Immigration is Good

I like immigration. Ethically speaking, for a Brazilian or an American sounds like pulling up the ladder after we or our ancestors have used it. All of us have ancestors who came rather recently from other places than São Paulo or Washington, places that even spoke other languages and had other customs. Brazil and the U.S. are the results of Africans, Japanese, Germans, Italians, and of course the descendants of those who came 12,000 years ago, such as Guarani or Navaho. In fact every human except the Khoisan has ancestors who came from somewhere else, ever since Homo sapiens started drifting out of southern Africa some 70,000 years ago.

Immigration is economically good for humans. It’s obviously good for the immigrant, or she wouldn’t do it. My own country has the second longest of the world’s borders between a very high income place and a very low income place. (The longest is the Mediterranean.) Obviously a poor Honduran or a poor Chadian who makes it to the U.S. or France has much better prospects than her cousin who stayed—literally about ten times better for her and especially for her children. I chat frequently with taxi drivers in Washington DC, who are mainly immigrants from Ethiopia. Over and over they are the proud fathers of two or three children, all of whom they have put through university.

But it’s also good economically for us descended from former immigrants. One simple economic argument is that it’s always better to have more people to trade with. That’s also the argument for free international trade.

And there’s another economic argument, that in a modern economy such as Brazil’s or the U.S.’s, with its astoundingly detailed division of labor, almost all immigrants are not substitutes for you. They do not drive down your wage. They increase your productivity, by helping you, and therefore raise your wage. They are, as economists put it, “complements” with you. The immigrant who drives a taxi is good for you, not bad—unless you are a taxi driver. But the bulk of Brazilians and Americans, even poor ones, are not competing with migrants driving taxis.

Proposing to protect, with restrictions on immigration, a tiny bit of local labor, though, is similar to the main objection to immigration, that it “dilutes” the existing culture. (The dilution argument is a nice version of a very nasty one indeed, which is simply “I hate foreigners.”)

My own country should have a much higher level of immigration. After all, it worked out well from 1776 down to our hideously racist restrictions of 1924. A U.S. without, say, Jews would have much less funny comedians, and without Italians much less interesting food, not to speak of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. And the grandchildren speak Portuguese or English, rooting for the national football team.

But there’s a deeper argument. Cultures change, even if they have no immigration. Protecting the culture from immigrants is the same as protecting it from change over time. Does that sound like a good idea?

Not to anyone but the most rigid conservative.

Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.