Posted on 01/02/2026 5:52:25 AM PST by MtnClimber
A couple of years ago, in July 2023, I participated in a debate at the Soho Forum on the subject of immigration. The resolution for the debate was: “Resolved: The U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease.” Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute took the affirmative. I took the negative.
Nowrasteh, a Senior Vice President for Policy at Cato, is known as a free immigration absolutist. And to his credit he had some good points to make. The most important one was that nothing increases world GDP so much and so fast as letting poor people immigrate into rich countries. Even working at the lowest-paid jobs in the U.S., their incomes immediately multiply by factors of five or ten or more. How could anyone be against that?
At the time of the debate in 2023, the Somali frauds in Minnesota had begun to come to light, but only to those paying close attention. The frauds were local news in Minnesota, but not national news at all. Among a few others, Scott Johnson at Minnesota-based PowerLine had been posting regularly about ongoing federal prosecutions relating to billing the Minnesota government for providing millions of non-existent meals to children during the pandemic. But the vast extent and pervasiveness of the plundering of the Minnesota and American taxpayers by Somali fraudsters had yet to be revealed.
Even before the current revelations, it was clear that there were problems with unlimited immigration that made the story focusing just on economic gain far too simplistic. The U.S. population, at around 340 million, is about 4% of world population of over 8 billion. With unlimited immigration, we could easily see our population doubling in a very short time. Would those new arrivals, now suddenly the majority of the country, be satisfied accepting jobs at the low end the income distribution (even if paying 10 times what they were paid just a short time previously) and then working their way up the income ladder gradually by hard work? Or would they take the opportunity to seize the much greater wealth around them immediately, either through the democratic process or by force or theft or all three?
The current revelations are making clear, to the extent it was not already, that the institutions and processes that enable Americans to enrich themselves — private property, free exchange, and hard work — are fragile and can be easily undermined and destroyed. If immigrants with no understanding of these institutions and processes get brought in faster than they can be assimilated, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Meanwhile, you may be wondering how a Somali day care center with no children attending gets accounted for in our GDP statistics. The answer is that this is government spending on goods and services, and thus it gets added to GDP at one hundred cents on the dollar of the government spending on the program. A day care center that collects a $3 million per year government grant to provide non-existent day care adds $3 million to GDP. Bring on hundreds of thousands more fake day care centers, and the GDP will soar. Unfortunately, as with much of the rest of GDP based on wasteful government spending, the gain is illusory.
Maybe we can continue to make some progress on this issue in the new year.
Happy New Year to all!
It seems like wasted government spending should be subtracted from the GDP figures.
Is it really necessary for Francis in his first sentence, to write that July 2023 was a few years ago?
the neoCON bush/romney butt lickers want America to just be an economic zone. Nothing more. Ruled by the 1% elites who got their riches through cronyism and government contracts - served their drinks at the country club by 3rd worlders that will work for less than minimum wage.
well i want to live in a nation. A nation of similar, shared values, beliefs, and heritage. A nation of people descended from similar backgrounds and people of the same religion who form a national culture to be proud of. Not just an economic zone where the rich are free to cry “muh free markets!” when the serfs ask for extra gruel. Not a nation where the self-appointed elites are then free to manipulate the free market to their benefit by massively inflating the supply illegal labor.
Free traitors, neoCONs, and open border globalists are scum of the earth and they do the bidding of their father the devil who also seeks a one-world government that tries to erase Christianity in a sea of ‘diversity’.
The Cato Institute has been a domestic enemy of the American people for decades.
This was evident as early as the Reagan years when Cato strongly opposed Reagan’s policy of protecting semiconductor manufacturing against Japan’s industrial policy that was gutting entire American industries.
These libertarian traitors have no more respect for borders than Obama and Biden. If you want to destroy America by mass immigration either one of those groups will happily do it.
Flooding the labor market with immigrants depresses wages and ruins the lives of the people.
Well said.
Take all government spend out of the GDP. It is not GDP. as it is not a product.
CATO has always been crap.
(And I’m a small-l libertarian/classical liberal.)
“If immigrants with no understanding of these institutions and processes get brought in faster than they can be assimilated, the consequences can be catastrophic.”
That’s not the only problem with massive infusions of cheap labor AND housing demand.
Only in Manhattan can the debate be so tepid and skewed.
Screw that.
1) I have no interest in the "world GDP".
2) We see time and time again these "poor people" getting jobs for what is to them vast sums of money, then they party, drink, and drive, and kill Americans in DUI incidents. Texas alone is full of these stories.
Because due to the cost of living in most places, the income increases are a wash at best!
Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles and a few others have assimilated while maintaining their cultural heritage. Why can’t the new ones follow suit?
Same math applies to worthless, even destructive, Civil Service jobs at all levels of government, and to government grants to NGOs to produce worthless reports and propaganda.
While ago, most of the human history, there was no welfare, but subjects were taxed.
Immigrants were generally welcomed then.
They did not cost anything, but they were potential source of taxes for the sovereign.
But even then, there were cultural and nationalistic conflicts between immigrants and natives.
Welfare makes it a lot of worse, because people moves are motivated by it!
The unconstrained immigration is not compatible with welfare state!
No one should get in except on:
invite (visa, time limited, requirement to become a citizen or leave) or
thoroughly vetted — this includes all family members. E.g., if a cousin wants in but has bad vetting results he is not allowed in. If that bothers the sponsoring family they all lose access.
Not true. Highways are important capital assets. They are constructed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost.
The GPS constellation costs about 1.5-2.0 billion a year to maintain, a tiny fraction of government spending, amounting to about 1.6¢ per American citizen per day, and returns vastly more value.
A very large fraction of government spending is inefficient, and even counterproductive. Student loans, for instance, probably cause more problems than they solve.
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