End the Recession: Limit Immigration Now

An increasing number of analysts, from the “Archdruid” in Endgame to Don Peck in a thoroughly depressing article in The Atlantic Monthly, are suggesting that the United States (and therefore likely Canada) have entered a period of prolonged or even permanent higher unemployment. This will lead to decreasing wages for everyone still employed, declining home values, and quite probably increased crime and social unrest as people find themselves scraping by with no prospects for improvement. There is a solution, but it is highly politically incorrect: limit immigration.

Canada's Population Growth

• Zeroing immigration would reduce population and would result in any increase in employment going to residents.
• Capping immigration at a level that stabilised the population would result in new jobs going primarily to residents.

It’s that simple, and no doubt many will accuse me of racism. (My wife and most of my friends are originally from Colombia, by-the-way.)  Others will trot out all the reasons why immigration is good for a country, but there is one inescapable fact these people frequently ignore: Population growth must stop sooner or later. Think about the city or area where you live; now double the population. Then double it again. Then again, forever. Imagine Los Angeles with 25 million residents, 50 million, 100 million. Imagine Atlanta at 20 million, like Mumbai, or Vancouver and Seattle with 32 million each, like Tokyo.

Sooner or later, we must stabilise population, and we must adjust the economy to work with this. The main driver behind immigration is the desire for continuous economic growth, and the easiest (although not cheapest) way to achieve economic growth is to bring in more consumers. This can’t go on forever. Imagine your country packed with people from sea to shining sea, no room for anyone. High levels of immigration also keep wages depressed, which employers like – and major corporations are the main drivers of the continuous growth economy and our governments.

Let’s look at some figures

Canada: The unemployment rate (according to government figures) is 8.3% (January 2010), which means 280,000 more people are unemployed now than pre-crash October 2008.

During that time, immigration to Canada has been approximately 309,000.* Hmm.

Of course, not all of those people were workers; many were children, mothers-in-law (we have sponsored mine), and others who will not be working. However, there were about 186,000 “economic immigrants,” meaning people who came to Canada to work. If that class of immigrant were eliminated (or at least tied to the level of emigration from Canada), there would be 94,000 more people unemployed, rather than 280,000.

United States: “About 8.4 million jobs have vanished in the U.S. since the recession began in late 2007.”

During that time, legal immigration to the United States has been approximately 2,250,000 and illegal immigration roughly the same, for a total of 4.5 million. (Accurate figures are obviously hard to come by for illegal immigration.)

As with Canada, not all of those immigrants were coming for jobs, but equally clearly the current U.S. population could have filled the jobs that economic immigrants did. The United States is in far worse shape in terms of unemployment than Canada.

The Solution: Limit Immigration to Stabilise Population

First, we must admit that population cannot grow forever. Given that, we should limit immigration to a level that results in a stable population:

• Stable population = (In-migration + births) – (out-migration + deaths)

In Canada, economic immigrants make up 60% of all immigration. We should eliminate this category and increase the number of refugees and family members allowed up to the point that population is stable. This would also greatly speed up the immigration process, which is currently four years or more for some family class members, and would allow more refugees, something that will become increasingly important as climate change refugees increase.

In the United States, illegal immigration could be stopped very quickly if the government went after employers rather than individual immigrants. The reason this hasn’t happened is because illegal immigrants keep wages down and do many jobs that nobody else wants. Ending illegal immigration and the economic class of immigration would mean new jobs would go to residents – including those jobs that nobody wants but immigrants are currently doing.

The U.S. is in big trouble because of illegal immigration, and perhaps not for the reasons you think. By allowing millions of people in to do jobs that nobody else wants, wages are suppressed for those jobs. Such jobs include picking fruits and vegetables, for example. Resident Americans might do those jobs – certainly I bet many would in the current economy – but would insist on a living wage. Illegal immigrants do not have this option. This means that prices for American-grown fruits and vegetables would increase, and that is going to mean unhappy consumers. However, in the real world, a country cannot rely upon imported, cheap, and often exploited labour forever. If the U.S. were to bite the bullet now and do this, unemployment would drop and wages for these jobs would increase and be registered legally – meaning tax revenues would also increase, a matter of desperate concern to many state governments right now.

We can limit immigration now or later, but eventually the growth has to stop. We would be wise to manage the process and the subsequent transition to a stable economy. The alternative is to wait until many millions more are in the country and our options more limited.

**********************************

* Based on 247,243 immigrants in 2008 divided by 12 to get a monthly figure, and multiplied by the 15 months from October 2008 to January 2010.

UPDATE: Various comments (here, on Reddit, and on other sites) claiming I’m naive, foolish, racist, etc, but not one addresses the rather obvious point that population cannot increase forever. Not one.