I know virtually nothing about economics in general, and less still about the effect of immigration on a country’s economic well-being. That being said, I seem to recall hearing it stated frequently that immigration confers a net benefit to a country’s economy and, beyond that, the absence of ‘sufficient’ immigration to a country will invariably lead its economic decline. In fact, the economic argument is the one usually given to justify a country’s real, or perceived, ‘excessively lax’ immigration policies.
Is the above essentially true? Is it the case that immigration is not just good, but essential, for a country’s prosperity?
If the above is true, or generally considered to be true, how does that reconcile with Japan’s infamous xenophobia and restrictive immigration policies vis a vis its previously robust economy and years of prosperity (I know that things have changed in the last number of years. I am referring to, say, the period from around 1965 to 1995 or so)? Stated more concisely: Japan never had much immigration yet enjoyed sustained prosperity. Is that surprising?
Thanks!
ETA: I am restricting my questions to legal immigration (but am not meaning to imply that “illegal” immigrants would have a different effect than legal ones on their new country’s economy).
what you heard is a, generally speaking, a lie by the partisans of a certain political position. Immigration can be good if certain types of people immigrate under certain circumstances. But plenty of other combinations of people and circumstances yield no benefit and indeed do much harm.
Have you also heard that “diversity” is always “strength” by any chance? Well, there are plenty of partisan slogan lies out there…
A certain amount of diversity is vitally important for . It’s no surprise that many of the most dynamic cultures are (were) hybrids. However, cultural hybridization, like biological hybridization, is risky and has limits. Too much of it erases local culture, and destroys the very structure which produces progress. It can produce increasing political chaos, too, with similar results.
Japan actually demonstrates both sides of the coin. It actually goes through cycles of heavy cultural borrowing and semi-xenophobia. In the former periods, culture tends to stagnate, although you may get limited internal development. In the latter, you tend to get a lot of turmoil but it does produce a lot of advancement and change. The Tokugawa Shogunate was an example of the former. It saw the decline of the Samurai class into glorified courtier sycophants. The later might be the Meiji era, which saw the nation transform into a democratic Republic. Of course, it also wound up becoming a quasi-fascist militaristic state, but c’est la vie.
The answer to the OP’s question lies within the OP’s question. Japan’s immigration policies have not changed significantly over the time period mentioned but they had a “they’re going to take over the world” decade followed by what most commentators call a “lost” decade.
Immigration is a factor, but not the determining factor. It may or may not be an important factor. The U.S. absolutely needed the enormous streams of unskilled and illiterate immigrants that flocked here from 1880-1914. (Most of those years at a rate of over 1% of the population a year per year. Nothing remotely comparable any year since) But the backlash against that immigration and the enforced limiting of immigration after 1920 didn’t cause the Depression any more than the lack of immigrants kept WWII from causing explosive industrial growth.
Japan has an aging population and one of the lowest replacement birth rates of any country. Letting in huge numbers of immigrants might be a terrific long-term solution even if it caused short-term disruption and the usual backlash against immigrants. Japan has always prided itself on its lack of diversity. But that’s not necessarily a good thing at all times either.
One argument for immigration being good for the economy is that most first world nation have a fertility rate below replacement level. This leads to a situation where the amount of retired people grow and the amount of working age people shrinks. Since economic growth is population growth plus productivity growth, a declining amount of working people can lead to economic stagnation. Japan has been losing working people at a fast clip. This is an element of the stagnation Japan’s economy along with (IMHO) bad policy at the BOJ. Since immigrants are normally of working age, immigration can be a way of adding to working population. As far as the dynamism of open societies, openness to ideas is as if not more important than openness to immigration, and Japan since the war has been very open to foreign business practices.
perhaps a nitpick, but the immigrants into America in early 20th century were not illiterate. Literacy in the native language was required by immigration authorities.
Also, a good chunk of them were Eastern European Jews that tended to give a pretty rigorous (religious) education to their boys. E.g. Sholom Aleichem depicts a scene of a less-than-studious young man (an artisan by profession) being forced to cheat on an impromptu examination by a representative of the family of his potential bride. The subject matter was Hebrew philology and Tanakh verse recognition.
the people who make such argument are not considering the likelihood that the native birthrate is low precisely because of the immigration. When housing is expensive, crime high, jobs scarce, hospitals charging extra to cover for spending on low wage people who cannot pay and government raises taxes to pay for various “justice” and “close the gaps” measures, people of Western cultures don’t feel like having children. Many of them are too busy trying to stay above water economically. Meanwhile, people from some other cultures (including many of the immigrants) keep on reproducing regardless, resulting in the big demographic changes we are observing.
That being said, such arguments are of interest mostly to people who are actually interested in having children if given a chance. Reputedly this does not include a good chunk of the “progressives”, “hipsters” and liberal politicians who are their political representatives.
I appreciate everyone’s responses. I have to admit, I thought a link between immigration and economic growth was more clearly established. Evidently not.
There must be objective analyses of this question, say in the economics literature, no? Does anyone know what they say?
The 30 years I mentioned saw about 20,000,000 immigrants. Perhaps 10% of those were Jewish. Even assuming that a cite to fiction has any meaning when applied to two million people, most of the 20 million immigrants of that period did not have good educations and most did not speak or read English. First generation immigrants tend not to if coming from non-English-speaking countries. New York City was filled with ethnic enclaves where the native language was so prevalent as to allow people to get by. Newspapers were published in dozens of languages. It’s the second and third generations who are fluent in the new native language. This is a pattern that appears over time and is found in virtually all immigrant groups in virtually all western countries. It is true for Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. post-WWII and appears to be true for others now reaching the second generation.
The argument that “they” are out-reproducing “us” also goes back to the 19th century wave of immigration in almost exactly the same language. It was and is utter nonsense. Over time “they” alter their reproduction rates to become almost identical to “us.” The rest of your post is opinion that belongs nowhere near GQ.
Immigration does not automatically translate into increased economic power.
In Japan, the declining population is coupled with a growing imbalance in the ratio between elderly (dependents/social security payees) and entry-level workers. That means that in order to maintain the current standard of living taxes will have to increase, despite a probable decrease in GDP. It’s a bad recipe - but many (most?) people favor such a gradual decline rather than risking a relaxation on immigration policy and all of the unknown evils that would accompany such a policy.
It seems preposterous to me that people would elect not to have children because of immigrants, but if you have evidence to the contrary by all means present it.
that’s why I said “Literacy in the native language was required by immigration authorities”. The “native language” here mentioned is not English, it is Italian or Russian or what have you, the native language of the immigrants. So the village idiots and the illiterate peasants were not supposed to get through.
that argument proved precisely correct - Italians ended up being a sizable chunk of the larger white American population. That they did this without causing mass unemployment among the blue-collar whites and without driving SoCal health care industry deep in the red (among other problems) is a testament to the power of no frills capitalism and no nonsense government of yore to keep things running.
As noted above, immigration works well in some situations but not in all situations. Not when certain elements of the current socialist and business establishments are busy electing a new people for themselves to replace the inconvenient old ones, all of it amidst an economy that is falling apart.
different places have different problems. Blue collar whites in America have low birthrate because of low wages and high housing costs that are significantly driven by high immigration. The question of what is keeping the Japanese from having more kids is better left to people who read fluent Japanese and are familiar with their political discourse, and it surely has nothing to do with low immigration. Just like the high birthrate amongst the Yanomamo has nothing to do with low immigration (to that tribe) either.
In related news, fever can be caused by flu, smallpox and malaria, among other things. If malaria is the biggest problem in one place and in another place people still get fever (from flu) without malaria does that mean that malaria does not cause fever? Or does this mean that for certain people slavish obedience to their favorite ideologies trumps basic common sense and logic?
In fact, blue collar birth rates have been higher than white collar rates in the U.S. since forever. Apparently there has been a slight, and predictable, dip in the birth rate during the current recession among lower income groups but the overall trend is consistent. Before the recession the gap was considerable. The Population Research Bureau said:
The chart at the bottom on National Birth Trends 1920-2008 show absolutely no correlation between birth rates and immigration. You can compare the birth rates to immigration numbers on the chart on p. 5 of the 2009 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Note that immigration numbers have stayed steady for the past five years.
code_grey, could you please stop inventing paranoid fantasies about the liberals and cite some actual facts when you dump your worldview on a thread? These demographic numbers are extremely easy to get, so easy that it becomes suspicious when you fail to include a single one in your rants.
Whenever anybody argues against current immigration they always think it’s different this time. People were making the same dumb arguments against immigration during the Yellow Peril. Ben Franklin was railing about those Pennsylvania Dutch who dared to speak German!
What does poor people’s birthrates being higher than some other people’s rates have to do with the reason of why their birthrates are nevertheless low? We are not having a gangsta rap battle here instead of a reasoned debate, are we?
So their low rates are higher than the even lower rates of the white collar ones? Well, no shit, huh. They weren’t up to the Baby Boom or even post Baby Boom level rates though, because the economy is in the toilet, wages are low, rents are high and immigration continues. There was a time when American whites reproduced significantly above the replacement level - that time was before the great immigration, great war on poverty, great Bush, great Obama and various other disasters that have befallen the nation over the years.
Well, there are plenty of partisan slogan lies out there…