The Democratic case for restricting immigration

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By Leith van Onselen

Left-leaning magazine, Vanity Fair, has published a well-argued article laying the Democratic (left) case for restricting immigration into the United States:

With stricter border enforcement, employers would immediately start to feel a reduction of available labor, as is already happening…

With the share of low-skill workers becoming smaller, many sorts of employment would start to pay better: home care, security work, massage therapy, dishwashing, gardening, housekeeping, cleaning, construction, gardening, manufacturing. Out in the fields, agricultural wages would likewise start to rise little by little. Union drives would go better, as employers stopped being able to threaten workers with deportation. We’d see more productivity innovations as labor costs forced businesses to make better use of their human resources or to mechanize, as in Japan.

Environmental conservation would become easier for the simple reason that fewer people would be making demands on our natural resources. Our persistent droughts out west would become less severe with a slowly growing population than with a rapidly growing population, for the simple reason that there would be more water to go around. Americans would continue to consume too much fuel and electricity per person, but lower numbers would mean less strain on our resources. Air pollution would be curbed. Traffic increases would be slower. National parks would become only slightly, not drastically, more crowded each year…

We’d see a stronger social safety net and more money freed up to support those who need it, rather than having it constantly subdivided among an ever-growing population of impoverished Americans.

… most of these developments would merely restore some of what Americans took for granted 50 years ago, when the wealthier among us accepted a more modest lifestyle in order to pay a living wage to the rest…

The hope of people like me is that the party that has traditionally favored market interventions to boost social egalitarianism—that would be Democrats—would remember that most of its social goals are jeopardized by laissez-faire immigration. (Denmark’s Social Democrats seem to have learned this.) Most problems that the left hopes to solve—poverty, bad schools, stagnant wages, homelessness, climate change—would instead be alleviated by more modest levels of immigration.

Can you imagine Australia’s left-leaning commentators at The Guardian and Fairfax ever writing such sense? Me neither. To them, maintaining mass immigration and ‘open borders’ is virtuous, regardless of the costs to ordinary Australians.

It’s a shame because mass immigration is a class war more than anything else. The elite owners of land and capital privatise the gains in the form of asset appreciation and more consumers feeding profits, whereas the costs of population growth are borne by the broader community (think infrastructure, congestion, housing affordability and the environment), reducing their living standards.

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If only the ‘fake’ left would learn and stand up for ordinary workers and the environment.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.