A Reasonably Strong Case for Way More Immigration.

• Author: Henderson, David R.

As a long-time advocate of expanded immigration, I am delighted +to have left / liberal Matthew Yglesias as an ally. Yglesias, who helped found online magazine Vox, is one of the rising stars in journalism and, especially, economic journalism. His latest book, One Billion Americans, advocates what the title says: we should change institutions so that we have 1 billion Americans. This book is particularly needed now. Yglesias's major argument for more population, though, is not mine: he wants the United States to continue to be the world's dominant power and worries that if we do not greatly expand our population, China will dominate.

In making this case, he advocates changing several government policies beyond immigration. In fact, he writes much more about those policy changes than he does about immigration policy. So, for example, we learn more about his proposals for government-funded childcare, housing, and transportation policy than we do about how many new people and what kinds of people he wants to let into the country each year. He does say he does not want open borders, but he does not say what immigration reform he wants instead.

On the non-immigration issues, he vacillates between intolerance of other people's choices and great tolerance: he is intolerant of voluntary contracts between employers and employees that do not include paid parental leave, but he is highly tolerant of people's decisions about what kinds of dwellings to live in. Where he is tolerant, he makes a good case. Where he is not, the book fails. Still, the big picture he paints is good: he shows that we can relatively easily triple the U.S. population without making our country too crowded or overly stressing most of our institutions.

Keeping America great / As noted above, Yglesias's major argument is that the United States should continue to be the dominant country in the world. He makes a tight case that without a major increase in population, China will become the dominant world power, but he does not say why that would be bad. It is true that China has a much worse government than ours. It is also true that a more powerful China would be the dominant force in Asia--but it already is. It is hard to imagine China directly threatening the United States militarily; the Pacific Ocean makes for a great moat.

Fortunately, you need not share Yglesias's concern about China to agree with his goal of a much larger U.S. population through immigration. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market...