The U.S. needs more legal immigration, not less

Over the past three years, the surge of unauthorized immigrants crossing the southern border has overwhelmed local communities, strained the resources of big cities and become a major political liability for President Joe Biden. Worse, the government’s failure to stop illegal entries is draining public support for immigration of all kinds — and in the process threatening America’s longterm economic growth.

Estimates released last month by the Congressional Budget Office show that higher-than-projected immigration — due to both the record influx of asylum-seekers and the post-pandemic reopening of legal pathways — will expand the U.S. labor force by 5.2 million workers over the next decade. That’s because more than 90% of adult foreigners coming to the U.S. are under 55, compared to 62% of the overall adult population. These workers should boost gross domestic product by about 0.2 percentage points per year over the next decade, adding $7 trillion to the economy and contributing an extra $1 trillion in taxes. Without this added growth, the projected federal deficit in 2034 would be 7.3% of GDP rather than 6.4%.

These findings add to other research on the benefits of immigration. New migrants currently account for 80% of US population growth; by 2042, they’ll be the source of all of it. Once integrated into the economy, immigrants fuel growth by filling labor shortages and allowing companies to expand, revitalizing communities, boosting home values and creating new businesses.

Yet those contributions need to be balanced against the downsides of admitting unauthorized migrants on such a scale. Most of the income and job gains flow to immigrants themselves during their first few years in the country, while the rest of society bears the costs in the form of depressed real wages for unskilled workers and increased demand for services like education, health care and temporary housing. There’s some evidence that this dependence diminishes over time — a recent government report found that from 2005 to 2019, asylum-seekers, refugees and their families cost $723.4 billion in government services, while contributing $739.4 billion in tax revenue — but the short- and medium-term costs are still huge.

What’s needed is a more orderly system that greatly restricts unauthorized entries while expanding legal pathways for immigrants to come to the U.S. to work. Funding for border security agencies and asylum processing should be increased and standards should be toughened, with applicants required to file claims before reaching the border. At the same time, the U.S. should boost the number of workers admitted legally in high-need fields that face labor shortages, such as nursing, home health care and farming.

Such reforms to expand legal immigration may be a hard sell until the border crisis is solved. For the sake of the country’s future, lawmakers have a responsibility to get serious about both.