Does America Need Immigrants?

By way of honest introduction, let me say that I think American society needs immigrants. I also think it will draw them either through an orderly process or through a disorderly one. Two big reasons US society needs immigrants. (There are other reasons.) First we have chronically unmet labor needs. As I write, more than a year into the pandemic, the unemployment rate of 6.2 is unusually high (not very high) as compared to mean unemployment for the past 70 years. Yet, many jobs are going unfilled according to newspapers, national and local, and to other media, including Fox News, repeatedly. I know the overgenerous subsidization of unemployment during COVID plays a role in the lack of responsiveness to job offers. I don’t think it explains everything, especially toward the top of the income structure and also toward the bottom where many just don’t qualify for benefits.

The second reason American society needs immigrants is that it is aging fast. It’s aging fast enough to threaten the future viability of such essential social programs as Social Security and Medicare unless we have an unprecedented rise in per worker productivity (which is not out of the question given fast technical progress, and a greater acceptance of artificial intelligence and of robotization). The bad news is that the current mean number of children per US woman (including permanent immigrants with a superior fertility) is only 1.7. That’s much below the generally recognized replacement rate of 2.1. If current trends continue, we will be seeing dwindling numbers of physically active younger people struggling to support a growing population of old people. (Current trends do not have to continue, I know.) I realize that there are solutions to this problem other than immigration including making many or all work latter into their lives, or even earlier. Still immigration looks like the quickest solution. In the short term, its concreteness, its immediacy, makes this solution pretty much irresistible. One more reason to think it through.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 2 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 1 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]