The United States needs more immigrants. But at the moment, it does not especially want them.
The country’s fertility rate has fallen far below the replacement level. Absent immigration, our nation will grow older and smaller simultaneously. In that scenario, a shrinking population of prime-age workers would need to support a ballooning population of retirees. Growth would slow, productivity would fall, and deficits would swell.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently illuminated these realities. In an update to its 10-year economic forecast released February 7, the CBO reported that America’s gross domestic product would be $7 trillion higher — and the federal deficit $1 trillion lower — than it had previously anticipated. This pleasant surprise came courtesy of the past year’s surge in immigration: Due to that uptick in new arrivals, the US is now on track to have 5.2 million more workers by 2033 than previously projected. That will increase the amount of goods and services the economy can produce and improve the nation’s ratio of laborers to retirees.
Even as the case for large-scale immigration has become stronger, however, political appetite for it has grown weaker. In Gallup’s polling, the share of Americans who want immigration levels “decreased” rose from 28 percent in 2020 to 41 percent in 2023. By contrast, only 26 percent of 2023 respondents wanted to increase immigration.
This restrictionist mood is apparent in polls focusing on the 2024 presidential race. In a recent Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey of swing states, voters said they trusted Donald Trump over Joe Biden on immigration by a 22-point margin, 52 to 30 percent. And this was, if anything, an unusually positive result for the president: An NBC News poll released this month found voters favoring Trump over Biden on immigration by 35 points.
This fundamental tension — between a growing economic need for immigrants and burgeoning political backlash against…
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