In the 1980s, the leader of the Republican Party, President Ronald Reagan, was famously enthusiastic about the importance of immigration to American success. He was fond of saying that “[a]nyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American,” and he believed strongly that this was a pillar of American greatness. As an academic social scientist, I can report that, although they may not put it as movingly, in the last few decades economists have confirmed that Reagan was right — our ability to assimilate immigrants is probably our greatest superpower, and is the reason we are a superpower. It is astonishing and painful how far the Republican Party has moved from this insight.
Reagan was arguably ahead of the curve in his view of immigrants. As recently as the early 2000s there was substantial disagreement in the field of economics about the impact of immigration. Since then, a flood of studies has shown how beneficial immigration has been, and how the United States is uniquely strong at incorporating immigrants. Michael Clemens and others have documented how immigrants can benefit American-born workers, the communities they arrive in, and even the communities they left. Anne Piehl and her co-authors showed that far from being dangerous and criminal, immigrants are more law-abiding than native-born Americans and have been since the 1800s. Carefully applying advanced data analytics to census and other records, Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky show that assimilation and economic success by immigrants has continued to stay at high rates from the 19th century to today.
Moving from the stories of individuals and communities to the country as a whole, the benefits of immigration can be seen in the continuing growth of the American economy. Immigration both helps to increase our per person income, but analyses such as the Penn Wharton Budget Model show it also helps increase the income of the nation as a whole. This is important when we think about the role of the United States in the world, as it deals with rivals such as China: without immigration the US would see declining population and a stagnating GDP, badly limiting our ability to protect our interests in the world.
Given all this, the current debate on immigration is, bluntly, absolutely crazy. It’s as if Americans were discussing motherhood and apple pie — but it was considered a given that all mothers commit infanticide and all apples are laced with cyanide! And while many politicians on all sides have contributed to this, the current leader of the Republican Party Donald Trump has been most aggressive and is now consistently promising to deport 15-25 million immigrants.
There is no doubt that if elected he can and will pull this off. Like two of the signal accomplishments of his first term, increasing tariffs and banning Muslim immigration, it can be done purely with executive branch powers. He has a group of experienced lieutenants who are enthusiastic about getting started on it, most notably Stephen Miller. With the Supreme Court firmly behind him and almost certainly a Republican Senate as well, no serious check or balance will be in his way. And there is no doubt it will be expensive — journalist Radley Balko has shown that the operation itself will cost at a minimum hundreds of billions of dollars.
With all these certainties, there are many outstanding questions — to me, there are three in particular.
The first is where? Where will all these people go? Deportations are hard to pull off without the cooperation of the country of origin. We can expect many countries to push back against mass deportations, requiring facilities — camps — to hold deportees being processed.
The second is who? Twenty-five million people is more than double the best estimates of illegal immigrants in the United States, and more than the number of all non-naturalized immigrants combined. The first Trump administration worked to de-naturalize US citizens, and many of his supporters are actively hostile to constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship. Will naturalized and native-born citizens be deported as well?
And finally — why? If you believe, with Ronald Reagan and this writer, that the United States of America is the greatest country that has ever existed, and you further see how essential a growing, dynamic economy is to its future success, why would you hobble it by destroying its great superpower?
Geoffrey Williams is a professor of economics at Transylvania University, who has published research on the economics of crime and the role of economics in international relations and national security. These views are his own and not that of Transylvania’s.
This story was originally published October 16, 2024 11:34 AM.