Attention immigration policy wonks and policy makers. We’ll regret not doing something like this … and sooner rather than later. US economic strength and prosperity depends on it. Agree to a goal; this suggests 2M per year over the next 20 years. Agree to what portion of immigrants should be for humanitarian purposes and what portion should be to scarf up the world’s go-getters and IQ points. Getting agreement to the goals will be a bitch. Put together a plan to achieve the goal; this will be work but is straightforward. Implementing the plan will also be a bitch; implementation always is.
Full Disclosure — My beliefs:
Like almost all of my US readers, my ancestors were immigrants.
Social progress and national security depend on economic prosperity. You need money to pay for social progress and national security.
GDP is a simple indicator of economic prosperity and the size of the economy. I’ll concede it might be too simple an indicator but I’m assuming it’s good enough.
The US economy is the biggest in the world and needs to stay that way.
How many immigrants does the US need? Here’s my back-of-the-envelope.
Caution. This might hurt your head but try to stick with it. And, please let me know if you see a logic flaw or arithmetic error, however embarrassing to me.
US GDP growth over the past 20 years has averaged 2.01% per year. That’s not a particularly robust number; it’s kind of middle-of-the-pack at best.
Note: In 2022, US GDP grew 1.9%. India’s grew 7.2%, Indonesia and Poland 5.3%, UK 4.3%, Mexico 3.9%, Canada 3.8%, China 3.0%, France 2.5%, Germany 1.8%, and Japan 1.0%. Russia’s declined by 2.1%.
US population growth over the past 20 years has averaged 0.80% per year.
Note: The historical actuals are based on the census. The US census includes immigrants, regardless of their legal status.
US population growth over the next 20 years is predicted to be about half of our historical average, averaging only 0.43% per year. At this growth rate, US population will be 368.7M in 2042.
Note: The future projections also include immigrants.
Key Point: If we want our future GDP growth to be the same as our middle-of-the-pack past 2.01% and if population growth drives GDP, we need 0.37% more population growth per year (0.80% minus 0.43%).
If we increase population growth by this 0.37% (from 0.43% to 0.80%), our population needs to be 396.9M.
That’s a gap of 28.2M people (396.6M needed minus 368.7M projected).
Key Point: Absent a robust boom in procreation or lifespan, however enjoyable that might be, it seems reasonable to assume we can’t do much about birth rates or death rates over the next 20 years. So, the only way to fill the gap is to increase immigration by this 28.2M over the next 20 years. That’s another 1.4M more immigrants each year.
How does this compare to the number of immigrants who have come to the US over the past 10 years? In 2012 there were 40.8M immigrants in the US. In 2022, that had grown to 46.2M. We added an average of 536K immigrants per year. The most recent 2 years (2023/2022 and 2022/2021) have been higher; about 1M immigrants per year. Maybe that level is an anomaly; maybe not.
Key Point: If we want to sustain 2% GDP growth, we need to quadruple the number of immigrants that have historically come to the US, from about 0.5M to about 1.9M per year (the 0.5M plus the 1.4M to fill the gap).
Note: It seems logical that we could need a lot more government and social infrastructure to smartly, gracefully, and humanely attract and assimilate a lot more immigrants. The experts need to consider this.
REALLY Key Point: Experts on the data and the underlying definitions and assumptions can do a better job of this than I have. And they should. We need to have a national goal for the number of immigrants that are needed to sustain our world’s-biggest economy, our social progress, and our national security. I think I’ve demonstrated with the above that this is a know-able number. True, it’s a prediction. But a solid prediction that we agree is roughly right is better than nothing.
What kind of immigrants does the US want and need?
Once we agree to a target number of immigrants we want and need, we need to think about what kind of immigrants we want.
To my mind, there are really categories: Selfish and Selfless.
Selfless is humanitarian, taking care of our fair share of the world’s refugees.
Selfish is growing our population and doing so with more than our fair share of the world’s go-getters and IQ points, especially STEM.
The mix we want will be driven by our values, our goals, our capabilities … and by external forces (like refugees from wars, natural disasters, climate change, crime, etc.).
I don’t know enough to hazard a guess on the “right” mix. But we do need a consensus agreement on the mix.
Then we can go about putting together a plan to achieve our goals. And, as is always the case, we’ll need to refine our goals and our plan as we learn. And also as is always the case, we can succeed; the US always does when we put our minds and hearts into it.
What I’m advocating here is trying to get to a consensus view on the number of immigrants we want and need … and the mix we want.
Note: In developing this, I worked Google search hard. Here are my sources. Trusting soul that I am, I assume they are credible.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-growth-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/population-growth-rate
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=1W&most_recent_value_desc=true
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