2.4 Immigration and the Economy

2.6 Immigration and the Economy

Pro-immigration business lobby groups, land developers and their allied politicians may fudge the job displacement effect of mass immigration by airily touting its purported general economic benefits thus implying that net jobs gowth will result from overall economic growth. This is pure prpaganda, however, as immigration does not generate enough broader economic demand to compensate for the job displacement it causes.

Immigration is a drag on the broader economy – immigration does not boost overall economic activity nor the tax revenue needed to support the demographically-ageing West’s pension and welfare state. Many quite respectable sources have documented this:

• • The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that immigrants are, on the whole, a drain on the American welfare system: half of all immigrants receive more in government handouts than they pay in taxes, another third break even, with only around 15% of immigrants contributing positively to the American economy in any meaningful way.

  • Denmark's Ministry of Finance found that immigrants are, overall, a net drain on the country’s welfare state – unsurprisingly, since 84% of all welfare recipients in Denmark are immigrants or their descendants.

  • For the UK, the University College of London found that immigrants consumed far more in welfare than they paid in taxes; during the Blair/Brown Labor government's mass immigration policies between 1995 and 2011, forexample, non-European immigrants (primarily from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa) cost the British economy a net £120 billion.

  • In the US, the (immigration-sceptical) Center for Immigration Studies found that 63% of households headed by a noncitizen depended on Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance or all of these taxpayer-funded welfare programs, double the rate for households headed by an American-born citizen. Illegal immigrants, alone, cost U.S. taxpayers $115 billion ($900 per household) per year in welfare upkeep, and give birth to 300,000 infants a year costing $2.5 billion more. Providing sanctuary from prosecution/deportation to its large illegal immigrant population costs 18% of California’s annual budget in taxpayer-funded welfare and services. Each month, 60,000 illegal immigrants cross the Mexican border into the US to add to the immigration-caused economic problems of the US (the cost of erecting a southern border wall, by the way, is less than 1% of the taxpayer expense that would be saved over four years by stopping illegal crossings).

These welfare costs, broader economic costs, deficit-boosting costs, of mass immigration are effectively outsourced to the government, i.e. the taxpayer, and not to the capitalist class – for businesses, the only thing that matters is boosting their bottom-line through cheap labour and selling more stuff to more consumers.