Torch, Spring/Summer 2012

ending U.S. sovereignty or erasing the border, rather it is a case for letting the free market determine how much foreign labor we need in this country. Currently, politicians and public policy makers set arbitrary immigration quotas — we’ll take so many from this country this year, so many from that country next year — and, like most exercises in Soviet-style central planning, it’s been a complete disaster. It’s left us with thriving markets in human smuggling and document fraud, dead bodies in the Arizona desert, and more than 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Our policy makers would do better to establish free market mechanisms, such as guest-worker programs, that allow the law of supply and demand to determine levels of immigration. In addition to reducing illegal entries, a guest-worker program would free up Homeland Security resources to apprehend drug dealers, gang members, and potential terrorists — actual threats to our safety. Pursuing people coming here to work is an inefficient use of limited resources and makes this country less safe. I favor free people and free markets, and that includes free and flexible labor markets. Most people who self-identify as free market conservatives claim to share this belief with one glaring exception — immigration. No self-respecting free market adherent would dream of supporting laws that interrupt the free movement of goods and services across international borders. But, when it comes to laws that hamper the free movement of workers who produce those goods and services, too many conservatives today abandon their free market principles. There is no inconsistency in advocating for both free markets and more open immigration. Over the years, I have repeatedly heard the same anti-immigration arguments: they’re stealing jobs, depressing wages, and overburdening our welfare state. Yet, my own research has found these claims to be overblown or simply untrue. Growing Our Economy The available research on how immigrants impact cities and states indicate that all but a very small percentage of people coming illegally are economic migrants. They are coming here by and large to work, not go on the dole. A study released in 2010, using the most recent census data, concluded that immigrants, legal and illegal, make significant economic contributions to the U.S. economy. The largest 25 metropolitan areas in the U.S. account for 41 percent of the country’s total population, half of our gross domestic product, and two-thirds of our immigrants. Even though immigration in the U.S. has expanded beyond the traditional gateways of New York and California, immigrants remain concentrated in just a handful of the country’s metropolitan areas. Roughly one in three residents in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York City is an immigrant, and nearly a third of all immigrants in the U.S. live in one of these three cities. Economists can’t say for certain whether immigrants come to metropolitan areas because they are growing or whether these areas are growing because of the immigrants. But what the data does show is that immigration and economic growth go hand in hand. Areas that experience large influxes of immigrants, legal or illegal, do not seem to experience economic harm as a result. Between 1990 and 2006, the metro areas with the fastest economic growth were also the areas with the greatest increase in the immigrant share of their labor force. For example, over that period, Dallas, Phoenix, and Houston’s metro areas experienced the fastest growth of the immigrant share of their respective labor forces (e.g., the percentage of foreign-born laborers in Dallas more than doubled). Yet over that same period, these three cities experienced economic growth well above 24 TORCH | Spring-Summer 2012