WashPost Op-Ed: Kamala Harris Should Use Migration to Grow the Economy

Vice President Kamala Harris should promise to grow the U.S. economy by importing more migrant workers, consumers, and renters, according to a pro-migration op-ed writer at the Washington Post.

 “Legal immigration is a critical component of economic growth and solvency for our entitlement programs,” columnist Jennifer Rubin declared on August 27.

“There is no shortage of good ideas, ranging from dropping outdated country caps to granting foreign STEM graduates green cards to clearing the green-card backlog to increased visas for seasonal workers,” Rubin added, without acknowledging the alternative strategy of growing the economy by raising Americans’ productivity.

Harris has already promised to continue President Joe Biden’s unpopular migration policy, which has been used as an economic strategy to stimulate the economy with imported workers and consumers. “I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” she said at the convention.

Harris used most of her convention speech to announce various tax-and-spend redistribution policies:

…Whether you live in a rural area, small town, or big city. And as president, I will bring together labor and workers and small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries.

However, the economic benefits of migration that are touted by Rubin — and hinted at by Harris — are very small.

Rubin cited research by Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, two business-funded, pro-migration advocates, who wrote in Time magazine, “The economic activity directly generated by increased immigration boosted real GDP growth by 0.1 percentage point in 2022 and 2023, according to our calculations. ”

A gain of 0.1 percent is one cent for every $10.00.

Those Democrat-caused downsides include more poverty, more civic chaos — and for Democrats, possibly the return of President Donald Trump to challenge Democrat dominance in Washington, DC.

Also, the 0.1 percent gain is “not an increase in [Americans’ average] wealth or per capita income,” but merely shows the economic impact of the extra immigrant consumers, renters, and workers, Camarota added.

Much of the claimed economic 0.1 percent gain comes from the federal government’s policy of borrowing money to support the poor migrants as they move into American communities and workplaces, hospitals and schools, politics, and elections.

For example, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reported that the federal government borrowed and spent $150 billion on Biden’s immigrants in 2022:

At the start of 2023, the net cost of illegal immigration for the United States – at the federal, state, and local levels – was at least $150.7 billion.

Illegal immigration costs each American taxpayer $1,156 per year ($957 after factoring in taxes paid by illegal aliens).

Each illegal alien or U.S.-born child of illegal aliens costs the U.S. $8,776 annually.

The debt, however, will have to be repaid by ordinary Americans as their wages stagnate and their housing becomes more expensive amid mass migration. That is a major threat to American white-collar graduates who face rising economic pressure from Biden’s flood of white-collar migrants.

So the costs of migration are spread through the American population, but the benefits are concentrated in the much smaller population of migrants, their employers, and the investors who convert additional revenues into great stock market and real estate wealth.

For example, much of that debt spending goes to investors, landlords, and companies that feed and house the extra migrants.

Wall Street investors gain because stock values are based on 15-year forecasts of future profits. So a promised 15-year annual 0.1 percent GDP gain can be forecast to deliver a 2 percent rise in profits from sales and rents. Unsurprisingly, the most influential pro-migration advocacy group, FWD.us, echoes the interests of consumer-economy investors, not of employees in the sector.

Harris is also proposing to offset the economic damage of her expensive migration policy by spending trillions of dollars on a promised “opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”  For example, she is promising to spend tens of billions of dollars to offset the housing crunch and rent increases caused by her pro-migration policies.

The harm goes far beyond housing, Camarota said.

The huge inflow of foreign workers also minimizes the incentive for employers to find, train, and hire  millions of Americans who have fallen out of the workforce, he explained:

The persistently low labor force participation in the United States is an enormous economic loss, and it has an enormous social cost … welfare dependency, crime, overdoses, [early] deaths, political alienation, [economic] barriers to forming families …. and the [American] labor force  participation looks like shit now.

Rubin also ignored the civic chaos caused by migration, including the spread of anti-semitism into the Democratic Party, its allied pro-migration groups, and the nation’s streets.

Rubin did not cite lessons from other countries, either. In Canada, Justin Trudeau’s high-migration policy has proved to be an economic disaster for young Canadians. In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party was smashed in the general election after it shrank per-capita income by importing millions of low-skilled migrants. Australians too have been hammered by the government’s decision to import millions of foreigners.

But there is an alternative growth strategy focussed on per-capita productivity, not overall population.

Rubin ignores that alternative growth strategy now being pushed by BlackRock founder Larry Fink.

“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,”  he said at a pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:

That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in —  shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …

If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.

In contrast, countries with expanding populations need to focus on basic issues of education and the “rule of law,” Fink, who oversees $10 trillion worth of investments worldwide, said. “The social problems that [we] will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations.”

Throughout history, labor shortages raised productivity, bumped up wages, boosted innovation, and reduced economic divides. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported:

Our estimate implies that since 2021, the increase in labor issues (due to, for example, tighter labor markets) has spurred approximately an additional $55 billion in investment in the U.S. economy.

This is a significant amount, and one that’s similar in size to funding appropriated through the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act for boosting domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing.

It depends on productivity gains. 2%+productivity gains is roughly the target. Productivity averages 1-1.5% gains per year, but can be pretty volatile over a shorter period of time pic.twitter.com/VKyV83TzRy

— Chris (@Finance_EconGuy) December 8, 2023

In contrast, China’s government blocks migration and has ensured productivity gains of about seven percent per year. Those gains exist because China’s government also spends heavily to grow productivity via automation, robots, and cheap energy.

China’s rapid productivity growth has delivered wage gains of roughly 10 percent per year from 2010 to 2021 to its Chinese population, far higher than the United States’ wage gains amid its tepid productivity growth of 1.5 percent per year from 2007 to 2024.

The South China Morning Post newspaper reported on China’s machines-before-migrants policy on August 28:

“From another perspective, as our society enters an era of technological, digital and intelligent advancement, the replacement of labour by technology is evident,” Yuan [Xin, vice-president of the China Population Association and a professor of demography at Nankai University in Tianjin] said.

“So while labour may be scarce, it is not necessarily in short supply – China does not lack people or a workforce. Even with the population decline, China’s vast population size remains a defining feature of our modernisation.

China has placed its bets on high-tech manufacturing, but since 1990, U.S. economic planners have preferred to inflate Wall Street’s consumer investors with more migrants.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the federal government has quietly adopted a policy of Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.

The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, white-collar graduates, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.

The little-recognized economic policy has loosened the economic and civic feedback signals that animate a stable economy and democracy. It has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.

Donald Trump’s campaign team recognizes the economic impact of migration. Biden’s unpopular policy is  “flooding America’s labor pool with millions of low-wage illegal migrants who are directly attacking the wages and opportunities of hard-working Americans,” Trump’s campaign said in a statement in May.

The secretive economic policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.

The colonialism-like policy has also damaged small nations and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.

Breitbart