Is population growth a bad thing? Much of the Left believes it is, and some of their unlikely allies on the Right have started to agree. The Left tends to see people as polluters, which makes every additional birth a burden on the planet. Some self-styled conservatives reach the same destination by a different road: More people means fewer jobs to go around, but only when those people are born abroad.
Both sides are selling the same product: degrowth. And if the Right seeks to grow economic opportunities for Americans, it must reject zero-sum thinking and embrace markets as the conservative immigration policy.
A serious conservative immigration agenda should do what we demand of every other sphere of public policy. This is what a market-based immigration approach would do: cut back on luck and family ties and instead prioritize the economic and cultural interests of the United States by selecting immigrants who would contribute most to the economy and who also happen to assimilate best into American culture.
First, claiming that immigrants steal American jobs is a misunderstanding of how an economy works. If immigrants only took jobs, why did unemployment reach its lowest level in half a century precisely when immigration ran near record highs? Or why has the unemployment rate continued to rise in the last year despite the massive deportation ramp-up?
The same logic that says immigrants shrink the job supply would have to say that rising birth rates doom the labor market, since babies eventually grow up and look for work. It would have to say that welfare reform in the 1990s, which pushed millions of recipients into jobs, threw other workers onto the street. Yet conservatives champion increasing birth rates and pulling Americans out of welfare. We will always have as many jobs as there are people able to work.
The real labor-market effect of immigration shows up not in whether people have jobs but in relative wages — and even that effect is smaller than many suggest because there is no single labor market. There are hundreds of them. A physician does not compete with a construction worker, nor does a welder in Alaska compete with a welder in Texas. People can retrain or relocate, but they don’t do it often, so distinct markets form and persist.
Consider that more than 200 U.S. counties have no primary care physician at all. Why don’t American doctors in New York City pick up and move there? Aren’t wages high enough with a labor supply of zero? If America admitted a few hundred foreign doctors to serve those communities, which American physician would lose an opportunity? None, but thousands of American citizens would live healthier, longer lives.
None of this means every immigrant is good for the U.S. because immigrants aren’t just workers; they are people. While a robot simply works and thus we love free trade of robots or technology, immigrants also pay taxes and receive welfare, they vote once they naturalize, and they interact with people around them by helping them, but also committing crimes and demanding housing. An immigrant who ends up dependent on welfare rather than paying into the system is not a gift to current citizens; he is a burden.
The central question of immigration policy is not how many immigrants but which. And the answer should be based on admitting the people whose presence makes existing Americans better off. Admitting a thousand English-speaking immigrants with job offers of $100,000 in salary annually or higher is not the same as admitting a thousand refugees who do not speak the language and will immediately depend on welfare and be more likely to commit crimes.
Unfortunately, the U.S. is not selective enough when it comes to immigration. The federal government issues approximately 1 million green cards to immigrants annually, giving them the right to reside here permanently and to apply for naturalization after five years. Over a third of green cards go to the spouses and children of citizens and permanent residents. Over 1 in 7 go to the aging parents of citizens, immigrants who arrive at the end of their working lives rather than the start, and with little education and English proficiency. The rest is dominated by extended relatives, refugees, and winners of a “diversity” lottery that selects for country of origin rather than contribution. Only roughly 1 in 8 immigrants are chosen on the basis of skills or a job, and that figure includes their own spouses and children.
A market-based conservative approach to immigration should look at this selection and see an enormous missed opportunity. We are running one of the most consequential selection systems on Earth almost on autopilot, letting family ties and luck do the choosing that merit and need should do. Imagine instead a system built to ask, for every visa, a simple question: Will this person, over a lifetime, add more to America than they take? Prioritize workers over dependents, the founders who build companies, the scientists and physicians, and tradespeople who pay far more in taxes than they draw in benefits, over adding more retirees or low-paid workers.
Conservatives such as Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) have already outlined proposals such as the Securing Migration, Addressing Reform, and Talent Retention Act that would move the immigration system toward one based on markets rather than luck, ending chain migration and lotteries in favor of employment-based migration. My own research finds that these measures would save the federal government trillions over the long run, and employer sponsorship is a much better predictor of immigrant success than even the origin country.
RESTORING AMERICA: THE 14TH AMENDMENT’S AUTHOR WOULDN’T ACCEPT THE SUPREME COURT’S INTERPRETATION
The degrowth Left supports only the types of immigration that consume American resources — refugees and chain migration — while the nativist Right thinks white Afrikaans-speaking refugees from South Africa are better than highly-paid English-speaking Indian or Korean immigrants. Each treats immigration as a threat to be minimized rather than a source of prosperity.
The better and more conservative answer is not fewer immigrants, but better ones, chosen deliberately through the market by employers, for the benefit of the Americans already here. Meritocracy and markets, not luck, are the American way.