A new analysis from the former chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that the large increase in immigration in recent years is a major part of why the U.S. has recently experienced extraordinary economic growth compared to peer nations.
Economist Ernie Tedeschi, now a research scholar at Yale University, writes in a new report that the rise in the immigrant population since 2020 accounts for at least a fifth of U.S. growth since then. That goes a long way toward explaining why the U.S. has grown almost twice as fast as the next best performer among G7 economies since the pandemic. Furthermore, he notes, “absent immigration, the US labor supply would have shrunk by 1.2 million since 2019. Instead, it expanded by 2 million.”
The arrival of a large number of undocumented immigrants has helped fuel yet another round of American exceptionalism in the global economy.
That’s a big deal. The report is a reminder of a truism among economists: Immigration is good for the economy, helping bring in new laborers who create goods and services, spend money on goods and services, contribute to the social safety net, and help spur innovation.
But the report also illustrates the odd tension between immigration as a political issue and immigration as an economic issue. Why is it that an economic winner is a political loser?
Currently, President Joe Biden — and much of the media across the political spectrum — has treated the large number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as a major political crisis. Some of that is because the system for receiving migrants is disorganized, out-of-date and lacks the resources to process the large numbers coming through, especially those seeking asylum. That’s an important issue that deserves serious attention.
But unfortunately, the migrant “crisis” as broadly understood in mainstream conversation — especially on the right — primarily stems from the fear that “floods” of new migrants are…
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