Best of 2024: Make Immigration Great Again

If we can do this in cricket, we can do it in anything.

I’ve been sending out a few highlights of my best work in 2024, and I know I just sent you one about immigration. But since that issue is cracking open right now—and especially in a controversy over immigration from India—I just had to remind you of the one below, which was one of the articles I most enjoyed writing last year.

The article I link to was published in Discourse, but I’m sending you this announcement of it because I added a lot of extra comments about the benefits of immigration. See also further comments on America’s import-export trade in talent. in the context of this summer’s Olympics.

Let’s just say that when it comes to one of the big issues of this new year, my readers are going in very well-informed. So consider taking advantage of the last few days of our holiday sale.

Make Immigration Great Again

I have a new article up at Discourse presenting the “The US Cricket Team’s Guide to Winning at Everything.” This is my promised commentary on the big lesson of the US cricket team’s upset win over Pakistan.

America just posted a stunning win from a team we didn’t even know we had, in a sport most of us don’t understand and could not possibly explain. If we can figure out the secret behind this, we can figure out how to become a leading world power in anything.

And the secret is very simple: immigration.

The big thing you’ll notice about the US cricket team is that it is dominated by Indian immigrants (plus an Australian, a South African, and the US-born children of Caribbean immigrants).

The joke that immediately made the rounds after the surprise US win in Dallas is that Pakistan didn’t lose to “India-B” (one of the Indian national cricket teams), they lost to “India H-1B.” India vs. Pakistan is the most intense rivalry in cricket, fueled by the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries. It’s a bit like the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, but with nuclear weapons. The US cricket team is dominated by Indian immigrants who are here on H-1B visas awarded to skilled workers, particularly in the tech industry.

The biggest star of the game—the team’s “bowler,” the equivalent of a pitcher in baseball—is Saurabh Netravalkar, who was raised in Mumbai and came to the US for graduate school. By day, he’s a software engineer at Oracle.

As I point out, “It is very difficult for a country that has no history or experience with a sport to excel at it.” So instead, we simply imported centuries of history and expertise. And if we can do that with cricket, we can do it with anything else—as we have done all along.

You want to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb? Bring in a bunch of German Jews, a few Italians, and definitely some Hungarians. The Manhattan Project was built on the work of refugees. It’s one of the great self-owns of history that the fascists drove a bunch of Europe’s top scientists into the arms of the Allies.

Similarly, if you want to beat the Soviets to the Moon, grab all the best German rocket scientists. One of the keys to America’s post-World War II ascendancy isn’t about traditional values or good old American ingenuity. It’s about the ingenuity of new Americans and the benefits of the wartime and postwar migration of European talent.

The lesson for today is pretty clear.

Unfortunately, this is not a lesson anybody seems to want to hear right now. As I observe, “If we want to make America great again, we need to make immigration great again. But somehow the people who claim to be interested in doing the former are dogmatically opposed to the latter.”

Read the whole thing.

The U.S. Cricket Team’s Guide to Winning at Everything

The $7 Trillion Subsidy

The rejoinder you will often hear, even frome some otherwise sensible portions of the right, is that you can’t have both a welfare state and immigration.

Bryan Caplan has an interesting post criticizing Milton Friedman for endorsing this idea, pointing out that it amounts to the rule you can’t achieve one increase in freedom without achieving every other increase in freedom at the same time. In effect, the free-market utopia has to be achieved all at once or not at all—which is not how things ever work.

In passing, though, Caplan makes what is actually a bigger and more important observation: “Once you realize that the welfare state is primarily about helping the old, not the poor, it turns out that immigration may be the only way for aging countries to sustain their welfare states.” In other words, Friedman got the economics of immigration backward.

It’s not that you can’t have a welfare state with immigration. The reality is that you can’t have a welfare state without immigration. Immigrants are young and come here in search of opportunity, so they work and start new businesses and end up subsidizing welfare for the native-born.

I’ve been keeping in my back pocket a link to a Washington Post article summing up a Congressional Budget Office report that quantifies the long-term contribution of immigrants both to the US economy and to the federal budget.

Voters and political strategists have treated our country’s ability to draw immigrants from around the world as a curse; it could be a blessing, if only we could get out of our own way.

Consider a few numbers: Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released updated 10-year economic and budget forecasts. The numbers look significantly better than they did a year earlier, and immigration is a key reason.

The CBO has now factored in a previously unexpected surge in immigration that began in 2022, which the agency assumes will persist for several years. These immigrants are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, largely because immigrants skew younger. This infusion of working-age immigrants will more than offset the expected retirement of the aging, native-born population.

This will in turn lead to better economic growth. As CBO Director Phill Swagel wrote in a note accompanying the forecasts: As a result of these immigration-driven revisions to the size of the labor force, “we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

So there we have the actual impact of immigration. Not a drain on the federal budget, but a $1 trillion per year subsidy in tax revenues—and a $7 trillion benefit to the US economy as a whole.

And that’s not counting all the other benefits.

Immigrants are also associated with other positive growth effects, including higher entrepreneurship rates and disproportionate contributions to science, research, and innovation.

This article was published back in February, so it does not mention cricket—but we can now add that to the list.

It is tempting for the native-born to deflect their unease with the parasitic ethics of the welfare state by projecting it onto somebody else. But immigrants are not the parasites on the system. We are.

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Conservatism Versus Greatness

Matt Yglesias, a guy famous for calling for One Billion Americans, recently posted some comments on the benefits of immigration. They’re probably good, but they’re behind a paywall, and I can’t subscribe to everything and neither can you.

But in the free preview, he makes an interesting observation on a somewhat different issue.

[V]isiting Shanghai “can trick you into thinking China is the richest country in the world, instead of a middle income country—China is just coming off of the greatest construction boom in world history, and everything in those Tier 1 cities is at the beginning of its capital depreciation cycle.” What I think is most interesting about this is the fact that people who visit Shanghai and see all the brand new buildings really do find it incredibly impressive. Now look back around at the United States, and note that every city has a lot of rules in place that are explicitly designed to discourage replacing the existing stock of buildings with newer ones.

The story of how those laws came to be is complex. But on some level, laws that prevent America from having a China-scale construction boom are in place because people think that’s what they want. The fact that nearly everyone who goes to Shanghai comes away impressed—so impressed that they develop an exaggerated sense of Shanghai’s prosperity—is telling us something about ourselves. Sometimes old things can be genuinely impressive and beautiful. But Americans should get real about the fact that the “historic” architecture of DC and San Francisco is not exactly Florence or the Barri Gòtic. We would like our country better with more renewal of the built environment.

There’s a tie between the fear of immigration and the fear of building newer and bigger things: a small-minded conservatism (whatever its superficial political trappings) that recoils from the new and longs for the familiar—and in the process shrinks from pursuing the greatness of which America is capable.