Some Notes On Immigration

In preparation for my big Soho Forum debate a week from today, I’ve been doing some research to collect statistics relative to the subject of immigration, particularly as to the potential consequences of unlimited immigration into the U.S. Today I’ll share some of those statistics as a teaser for what you will get when you come to the debate.

The resolution for the debate is “The U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease.” I have agreed to take the negative side of the resolution. You might say that they have given me a ridiculously easy position to defend. The affirmative side must argue for essentially wide open immigration. Like most libertarian-oriented people, I support robust immigration. But wide open? Let’s be realistic.

For starters, the population of the world has just passed 8 billion. The population of the U.S. is about 340 million, which is just over 4% of the world’s total. Another way of looking at that is that if just about 4% of the people in the world outside the U.S. decided to pick up and move here, that would double our population. In an unlimited legal immigration regime, that could happen very quickly.

A sudden flood of immigration of such magnitude could be enormously disruptive to many or even most people’s lives. The biggest disruption would be to the lives of those at the lowest end of the income distribution, where competition for low-skilled jobs could not help but increase substantially. If you think that the most important value is the aggregate income of all the people (pre-existing Americans plus new immigrants), undoubtedly that will have increased substantially. If you think that it is important that the pre-existing Americans have some stability in their lives and a legitimate interest in not seeing their already-modest incomes suddenly undermined, you would have a different view.

And in this regime of unlimited legal immigration, why wouldn’t huge numbers of people move here? The per capita GDP of the U.S. now is in the range of $70,000. Go to the rankings of countries by per capita GDP, and you will find nine of them with higher per capita GDP than the U.S. All of those nine are little niche places with no remotely possible capacity to absorb any kind of mass immigration from around the world. Of the nine, the one with the highest population is Switzerland, at under 9 million. Ireland, Norway and Singapore come next in the 4 - 6 million range. Five of the super-wealthy 9 have populations under 1 million (Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Bermuda, Isle of Man, Monaco), and the last four are under 100,000. The total population of the super-wealthy nine is well under 30 million, less than one-tenth the population of the U.S.

So the U.S. is a huge outlier in having both a big land area and a very large population to go along with top-ranking per capita GDP. If you were living today in one of the poor countries of the world — countries with close to 7 billion of the 8 billion people — there is no question that this is where you would want to go.

Is the prospect of increased crime a serious concern in a world of no immigration restrictions? I think there is no doubt that it is. The countries south of our border — including Mexico, Central America, and northern South America — include some of the highest crime countries in the world. As readers here know, I often use murder rates as a proxy for overall crime level, since murder rates are less subject to manipulation and subjective judgment than rates for other crimes. The overall murder rate for the U.S. is approximately 5 per 100,000 per year. Here are some rates (from World Population Review) for countries to our south that are large sources of current illegal immigration that would become legal under the proposed resolution:

Mexico: 29/100K; El Salvador: 52/100K; Honduras: 39/100K; Guatemala: 22/100K; Venezuela: 37/100K; Brazil: 27/100K

Those range from more than 4 times the U.S. rate to over 10 times. And note that most homicides are committed by young men. The rates cited for each country are with respect to the entire population, whereas the population that picks up and moves to the U.S. includes few older people and more men than women, so the propensity to crime would be much higher than indicated by these numbers.

Then you have the propensity of the Latin American voters to elect far-left and even Marxist governments. I can’t explain why they do this, but time and again, they do. Voters in places like Colombia or Peru can look at failed Marxist states like Venezuela or Bolivia right next door, and yet they go right ahead and vote for the far left themselves. And thus the wide-open-immigration proposal in the U.S. is jointly supported by many libertarians on the one hand, but also Democrats and the Left on the other. The libertarians support open immigration for what are in my view worthy reasons — mainly, offering the chance to many poor people to greatly increase their prosperity. But the Left supports open immigration for much less worthy reasons, mainly the hope of getting enough left-wing votes to establish a permanent majority here and banish Republicans and libertarians from government forever.

A few examples of Latin American countries voting in the far Left:

Venezuela first elected Hugo Chavez in 1998. There hasn’t been a remotely fair election since, and Chavez’s designated successor Maduro remains in power today. The economy has been destroyed.

Mexico elected President Lopez Obrador in 2018, promising a far-left transformation.

Brazil brought far-left President Luis Ignacio da Silva back to power in 2022.

Colombia elected leftist Gustavo Petro in 2022, despite being right next door to Venezuela and having received millions of immigrants from that failed Marxist state.

There are similar stories from Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, and others.

Is there any reason to think that Latin Americans moving here en masse will not bring their voting proclivities with them? None that I can think of.