The United States Needs More Immigrants

Here are 10 reasons why I think the United States should dramatically increase the number of immigrants we take in.

1. Lots Of People Want To Become Americans

As of 2013 there are 138 million adults around that world that want to become US citizens. I'm sure there are some amazingly talented individuals who would make this country even better. Why aren't we taking them?^[2]

2. We Can Take More People

In 1907 there were 1,285,349^[3] immigrations out of a population of 87,008,000^[4] representing a ratio of 1.48%. This was the high water mark in terms of new immigrations as a percentage of our population. Contrast this to 2013 where there were only 990,553^[3] immigrants to a country of 316,128,839^[5], a ratio of 0.31%. We are taking in 4.77 times less immigrants as a percentage of our population than we were 106 years ago. Using the 1907 ratio, we would be taking in almost 5 million new immigrants per year. Clearly we have more capacity to take in and assimilate immigrants, and we should start doing this as soon as possible.

3. We Need More Skilled Workers

We have loads of ideas and capital just waiting to be unleashed but a lack of qualified engineers and scientists is holding things back. As a result there is a huge push in the tech industry to increase the number of H1B Visas. I have issues with H1B visas, and would rather just make these people citizens.

4. We Have A Brain Drain

The US has the best higher education system in the world. Our Universities consistently dominate in research across the board. We bring over millions of foreign students every year and educate them, and then send them right back home (often rudely to boot). This is most definitely a form of brain drain - and there is no reason we can't grant citizenship to any foreign student who earns a degree at a US university. In fact I'd go further and suggest that we recruit the world's best and brightest with full scholarships^[6]. Instead of a brain drain, we should become a brain magnet!

5. We Have 12 Million Second Class Citizens

We have a seemingly intractable situation with around 12 million undocumented immigrants. These people our members of our community, they work hard often doing the jobs that citizens won't, they are our family members. But they live in a state of constant fear of being discovered, and as a result deported and torn away from their family and what has become their country. Many of them were brought here as children and know of no other home. The only way to solve this is to legalize these people. With the current rate of immigration, simply putting these people in the backlog would take decades - which is untenable. Therefore, as a practical matter we must increase the number of legal immigrants we let in per year.

6. Immigrants Bring New Energy And Ideas

I'm very spoiled to live in New York City - a hub of immigrants for the better part of two centuries. The people who come here bring their cultures, their languages, their food, and a hunger to 'make it' in America. It's an incredible environment and represents the best of America. Immigrants have started some of our most important companies. The list includes Elon Musk (PayPay, Tesla, and SpaceX), Sergey Brin (Google) Jerry Yang (Yahoo), and Pierre Omidyar (eBay) to name a few. Immigrants such as Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger have gone on to become some of our most important statesmen. Albert Einstein immigrated to the US and helped win World War 2 with his work on the Manhattan Project. Many millions more, and their children, and grandchildren have made this country great in so many ways. Why wouldn't we want more?

7. Immigrants Grow Our Economy

The US has some long term fiscal issues, mainly surrounding government spending on services, that need to be addressed. We have three choices to solve our fiscal issues - increase taxes, decrease spending, or increase growth. Obviously the most pleasant way forward is to grow faster. This can be accomplished by both growing GDP per capita, as well as simply increasing the population. Increasing the number of immigrants per year is a very easy way to increase the population, and thus the GDP. We have a lot of fixed costs (the military, financial assistance to the elderly, etc) that would be shared by more people as a result. We could use the surplus this generates to reduce the deficit, pay down the debt, cut taxes, or make much needed investments in things like infrastructure, education, and innovation.

8. There Is Strength In Numbers

The rest of the world is getting richer, and fast. China is in the process of overtaking the US as the world's largest economy. As the BRIC and Next Eleven countries rise, the balance of power will surely shift. Overall this is good - these countries have largely been very poor for a long time, and with the economic growth unleashed over the last few decades hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty. However, being particularly biased as a US citizen, I like being number 1. I also like the corresponding hard power that comes with being the richest country. The US is less than 5% of the global population, but because we have such as high GDP/capita, we have a very high GDP and thus a lot of power. Over the next few decades our GDP/capita advantage will slowly erode. Assuming the wealth of a country roughly correlates to hard power, this means the US will decline unless we increase our wealth commencerately. If we are to keep any semblance of our super power status, it is therefore critical that we keep growing our economy, and as outlined in the previous point, increasing immigration can help.

9. The World Economy Would Be More Efficient

Many smart and capable people are trapped in economic systems where they are underutilized. Increasing the free movement of people to places like the US where their skill set can be put to better use will increase the productivity of these people. This is a fairly straight forward way to make the world richer. If we target the increase in immigration to be made up of people from the poorest countries, the increase in aggregate wealth would be greater. Furthermore, remittences back to these countries could be particularly helpful in combating extreme poverty.

10. America Should Be A Land Of Opportunity

In the Statue of Liberty there is an engraved poem that says "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Maybe it's something we never lived up to, but we certainly should try to. There are currently 60,000 children refugees on our southern border, many of whom are fleeing horrific conditions in their home countries. Although it may not be prudent to get involved militarily in situations like Syria, we can and should welcome the people displaced by these atrocities into our country. Finally, over the last 13 years we effectively broke Afghanistan and Iraq. Now that we are leaving them behind, the least we can do is to bring over anyone who helped us in our efforts (and thus may now be in danger of retribution), and probably a whole lot more of their fellow countrymen.

<sup>1. June 2014 study by Gallup ↩
2. There is also potential to directly financially benefit from this pent up demand for US citizenship. Gary Becker proposed we auction off 1 million citizenships per year at $50,000 - which would generate $50 Billion in revenue per year. ↩
3. DHS historical immigration stats excel file ↩
4. Historical Census population data ↩
5. Recent Census population data ↩
6. Of course to be even remotely politically viable this would need to be coupled with making college cheaper and also giving out scholarships to US born children. ↩</sup>