Last week, President Joe Biden announced a crackdown on migrants trying to cross the southern border. The responses from immigrants’-rights groups, civil-rights groups, and some Democratic politicians were instantaneous. Senator Alex Padilla, of California, said that the new policy—which empowers border agents to quickly deport people who cross between ports of entry, by drastically restricting their ability to claim asylum—“undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.”
But at least one economist, who strongly favors liberal immigration policies, was more sympathetic to the White House’s move. “The situation at the southern border has been chaotic,” Giovanni Peri, who directs the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis, told me. “It has been hurting the case for immigration because people have only been talking about that, and not talking about all the migrants who have been coming here and working and boosting the economy.”
Michael Clemens, an economist at George Mason University who is an expert on immigration, said that some of the coverage of the new policy, particularly online, had been misleading. Under certain exceptions enumerated in the plan, at least sixty thousand migrants—with access to parole pending an asylum or other court hearing—are likely to be lawfully admitted to the U.S. each month, about six times as many as under Donald Trump, Clemens said. “This is not a return to Trump,” he told me. “There is no comparison.” Biden’s plan, which went into effect on Wednesday, does limit most asylum claims for migrants crossing between ports of entry, until the daily average of migrant arrests falls and stays below certain thresholds. But Clemens pointed out that migrants could still schedule appointments to appear at border posts, or could apply under a separate, special admissions program that the Biden Administration has set up for residents of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Nevertheless, he and Peri both agreed that there is an urgent need to accompany the new policy with more legal-entry options for the migrants who are trying to cross the southern border. “We can easily absorb these people, and the economy needs them,” Peri said. Clemens also argued that expanding legal channels is necessary to secure the border: “Just denying access is very likely to encourage more clandestine entry. It may be completely ineffective.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, net immigration to the U.S. surged to 2.6 million in 2022 and 3.3 million in 2023, and the majority of this increase came in the form of migrants who were granted parole either pending an asylum hearing or for other reasons. In a much discussed paper that was published a few months ago, Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, two economists at the Brookings Institution, argued that the entry of many of these new migrants into the U.S. helped enable the economy to grow and increased total employment, even as the Fed raised interest rates sharply to bring down inflation. New migrants contribute to economic growth in two ways: by working and by spending. Their presence in unexpectedly high numbers “explains some of the surprising strength in consumer spending and overall economic growth since 2022,” Edelberg and Watson wrote. “Moreover, we expect immigration flows to further boost economic growth in 2024.”
When I called up Edelberg, she said it was hard to predict exactly what impact the new border policy would have. But, if it worked out as planned, the policy would eventually reduce the number of people seeking asylum only by about twenty-five per cent. “What Biden is doing is relatively modest in relation to the broader economy,” Edelberg said. “It’s not nothing, but it’s not going to have a dramatic effect immediately.”
This analysis illustrates a more general point about immigration policy, which right-wing politicians have ruthlessly demagogued for decades. The tropes that tend to dominate public discussion often have little basis in fact, and the facts that should be at the center of the discussion often go ignored. Take, for example, the claim often made by Republicans that the country is being “swamped” by migrants crossing the southern border. It’s certainly true that a surge in unauthorized immigration during the past couple of years has created considerable challenges for communities in border states, and for cities such as New York and Chicago, which have received large inflows of migrants. But it is barely mentioned that this recent surge—which is largely rooted in people fleeing poverty and dysfunction in troubled Latin American countries, such as Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela—comes after a decade in which the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States declined.
According to recent estimates by the Department of Homeland Security, in 2010 there were 11.6 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. In 2022, there were eleven million. So, even though the number of unauthorized arrivals has risen sharply in the past couple of years, this follows a period in which large numbers of undocumented immigrants returned home, especially to Mexico, causing the over-all number still living here to fall slightly. It’s also true that during the past two decades the number of foreign-born people living in the United States has increased significantly—from 31.1 million in 2000 to 46.2 million in 2022, according to the Census Bureau. But legal immigration has accounted for most of this jump, and many of the arrivals have been skilled workers. “Since 2000, net immigration has become massively more concentrated among highly educated workers,” Peri, of the Global Migration Center, pointed out.
To be sure, many of the migrants crossing the southern border don’t have an advanced education. But two more unsung realities are relevant here. Based on news coverage, particularly on television, it’s easy to get the impression that most of the migrants are unable to work and are languishing in taxpayer-funded shelters. That impression is almost certainly inaccurate. Migrants who have been given asylum-processing appointments or granted humanitarian parole are eligible to apply for temporary work permits. “Looking at payroll-employment data, it is very consistent with high labor-participation rates among recent migrants,” Edelberg said. “They appear to be working in a very similar pattern to other recent waves of immigration.” Some commentators have queried this argument, saying there is little evidence of a jump in over-all financial remittances by migrants to their home countries. Edelberg said that the remittances data merely suggest to her that “brand-new migrants aren’t yet sending a lot of money home.”
The second important reality is that, in the coming decades, we are going to need many more of these types of workers to keep the U.S. economy growing and to fill essential jobs in industries such as construction, agriculture, food processing, hospitality, and long-term care. The potential shortage of workers is based on inexorable demographic trends: declining fertility rates and the aging of the U.S. population. According to this year’s Economic Report of the President, which is prepared by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, between 2023 and 2052, the share of workers aged twenty-five to fifty-four is expected to grow at an average annual rate of just 0.2 per cent. That’s a fifth of the growth rate between 1980 and 2021. And even this puny 0.2 per-cent rate depends on large numbers of new immigrants arriving year after year. “Without positive net migration, the U.S. population is projected to begin shrinking by about 2040,” the report said.
Sustaining healthy economic growth alongside a stable or declining population is theoretically conceivable: it would depend on making existing workers significantly more productive every year. A.I. optimists would say that should be possible. But the experience of Japan, where the population has declined in the past decade and a half, and where economic growth has stagnated, demonstrates the challenge that the United States would face if immigration was severely curtailed, as Trump and other Republicans have called for. “Our economy needs immigrants to grow over the long term,” Edelberg said. “What we really need to do is open up more pathways for legal immigration.”
Peri emphasized the importance of making such pathways readily available not only to highly trained workers, such as computer engineers headed to Silicon Valley, but also to the types of migrants who have been crossing the southern border. During the past few years, labor shortages have already emerged in parts of the economy where low-skilled immigrants tend to work, such as construction and elderly care. (Earlier this year, the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group said that the industry would need to attract half a million workers beyond its usual rate of hiring to meet demand in 2024.) “In the next ten or twenty years, it will be even more important to do proper and comprehensive immigration reform,” Peri said. “If we only deal with border security and don’t do anything about expanding legal immigration, we are not really doing anything.” ♦