The Case for Open Borders

by John Washington

In 2016, the United States took in over 1.1 million legal migrants. The number of unauthorized migrants that year was also high, though harder to pinpoint. It was a big year for immigration, but no aberration. Indeed, the wage trends that year, and the subsequent years, were normal: that is, even as productivity continued to rise, wages barely eked upward. Unemployment soon dropped to near-record lows, and GDP rose more than it had in almost a decade. In other words, with near-record highs of immigration, the country saw no negative effects on job markets and wages. In 2022, after a five-year dip, another million-plus immigrants moved to the United States, most of them working-age adults. Despite fears of rising inflation and recession, the labor market continued to perform beyond expectations, adding more jobs than pre-pandemic forecasts. As economist and New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman put it: “It’s an exaggeration, but one with some truth, to say that immigrants are saving the U.S. economy.”

Now, to be fair, this argument is not entirely without merit. Immigration can improve the economy, but this is where common sense has to be applied. Salt can bring out the flavor of your meal, but that does not mean that you should empty a bag of flour into your meal. You can cook your meal with a measured amount of heat. But if you turn the heat all the way up and leave it up, your meal will burn. I do not intend by this to instrumentalize immigrants, but merely to show that something can be good to a certain extent and bad beyond that level.