Immigration: More Nickels than Dimes

Three reasons why the positive impact goes beyond crude costs and benefits.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Article created by The Century Foundation.

Economists treat immigration like any other phenomenon that generates costs and benefits. They ask the economist’s one-size-fits-all question: What are the additional benefits and costs to Americans of admitting a few additional immigrants? This kind of marginal-change analysis applied to all immigration is flawed for three reasons.

1. By looking at the benefits and costs only to today’s Americans, this analysis biases the discussion against immigration. “Will the last one in please shut the door” is the message likely to emerge. Since virtually all Americans are descendents of immigrants, it is not reasonable to exclude the welfare of today’s immigrants—tomorrow’s new citizens—from the analysis. Any discussion that requires a substantial net benefit for today’s citizens sets the bar too high. Since it is obvious that potential immigrants are willing to leave family and friends, risking discrimination, detention, and even death, to come to the United States, the net benefits to them must be very high. Impoverished relatives left behind benefit too, from the remittances immigrants send home. Such remittances now exceed a billion dollars a month to Mexico alone.

2. The benefits of immigration to today’s Americans are more than the sum of changes in household income from changing the supply of labor and skills. The creativity and dynamism of our economy that is so widely admired all over the world would not exist without immigration. Where would today’s information technology industry be without immigrants from China, India, and Russia? More broadly, where would our leadership in science and technology be without infusions of genius through immigration. Of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences since 1950, 28 percent of those who did their work in the United States were born elsewhere.

3. Most fundamentally, America without a flow of new immigrants would be a much poorer place culturally and spiritually as well as economically. Those periods in our history when anti-immigrant sentiments were at their peak—in the 1870s and 1880s following the Irish immigration, in the interwar period following the Italian, Eastern European, and Jewish immigration, and in the immediate post–WWII period—all benefited from contributions of earlier waves of immigrants. It is hard to imagine an America that is not always changing, always adjusting to new Americans.

Those who would like drastically to limit new immigration are not fundamentally interested in the marginal economic effects of another immigrant household on American citizens (an effect which, by the way, experts agree is positive, if small). They resent the changes to the society they grew up in. What they fail to realize is that the society of their childhood—real or imagined—is no more “authentically American” than today’s America. This country is constantly changing, economically and culturally. Everyone alive today was born into a dynamic, mongrel culture and can expect it to change in surprising ways every year. Immigration is part of authentic America’s soul.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate