Symposium on Immigration: An Introduction.

• Author: Whaples, Robert M.

Immigration to the United States has increased substantially in recent decades, rising from about 330,000 per year in the period 1961-70 to 1,050,000 per year in the period 2009-15 (Cohn 2017). (1) In die process, the foreign-born population has risen from 9.7 million to 43.2 million, with the portion of foreign born rising from 5.4 percent of the population to 14.1 percent (Lopez and Radford 2017)--not far below the record of 14.8 percent in 1890. This pattern is not unique to the United States: 20 percent of Canada's population is foreign born, and nearly 30 percent of Australia's population were born elsewhere.

In a familiar historical pattern, high levels of immigration have made immigration policy a potent political issue. Unsurprisingly, the topic has drawn keen attention from social scientists. Many American economists argue that theories demonstrating positive net benefits from international free trade in goods and services also carry over to the free movement of workers. One noted exception to this "economistic" perspective is George Borjas--author of a stream of important research articles on the economics of immigration and a recent, influential book: We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative (2016). This symposium features Borjas's overview of the key arguments and evidence in his book and two responses to his essay.

Borjas's central argument is that immigration--like trade--produces winners and losers. Its net benefits may (or may not) be positive, but this tells us little because its most noticeable impact on individuals and communities is redistributive. In an essay published in this issue of The Independent Review, he estimates that "[i]mmigration is responsible for a huge redistribution of wealth, totaling around half-a-trillion dollars per year, from native workers who compete with immigrants to those natives who use or employ immigrant labor." Immigration also has important effects on the fiscal health of the republic, but this impact is exceptionally tricky to parse out. As Borjas puts it in this essay, "Perhaps it is time for us 'experts' to admit the obvious: we have little clue about how immigrants affect the cost of providing public goods, and we have no clue about the future path of taxes and government spending." Accordingly, "all the available estimates of the long-run fiscal impact" of immigration "are useless."

In his response to Borjas's essay, Benjamin Powell argues that Borjas has it wrong...