immigration of low IQ and largely aggressive sub-Saharan Africans as well as low class Middle Eastern populations into Europe, this is very much avoidable with stricter border control, stricter requirements for welfare payments, and active deportation policies in coordination with other EU countries.
Education may help raise someone’s IQ somewhat but only to their phenotypic maximum, which is for these Middle Easterners low and for sub-Saharan Africans considerably lower, which will prevent their integration and upward mobility indefinitely.
Numbered paragraph by paragraph -- feel free to provide your side:
1- please describe, easy manipulation
2- why not?
3- I’m sure you’re well aware of your generalization. I agree with a structured migration system, which is fair both with benefits and sanctions. Now, you’re probably itched by the benefits side -- my question is, how do you address the problems that come with an aging population?
4- well, you’re going phenomenally wild with your phenotypical theory here. Please check back with your cookie receipt if it really says so
1. Mass immigration is not a forgone conclusion. Many countries have intentionally filtered their immigration system to select for the good ones and limit it at that.
2. What do you ‘why not’? That’s not a normative argument. It’s just an argument that there are many cases where immigration and guest-work does not carry with it the guarantee of citizenship. Again, the Gulf States prove this.
3. Phased destruction of dead-end welfare programmes which subsidize low IQ people to breed and further burden the entire economy with welfare transfers, health problems, and crime. Moreover, phased deportation of useless low IQ immigrants and refugees who, again, are a net negative in their contribution to the economy.
4. Everyone has a phenotypic maximum intelligence. That is, you can only become so smart under the most optimal conditions. Middle Easterns and North Africans have a significantly lower maximum than Northwest Europeans. Sub-Saharan Africans have an even lower maximum. Meaning, by virtue of their low IQs, they will naturally fall into the lower classes of society (as is borne out empirically), and will have little socially upwards mobility.
Some kinds of immigration are probably to some degree beneficial, but there are rather good data from different countries that immigration from Africa and the Middle East is net negative for living standards and public finances.
Claims that immigration is "good for the economy" often seem to refer to pay-as-you-go pension systems. But for most kinds of immigration except immigration of very high skilled people, two counterarguments must be made:
1. In some cases, the claim of economic net benefits is wrong even in the short term. E.g. it was celebrated by some that about half of the Syrian refugees that came to Germany in 2015 are now employed (the exact figures would be more complicated because of people who are doing an education, working outside the normal labor market etc.). If about half of them even after years live on benefits ("Bürgergeld") and have little chance of being integrated into the labor market, and the other half mostly works in low-wages jobs, it is obvious that this kind of immigration has been a large net negative even in the short term.
2. For kinds of immigration for low-skilled work, it looks like it is a small benefit for pay-as-you-go pension systems in the short term. But in the long term, usually a majority of people receive more from pay-as-you-go pension systems over their life time than they pay (this is definitely the case for the pay-as-you-go system in Switzerland, the first pillar), this is compensated by a minority of high earners who pay more than they receive. Therefore, in the long run, low and below average skilled immigration makes financing pay-as-you-go pension systems more difficult, not easier.
Is not the standard argument Ricardian Comparative Advantage, that is as a first approximation, putting aside various externalities and such.
Ricardian Comparative Advantage assumes/requires labor and capital immobility.
Yes. That's the right way to conceptualize it. The classic (now offensive) example was a lawyer who types fastervthan his secretary, but they both better off if he leaves the typing to her, and focuses on more productive work.
Unless... Importantly.. she then demands a salary equal to his. That's not a great deal for him.
The real economic reason to restrict low-earner immigrants is: the welfare state.
Is it possible that even though immigrants receive more in state benefits than they contribute in taxes, that they actually do boost living standards in the West if their contribution to overall productivity is much higher than their tax consumption? This wouldn’t necessarily be captured by simply comparing the standard of living of countries with higher or lower populations. For example, productivity in the West has risen dramatically in tandem with population growth.
Can you demonstrate that productivity per worker has risen in exact tandem to population growth? Also, doesn't an economy which is growing for reasons unrelated to population changes attract immigrants, while an economy which is shrinking encourage emigration? You might be reversing causality.
Just seems like the overall trend. Compare US population/standard of living in 1700s vs 2023.
Okay fine, how about this: if a larger population makes us wealthier then a smaller population should make us poorer, so it is grossly immoral to accept immigrants from any country with a lower standard of living; we are literally making poor countries poorer!
How do you figure they contributing to overall productivity in a way that is jot captured
Back on Brexit fallout days Twitter I (a Remainer) posted the story of my friend, an interior designer. His business in London was a wiped out by incoming highly skilled and ultra cheap Polish interior designers, when Poland acceded to the EU. I was bombarded with spreadsheets proving that this immigration had grown the economy, which of course it had. When I pointed out that spreadsheets, with abstract numbers on them, aren't people they resorted to saying that my story was false. The funny thing was that my friend wasn't even annoyed about his business collapsing under the pressure of impossible competition. He lives here in France now. But immigration definitely made him worse off for a while.
People who want to win brownie points and virtue-signal will grasp at any argument post hoc to justify the zeitgeist accepted opinion.