Immigration has been a huge driving force behind creating America as we know it today. Without immigrants, or with far fewer immigrants, it would be impossible to imagine the United States developing into the world’s dominant economic powerhouse as it did. Opposition to immigration has been allowed to gradually place the American dream out of reach for so many ambitious individuals and deprive the country of further potential in the process.
Not only have their ideas failed on their terms, they have backfired, creating more lawlessness than before.
Although I’m looking for reasons to be optimistic and I’m hoping my predictions about Trump continue to be as wrong going forward as they have been up to this point, the weight of evidence convinces me that his immigration policies will likely be just as bad as many of us feared.
If we believe in liberty for migrants as well as Americans, we must grant them liberty peacefully to travel the world unmolested and to settle wherever they find homes to rent and enterprises to work for.
U.S. policymakers cannot base their estimates of how refugees will impact the labor market on the situation in Germany. Labor market institutions in the United States are better equipped to handle an influx of new workers.
The introduction of low-skilled immigrants frees up time for native workers to improve their skills and move on to higher paying jobs. This is a desirable economic development from the migrant, as well as the native, laborers perspective.
Emigration restrictions are guaranteed to injure the would-be emigrants in exchange for a very small positive effect on those who would not emigrate – if there is a positive effect at all. It’s a foolish policy that does more harm to more people than just letting skilled foreigners seek jobs where they are most highly valued.
Editor’s Note: This post was first published on the Cato at Liberty blog. The Syrian Civil War has produced about 5.8 million Syrians seeking refuge or asylum elsewhere–a scale of population displacement unseen since World War II. Although the flow into Europe dominates the news, most of the registered Syrian refugees remain in the Middle […]
🌍 Meet attendees from 60+ countries
💡 Explore 20+ sessions with top speakers
📍 Washington, D.C. | Feb 7-8