I agree with this essay with one quibble: considering that caring for the elderly is a growing need and if many of the people doing so are immigrants who likely do not have a college degree (because they are from countries that have a low college degree penetration), then I think we need to have immigration from a wide range of educational backgrounds.
I think we would do well to remove degrees from the equation that defines skill and immigration eligibility altogether. There are plenty of foreign tradesmen that never went to school but could start earning $100K+ the day they land and plenty of basket weaving majors that have no value at all.
Noah, you say that well educated immigrants do not contribute to national debt. But are the well-educated immigrants the ones who will care for the elderly? Perhaps the less well-educated immigrants make a unique contribution by being willing to do the care work that better educated people avoid.
Thank you David, you beat me to the punch! I was just about to say: Noah says we need to bring in immigrants to care for old folks, but then contradicts himself by saying we need college kids coming in. Well which is it? Some mixture of both it sounds like.
I wonder if that graph on the fiscal impact of immigrants includes the change in cost of labor for the caring jobs that the government disproportionately hires people to do.
The extreme positions on both sides are horrible like you say. I like your take on this. Why would it be so terrible to have targeted legal immigration as a policy? Open borders with a fraud filled welfare system is something warned about many years ago. " All muslims bad," is pretty asinine as well. Let's get people who share in building block American values and want to contribute no matter where they are from and what they look like. That's how my family got here generations ago.
I am an immigrant to the US. I came here in the early 1980s on an H-1 visa, then a green card, now a citizen. One thing that I think gets lost in the immigration debate is the one of the US's unique strengths is it is brilliant at taking the best people from all over the world. I worked at a company where the CEO was Israeli and the CTO was Iranian. Try doing that in any other country. US-born citizens underestimate this since they know very little about how immigration works (I used to love asking people 'what color is a greeen card?' back when the answer was pink since most Americans have never seen a green card).
I lived in France for several years. It doesn't have birthright citizenship. If you are born in France you are not automatically French (unless one of your parents is, of course). But there is a second-generation get-out-of-jail-free rule. If you are born in France, and your mother was born in France, even if she is not French, then you get birthright citizenship. This prevents what I think happens in Germany where Turkish immigrants can be there for multiple generations without any of them being German.
I think we need to touch grass a bit sometimes as people who sit close to data and think hard about things. Of the kind of median folk I grew up around, pretty much all of them believe that population growth is bad. I don't know if it's first order thinking derived from "there's too much traffic" or "this line is too long" but people's basic intuition is that things are bad because there are too many of us.
Some people only remember all the panic caused by Erhlich’s The Population Bomb and don’t realize the global population will soon be in free fall. Maybe they’re also touching (or smoking) too much grass. Too much traffic is probably due to inadequate spending on roads and transit, which is made worse if you reduce the number of taxpayers and construction workers. Usually, when a line is too long it means the service provider didn’t hire enough workers or invest in automation, not that there are too many customers.
"America is not North Korea; we’re not even Japan or Sweden"
In Sweden, approximately 21.4% of the population is foreign-born as of 2024. In comparison, about 13.7% of the U.S. population is foreign-born as of 2021.
This issue has been needlessly moralized. It is tough to talk immigration using basic problem solving or cost benefit analysis like you've done here. The loudest, most extreme voices on the right and left have turned this into a moral issue.
I do appreciate you tying this back into the birth rate issue. If all of the people who scream for immigration restriction would start cranking out 8-12 kids a pop like people did decades ago, we probably would have a decent TFR and then I'd be more open to hearing them out regarding increasing immigration restriction. But if they're not willing to dismantle the welfare state, and they're not willing to triple or quadruple the number of kids they're having, it's hard to take immigration restrictionists seriously. Cause those are the only valid options we have. End the welfare state for senior citizens, dramatically increase fertility, or expand immigration.
The Republicans would have done better for themselves if they had issued a much more limited executive order that specifically targeted birth tourism and very recently entered illegals. Something like no citizenship to any child whose parents had entered the country less than 30 days before the birth illegally or on a tourist visa. It would make the Democrats look like absolute morons for zealously defending it. And no matter how unusual this case is, a favorable ruling would have got them what they wanted which is an end to blanket birthright. Going from 30 days to 5 years is a lot easier than going from 0 to 30 days.
The Constitution is actually clear on this. The senators who debated this in the 1860's said that this would apply to someone who just stepped off a ship that day.
The dairy industry in New England would not survive without illegal immigrants, very few of which have college degrees or need college degrees to be good at their work. There is very little chance of filling these jobs with US citizens. The US needs a broad range of immigrants because there is a broad range of jobs to be filled.
There is no chance of filling those jobs with US citizens because the wages are depressed by the illegals flooding the labor supply and the US citizens have access to employment in the parts of the economy where laws against hiring illegals are actually enforced. It's essentially Feudalism Lite, and they are the peasants. Of course the higher classes don't want their jobs.
The industry would survive just fine without them. Laborer income would increase a lot. The price of dairy products would increase and people would buy less. Some farms would go out of business. But the industry would be just fine, same as it is in Denmark that doesn't have a massive illegal cheap labor force.
That sounds like an inhumane way to train a dog not to pee on the floor - I feel sad that so many bloggers think it's professionally important to subject themselves to that!
There's no birthright citizenship in many Western countries and it's an unusual practice that becomes increasingly inappropriate for illegal immigrants and those who just drop in pregnant in order to deliver an anchor baby. I met such a woman once, and I could certainly relate to it, especially as an immigrant, but I still didn't like it. The sacred cow of the text of the Constitution is a burden, from my old Euro perspective. The 14th amendment just isn't as bad as the 2nd one, for instance. A well regulated militia as understood in the 18th and 18th centuries, really? None of this makes any sense. Not the blood and soil fascism nor the leftist open borders or no-borders-at-all program. The fringes nominate their favorites in closed primaries and the citizenry reads and watches only what it likes. This is just one more instance of it. But I think Noah probably underestimates how angry many people are when their home increasingly looks and feels like something culturally alien. The pace of immigration has been too quick all over the West. It's not a question of what's right. Most people just can't handle it.
The 2nd amendment makes perfect sense when you consider the 30K Iranian protestors that were just mowed down by their government. But I agree with everything else.
Personally, I don’t really care about immigration. If they come, I want them to assimilate pretty well because creating closed-off ethnic enclaves isn’t a good societal harmonization strategy.
I’d be fine with paring increased immigration enforcement and restricting it to more well-off immigrants as a general rule. We really don’t need more people that add to the debt since it’s pretty high already.
I’d pair this with cutting our old-age spending. We can’t really afford it anymore and the elderly have told me to suck it up for years, so I’m fine letting them suffer from government policy for once. They gutted higher education funding, state capacity, and other things I hold dear, so why should I pay for them to be comfortable in old age?
I am the child of immigrants. My parents had no formal education. My father started as a unskilled laborer. My sister and I have advanced academic degrees. That’s the American story. I googled cardiologist in Iowa; there are more Dr. Patel than Dr. Smith. They are crying about the way things have actually been for more than a hundred years.
But see Adam Lehrer Tablet magazine piece pointing out how Mamdani’s election seemed to hinge on ethnic appeals to south East Asian immigrants, that echo, correctly apparently, Ruy Tiexeria’s argument of the early noughts about migrant communities becoming permanent fixtures of the Democratic Party.
I agree with this essay with one quibble: considering that caring for the elderly is a growing need and if many of the people doing so are immigrants who likely do not have a college degree (because they are from countries that have a low college degree penetration), then I think we need to have immigration from a wide range of educational backgrounds.
Yeah we're obviously not going to cut "low skilled" immigration to 0.
But note that most people who work in the health care industry have college degrees.
Not home health care aides.
I think we would do well to remove degrees from the equation that defines skill and immigration eligibility altogether. There are plenty of foreign tradesmen that never went to school but could start earning $100K+ the day they land and plenty of basket weaving majors that have no value at all.
Dave, I just expressed the same idea.
Noah, you say that well educated immigrants do not contribute to national debt. But are the well-educated immigrants the ones who will care for the elderly? Perhaps the less well-educated immigrants make a unique contribution by being willing to do the care work that better educated people avoid.
Brilliant minds….
Thank you David, you beat me to the punch! I was just about to say: Noah says we need to bring in immigrants to care for old folks, but then contradicts himself by saying we need college kids coming in. Well which is it? Some mixture of both it sounds like.
I wonder if that graph on the fiscal impact of immigrants includes the change in cost of labor for the caring jobs that the government disproportionately hires people to do.
Good point about knock-on effects.
I totally agree.
The extreme positions on both sides are horrible like you say. I like your take on this. Why would it be so terrible to have targeted legal immigration as a policy? Open borders with a fraud filled welfare system is something warned about many years ago. " All muslims bad," is pretty asinine as well. Let's get people who share in building block American values and want to contribute no matter where they are from and what they look like. That's how my family got here generations ago.
I am an immigrant to the US. I came here in the early 1980s on an H-1 visa, then a green card, now a citizen. One thing that I think gets lost in the immigration debate is the one of the US's unique strengths is it is brilliant at taking the best people from all over the world. I worked at a company where the CEO was Israeli and the CTO was Iranian. Try doing that in any other country. US-born citizens underestimate this since they know very little about how immigration works (I used to love asking people 'what color is a greeen card?' back when the answer was pink since most Americans have never seen a green card).
I lived in France for several years. It doesn't have birthright citizenship. If you are born in France you are not automatically French (unless one of your parents is, of course). But there is a second-generation get-out-of-jail-free rule. If you are born in France, and your mother was born in France, even if she is not French, then you get birthright citizenship. This prevents what I think happens in Germany where Turkish immigrants can be there for multiple generations without any of them being German.
The answer to the question "Who's gonna change your momma's bedpan at the nursing home?" is not "an immigrant with a master's degree."
I think we need to touch grass a bit sometimes as people who sit close to data and think hard about things. Of the kind of median folk I grew up around, pretty much all of them believe that population growth is bad. I don't know if it's first order thinking derived from "there's too much traffic" or "this line is too long" but people's basic intuition is that things are bad because there are too many of us.
Some people only remember all the panic caused by Erhlich’s The Population Bomb and don’t realize the global population will soon be in free fall. Maybe they’re also touching (or smoking) too much grass. Too much traffic is probably due to inadequate spending on roads and transit, which is made worse if you reduce the number of taxpayers and construction workers. Usually, when a line is too long it means the service provider didn’t hire enough workers or invest in automation, not that there are too many customers.
"America is not North Korea; we’re not even Japan or Sweden"
In Sweden, approximately 21.4% of the population is foreign-born as of 2024. In comparison, about 13.7% of the U.S. population is foreign-born as of 2021.
This issue has been needlessly moralized. It is tough to talk immigration using basic problem solving or cost benefit analysis like you've done here. The loudest, most extreme voices on the right and left have turned this into a moral issue.
I do appreciate you tying this back into the birth rate issue. If all of the people who scream for immigration restriction would start cranking out 8-12 kids a pop like people did decades ago, we probably would have a decent TFR and then I'd be more open to hearing them out regarding increasing immigration restriction. But if they're not willing to dismantle the welfare state, and they're not willing to triple or quadruple the number of kids they're having, it's hard to take immigration restrictionists seriously. Cause those are the only valid options we have. End the welfare state for senior citizens, dramatically increase fertility, or expand immigration.
The Republicans would have done better for themselves if they had issued a much more limited executive order that specifically targeted birth tourism and very recently entered illegals. Something like no citizenship to any child whose parents had entered the country less than 30 days before the birth illegally or on a tourist visa. It would make the Democrats look like absolute morons for zealously defending it. And no matter how unusual this case is, a favorable ruling would have got them what they wanted which is an end to blanket birthright. Going from 30 days to 5 years is a lot easier than going from 0 to 30 days.
The Constitution is actually clear on this. The senators who debated this in the 1860's said that this would apply to someone who just stepped off a ship that day.
The dairy industry in New England would not survive without illegal immigrants, very few of which have college degrees or need college degrees to be good at their work. There is very little chance of filling these jobs with US citizens. The US needs a broad range of immigrants because there is a broad range of jobs to be filled.
Milk is still pretty cheap, maybe those old New England farmers who don’t buy milking machines need to go out of business.
There is no chance of filling those jobs with US citizens because the wages are depressed by the illegals flooding the labor supply and the US citizens have access to employment in the parts of the economy where laws against hiring illegals are actually enforced. It's essentially Feudalism Lite, and they are the peasants. Of course the higher classes don't want their jobs.
The industry would survive just fine without them. Laborer income would increase a lot. The price of dairy products would increase and people would buy less. Some farms would go out of business. But the industry would be just fine, same as it is in Denmark that doesn't have a massive illegal cheap labor force.
Where do you find these losers on Twitter who seem to exist only to prove the wildest fantasies of their foes right?
Twitter is a magical colosseum which finds you the people who disagree with you the most and rubs their posts in your face all day.
That sounds like an inhumane way to train a dog not to pee on the floor - I feel sad that so many bloggers think it's professionally important to subject themselves to that!
There's no birthright citizenship in many Western countries and it's an unusual practice that becomes increasingly inappropriate for illegal immigrants and those who just drop in pregnant in order to deliver an anchor baby. I met such a woman once, and I could certainly relate to it, especially as an immigrant, but I still didn't like it. The sacred cow of the text of the Constitution is a burden, from my old Euro perspective. The 14th amendment just isn't as bad as the 2nd one, for instance. A well regulated militia as understood in the 18th and 18th centuries, really? None of this makes any sense. Not the blood and soil fascism nor the leftist open borders or no-borders-at-all program. The fringes nominate their favorites in closed primaries and the citizenry reads and watches only what it likes. This is just one more instance of it. But I think Noah probably underestimates how angry many people are when their home increasingly looks and feels like something culturally alien. The pace of immigration has been too quick all over the West. It's not a question of what's right. Most people just can't handle it.
Most new world countries have birth right citizenship. Its not about the Western or non Western as much as Western Hemisphere.
The 2nd amendment makes perfect sense when you consider the 30K Iranian protestors that were just mowed down by their government. But I agree with everything else.
Please, if you do immigrate here, don’t naturalize because we don’t need more old Euro ideas put into law.
Personally, I don’t really care about immigration. If they come, I want them to assimilate pretty well because creating closed-off ethnic enclaves isn’t a good societal harmonization strategy.
I’d be fine with paring increased immigration enforcement and restricting it to more well-off immigrants as a general rule. We really don’t need more people that add to the debt since it’s pretty high already.
I’d pair this with cutting our old-age spending. We can’t really afford it anymore and the elderly have told me to suck it up for years, so I’m fine letting them suffer from government policy for once. They gutted higher education funding, state capacity, and other things I hold dear, so why should I pay for them to be comfortable in old age?
I am the child of immigrants. My parents had no formal education. My father started as a unskilled laborer. My sister and I have advanced academic degrees. That’s the American story. I googled cardiologist in Iowa; there are more Dr. Patel than Dr. Smith. They are crying about the way things have actually been for more than a hundred years.
Good stuff on a Friday night. A rational point of view written by a human offers me a glimmer of hope on the eve of the eve of July 4:)
But see Adam Lehrer Tablet magazine piece pointing out how Mamdani’s election seemed to hinge on ethnic appeals to south East Asian immigrants, that echo, correctly apparently, Ruy Tiexeria’s argument of the early noughts about migrant communities becoming permanent fixtures of the Democratic Party.