Most U.S. Immigrants Are Socio-Economically Fit

The argument against greater immigration to the U.S. is not supported by economic arguments about the health of the U.S. economy as a whole. 

This isn't the only legitimate reason to favor or oppose immigration. But Garett Jones is simply wrong in arguing or implying that the U.S. economy as a whole would be better off with less immigration.

Also, in fairness, Caplan doesn't think that the research Jones is relying upon, even though it disproves Jones' own point, is as solid as Jones claims.

Almost everyone will take Garett Jones' The Culture Transplant as a forthright defense of not just maintaining existing immigration restrictions but tightening them. Every chapter strongly implies that liberal immigration policies are naïve and myopic. Jones, an economist at George Mason University (where I also teach), concludes by warning that admitting millions from the poorest nations will impoverish all humanity: "Innovation would decline overall, and since new innovations eventually spread out across the entire planet, the entire planet would eventually lose out." 

Even his support for high-skilled immigration is restrained: Jones wants to welcome "immigrants who have substantially more education, more job skills, more pro-market attitudes, than the average citizen" . . . 

Yet Jones' evidence argues for radical liberalization of immigration: if not fully open borders, then at least 50 percent open borders—at a time when borders are somewhere around 2 percent open. Using Jones' hand-picked measure of cultural quality, immigration from all of the following countries to the United States would be, by his argument, a clear-cut cultural improvement:

Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Moldova, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and Vietnam. 

Using a slightly different cultural measure adds the 1.7 billion inhabitants of India and Pakistan to the list. 

According to the research upon which Jones rests his book, we should expect migration from this long and populous list of countries to (a) substantially increase per-capita U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), (b) drastically increase gross world product, and (c) drastically increase global economic growth. . . . 

I fear that I'll find that Jones is again hiding the ball. Why? Because when I know a piece well, I often see the ball he's trying to hide. Most strikingly, when he discusses Robert D. Putnam's famous article on the effects of ethnic diversity on social trust, he neglects to mention that moving the U.S. from its current diversity to the maximum possible diversity would reduce trust by a microscopic 0.04 on a 4-point scale. Much ado about next to nothing.

- Bryan Caplan (an economics professor and blogger) reviewing The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left, by Garett Jones.