Moderate Immigration Analysis

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One of the major issues that current political discourse in America and the West revolves around is mass immigration from undeveloped nations to the developed nations of the West, primarily from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America to the United States and from the Middle East and North Africa to Western Europe. In general, the left side of the political spectrum supports open borders and increased immigration while the right supports secured borders and decreased immigration. Immigration in moderation is undoubtedly beneficial to economic health. Neither side of mainstream politics denies the benefits of moderate immigration; however, both sides disagree on how much “moderate immigration” is. To arrive at a conclusion on what amount of …show more content…

Immigration’s principal effect on the American economy is it’s increase of the total national GDP by approximately 11% annually. This may seem to be wildly beneficial to the nation; however, George Borjas, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Economics, states “This ‘contribution’ to the aggregate economy, however, does not measure the net benefit to the native-born population. Of the $1.6 trillion increase in GDP, 97.8 percent goes to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits” (Borjas). Borjas’ research clearly indicates that the net economic benefit of immigration for the native population of America is practically nonexistent. Furthermore, immigration not only does not benefit the native population but negatively affects it. By flooding the labor market with droves of new arrivals, primarily unskilled and uneducated laborers, the wages and employment opportunities for current citizens drastically decrease as “A 10 percent increase in the size of an education/age group due to the entry of immigrants (both legal and illegal) reduces the wage of native-born men in that group by 3.7 percent and the wage of all native-born workers by 2.5 percent ($1,396)” (Borjas). Additionally, the social welfare use of immigrant families of all education levels is 33% compared to 19% of native …show more content…

One of the most famous studies performed on the cultural effects of immigration is Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a study partly famous for the fact that Putnam delayed its publishing as his findings did not quite align with his political views (Leo). His study investigated the “social capital”, aspects of a community including involvement, trust, reciprocity, in a varied set of forty-one communities from Chicago and Los Angeles to rural Appalachia and South Dakota (Leo). Putnam found that in every area he investigated, excessive diversity invariably causes