Immigration to Boost US GDP by $7T over Decade, CBO Says | Hacker News Reader

Immigration to Boost US GDP by $7T over Decade, CBO Says

bloomberg.com

28 pointsconsumer45132 comments

Here in Australia, immigration has been one of the drivers of economic growth over the past couple of decades.

https://www.visaverge.com/questions/the-impact-of-immigratio...

Never believe an economist when they say "x will cause y." They didn't predict inflation. Then they predicted that fighting it would cause a big recession, and it didn't. They seem pretty good at measuring the current state of things, but the whole field has very low predictive power.

CBO tends to have a very good reputation actually.

Plenty of economists predicted inflation lol

EDIT: To be clear, I think more of them should have, and it's shameful that they didn't. But the old Econ orthodoxy would have, and this detour from the idea that printing money causes inflation is a fairly recent thing, and wasn't by any means a consensus position.

First, you're lumping every economist into a single entity. Different economists can look at the same information and determine different outcomes. It is more subjective than objective.

That said, many economists did warn that stimulus money would lead to inflation, however there were many people in dire need which justified the 'greater good' approach to it. As to fighting said inflation, many economists believed we would have the 'soft landing' that we are heading for. They warned fighting too hard would lead to a recession, as in the harder and higher interest rates go, the more likely a recession would become.

Were there economists on the other sides of these beliefs? Yes, so that's why weighing the multitude of opinions and getting toward a consensus comes into play.

> Migrant surge will lift demand and increase the labor force

> Wages, however, will rise more slowly, in part reflecting the increase in the number of lower skilled workers

TLDR: increased immigration will suppress wages for common people while the rich and powerful benefit massively.

That’s not how I read the second point. More low paid workers will of course suppress average wages, but that says nothing about the wages of an individual longitudinally

I think it will actually hurt people at the very lowest end of the spectrum, that are most vulnerable to price competition

If you expect that low-income people do not consume the services of low-income people that makes sense.

Research generally shows that it is low-income Americans that benefit the most from immigration.

For example, suppose there's a high school dropout now working as a janitor because that's all he can get. Now a bunch of low-skill immigrants come in and compete for that janitor job. But now he's not on the bottom of the pecking ladder. He's got skills the immigrants don't have, like a solid grasp of English and understands the customers better than they do. He gets a job as a manager of immigrant janitors.

Also those low income migrants have a better life too

They are essentially union busters.

> TLDR: increased immigration will suppress wages for common people while the rich and powerful benefit massively.

That's not in line with the econ literature in this area. There's some suggestion in the literature that under some circumstances it might suppress wages for males who didn't complete high school, but additionally it will have significant positive effects on prices of lots of things that demographic (and others) buy.

Higher GDP, lower GDP per capita.

Not a great deal for workers.

That's nonsense.

This article sounds like propaganda.

It's not. CBO is consistently reliable.

Nearly every econ paper on the economic benefits of immigration sounds like propaganda to people who aren't familiar with the literature, because the estimates of the effects are absolutely massive. It's not intuitive to people, because they don't understand the massive efficiency gains from trade in enlarging the pie. To most people the entire idea of pies that aren't fixed is unintuitive.

That explains why mass immigration has been driving down real housing and health care costs. The pie, it grows! California has never been a more affordable place to live and start a family.

California's undocumented population hasn't been growing (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/what-we-k...)

How much will the predicted spending on entitlements increase alongside this predicted GDP increase? More people = more entitlement spending, which is a serious long-term problem that needs to be addressed.

Given that both legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants are net tax donors on average overall, less than they pay in.

I just looked it up, and that does appear to be the case.

People keep saying this, but what rigorous study is there to demonstrate this to be true?

Assuming it is true, immigration has a considerable pressure on housing prices.

It turns out people are willing to spend basically everything they can to not be homeless, so even a slight influence in supply and demand for housing causes a massive price shift.

We have great data on legal immigrants, skilled and unskilled, and the headline is that they use fewer benefits and create more tax receipts than similar native-born groups across the board.

As discussed in this paper, due to sample sizes we have a hard time verifying anything with the undocumented population because it's a hard sample to study. But because we know more about adjacent populations, and we know that undocumented immigrants are eligible for far fewer benefits than those adjacent populations, we can have a strong sense of net fiscal impact. However, it's also uncontroversial that giving them legal status would drastically increase tax receipts as well, and that the net fiscal impact of their contribution to economic growth definitely outweighs the potential for net negative fiscal impact you'd get from direct receipts vs. benefits (if we could get good data for it). https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-u...

And unskilled immigration has a considerable downward pressure on housing prices, because the single biggest bottleneck in increasing housing supply (other than policy) is the price and supply of labor.

  GDP = C + G + I + NX

  C = Consumption
  G = Government spending
  I = Investment
  NX = Net exports

Which of these exactly is immigration going to boost and how will it sum to $7 trillion? My money is overwhelmingly on G for mass low skill immigration. It’s easy to see how it will increase strain on the public purse.

Needless to say GDP is not necessarily the right metric to optimize for. It’s kind of like BMI in that way. Useful when used properly, not so much when other factors are ignored.

Edit: I’m not interested in rhetoric. I want to see how the numbers add up. Government spending is the likely candidate.

Wrong. It'll increase productivity, given the acute labor shortage were facing. Immigration has always been a net positive.

well, there's no such thing as a true shortage without price controls.

I am quite surprised that anyone believes there is a labor shortage. are you a mega-corp CEO perhaps?

Consumption because they're people and spend on things.

Investment because immigrants tend to make a lot of money and (some) culturally save and invest a lot.

Net exports because immigrants work and produce things.

Why wouldn't more bodies increase every one of those variables? More bodies consume more, produce more, the govt spends more, and we have more things to export.

Consumption - They are people who will buy things. They will also add labor to the market, making goods less expensive for others to purchase.

Government Spending - Investment in industries like energy, infrastructure, and chip manufacturing all needs labor. With a ~3% unemployment rate that's going to be hard to come by.

Investment - Immigrants will have money to save and invest. Many small businesses are owned by immigrant families.

Net exports - Lower skilled factory labor is in demand and hard to come by. Can't make stuff in America if there is no one to make it.

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