I am leaving for New Zealand this week to marry my best friend. Being that I come from Fairbanks, Alaska, and she is from the Albany, New York area, it only seemed fair for us to make our families collectively travel to a destination wedding. An added perk to the wedding trip is that it allows me to reconnect in person with some dear friends from Alaska who have since immigrated to New Zealand. From my friends’ description of the New Zealand immigration system, the process sounds arduous, more akin to a job interview where New Zealand takes into account your professional standing, education level, and finances into its ultimate decision-making.
There are undeniably powerful logistical/logical reasons for a country the size of New Zealand to want to restrict immigration to its islands. Moreover, it does say something positive about the life my friends had built that they satisfied this process and successfully immigrated to New Zealand. However, I also cannot help but feel a sense of pride that in my country, the United States, a majority of the overall population still desires to set us apart from the merit-based immigration of other countries. Most encouraging, the pure economic, universally beneficial argument for meritless-based immigration remains powerful. Principles are nice and I strive to maintain them, but to a cynic like me, principles are not as reliable in getting people to act in a certain way as much as economic incentive does.
The economic need is why Republican senators from red states have this year begged for increasing the number of H-2B visas, when their current party leadership’s “principles” advocate the opposite. The “argument” that the United States is somehow “full” is also provably false. First of all, as Shikha Dalmia explains, there is a glaring problem with the logic that the country is full. It is simply telling that no one, including anyone in anti-immigration MAGA world, is worrying about restricting child birth or an increasing U.S. population that is outgrowing its resources.
But there is also a more fundamental issue underlying the economic argument for increasing immigration, per Dalmia:
At the heart of this issue is the question: Are humans a liability who deplete resources or an asset who themselves are a resource—indeed, to use the parlance of the late, great environmental economist Julian Simon, the “ultimate resource”?
It is the ingenuity of human beings that turns fallow land bounteous, dirt into valuable metals, and sand into computer chips. There is no given or fixed set of natural resources out there, Simon pointed out. Useless materials become resources once human creativity finds a way to harnesses them. Oil was just a toxic black liquid in the ground till humans discovered that it could be burnt for light and power. The development of high-yield grains increased the productivity of land exponentially while human population grew only arithmetically—the exact opposite of what Malthus predicted.
The most important factor limiting a country’s economic progress, then, isn’t insufficient physical resources but insufficient human resources. Hence, contrary to Malthusian—or Trumpian—thinking, population increases through immigration are nothing to fret over when you have institutions able to harness human talent. Immigrants are not only mouths that need to be fed but also minds and hands that grow the economic pie. They certainly consume resources. But they produce far more than they consume over the long run when given an opportunity. To the extent that immigrants, whether high- or low-skilled, have jobs, it’s because they produce more wealth or value for their employers than they consume in wages.
Imagine for a moment that there were foreign planes periodically airdropping free goods on American homes. Wouldn’t it be colossally stupid to send missiles to shoot them down? Yet why is it not equally foolish to shoo away the real source of this wealth, namely, Mexicans whose sweat makes affordable housing possible for Americans and puts cheap goods in these houses? Or when it turns away Chinese computer engineers whose smarts virtually spin gold from sand?
Going beyond the economic case to a principled one, I think the argument for increasing immigration is strongest, even if it is less influential, perhaps, than pure economics. The reason I find the principled argument to be so superior is I fail to see how anyone can deny that the nativist argument against immigration is based on nothing but luck. In other words, no one can pick their birth parents, nor the place or time for which they will be born, meaning every American is American entirely by chance. Even if you immigrated here after you were born, the issue of personal responsibility remains, and luck or lack thereof depending on how you might look at it, is still the dominating factor.
The Nationalist desired policies of this current president fly in the face of all this evidence and reason. What has replaced each in MAGA world is slave-like devotion to the word of one man, and instead of a love for liberty there is outright bigotry. So, if by the time I get back from my wedding, if you all can just go ahead and impeach the guy that would be great.
Tyler Broker is the Free Expression and Privacy Fellow at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. His work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review and the Albany Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.