All four of my grandparents emigrated as teenagers to New York City from Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century. Both of my parents were born in the early twentieth in what was then the west-side midtown Manhattan ghetto. Both went to work to help support their families when they finished grammar school.
This history has made me curious as an adult about the economic role of immigrants in fostering economic growth.
A central economic issue for the US is that the native-born working population is growing at less than one percent yearly. Given that real economic expansion is driven by two factors, the growth in the number of workers and increasing worker productivity (meaning more machines or more education), the fastest way for the US to boost the economy is to admit immigrants. Conversely, the fastest ways to undermine the domestic economy are to close the borders and to deport foreign-born workers already here. Put a different way, the Trump immigrant deportation plans are a sure-fire road to a deep and lengthy decline in national GDP.
Yesterday, I read a study that indicated that although Republican-leaning areas of the country are the most strongly opposed to immigrant arrival in the US, very few immigrants actually live in red communities. Most live in blue areas instead. The study didn’t say why, but presumably immigrants go to where there’s work. Why the anger in GOP land? As economist Tyler Cowen put it in Create Your Own Economy, “objective reality does not determine what people believe…People misperceive reality or people self-deceive to create a more pleasant reality within their own minds.”
This situation is full of ironies. The parlous condition of many Republican-leaning areas is a direct result of the “Reagan revolution,” which played a key role in modernizing American manufacturing in the 1980s but which has no useful thoughts on how to maintain roads, bridges, railways, communication networks…, putting the US solidly in the third world in these areas. Nor does it have any intention of helping areas that have fallen on hard times.
Worse than that, take Springfield, Ohio, a reddish area undergoing an economic renaissance in significant measure through the arrival in town of internet warehouses and manufacturing businesses. These are being manned by families who have emigrated from Haiti, and who now make up about a third of the local population. The only obvious complaint about the new residents is that they don’t drive very well. The town is under attack, however, by Trump and by its own US senator, J D Vance, apparently because it has pulled itself up by its own bootstraps. This is happening through their amplification of the baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants are stealing, killing and eating the pet animals owned by long-time residents. The Ohio governor has deployed the state police to deal with numerous bomb threats targeting local schools that these claims have produced.
Why would anyone believe the pet-eating lie? Back to Prof. Cowen–I guess it’s easier than thinking that the people you’ve been voting for are the ones responsible for your own economic woes.