Welcome to another Head-to-Head discussion, where conservative talking points get dismantled with facts.
- CBS News is reporting that the White House is considering an expansion of immigration detention and deportation, and supporting a new border authority to expel migrants without asylum screenings as a concession to get Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine aid passed in Congress.
- Essentially, what’s being discussed is a return to Trump era Title 42 orders, to allow officials to pause U.S. asylum law, without a public health justification. Concessions would also accept a process known as expedited removal that allows immigration officials to deport migrants without court hearings if they don’t ask for asylum or if they fail their initial asylum interviews.
Let’s consult the research and data that show us what immigration actually does to an economy.
In an opinion piece from The Hill, author Kenneth Reinert says that MAGA gets the economics of immigration all wrong, noting that ethnonationalists rely on political theatrics instead of effective policymaking.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Stephen Miller outline how if Trump is reelected, the MAGA plan is to round up millions of illegal immigrants, place them in what can only be called concentration camps, then deport them.
Stephen Miller explains that “mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”
Wrong.
A Marketplace report lays out what immigration actually does to jobs, wages, and more.
Zeke Hernandez, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, spoke with Marketplace, citing his upcoming book, “The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers.”
Hernandez explains that the biggest misconception is that immigration reduces wages, and increases job losses for native American workers.
- The truth is that immigrants, when they settle in a community, that community receives a lot more investment. When immigrants arrive, there are not just more workers that are competing with native workers, but there are more people who demand housing, entertainment, food, education. And so you need to hire more people to satisfy that bigger demand. Immigrants disproportionately start businesses and those businesses create jobs.
- Newcomers grow an economy. It’s not just the supply of workers that increases, but the demand for other things also increases, which means the economic pie is bigger, which is why there’s not zero-sum competition.
Those who worry about immigrants taking jobs or lowering wages are often assuming that an immigrant worker is identical to a native worker. But they’re not.
- For example, we know that immigrants take and want different jobs — for example, in farms, in factories and construction that natives simply won’t do. The other thing is that even for cases where an immigrant and a native might be working in the same sector, say like construction, immigrants bring different skills and natives have different skills. And so the immigrant might allocate into, say, the manual part of the construction job that doesn’t require language skills, because maybe the immigrant doesn’t speak English well. And that means that the native will kind of allocate into, say, becoming the foreman, where he can use his language skills. And so then you don’t get that direct competition for those two reasons.
Immigrants are 18% of the workforce, both unskilled and skilled laborers.
- They are, disproportionately, 45% of workers and household services; 36% in clothing manufacturing; 33%, in agriculture; 32% in hospitality; 29% in food production; 27% in electronics manufacturing; and just about a quarter in construction, laundry services and other kinds of manufacturing. These are the kinds of jobs where we need more immigrants.
- But also, highly skilled, educated workforce, immigrants are, again, just about 16% to 18% of the workforce, but they account for 36% of all patents produced in the U.S.
- Immigrants are 14% of the population, but they are founders of 25% of all startups, and over half of all high-tech, high-growth startups that achieve a valuation of a billion dollars or more.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams says the city will have to cut its budget to accommodate the influx of immigrants.
- While many of these people do end up working, generating economic activity, paying taxes, they also use social services like the mayor was complaining about.
- Hernandez says that in the long run, it nets out positively for the U.S. economy, but Adams has a valid point that short term costs escalate for cities and states. It might be temporary housing or a receiving center, providing education for the children of those immigrants, and the federal government needs to step up financial support.
The Bottom Line
The Penn Wharton Budget Model recently estimated that if we double the number of immigrants we let in legally, GDP would continue to grow. History shows there is no systematic evidence that there was economic harm to natives or to the economy from unrestricted immigration — but there is a lot of evidence of the economic benefits.
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