Cato Institute has released a couple of studies recently showing that low-skill immigrants are valuable. (The papers lump together all immigrants, but the majority of immigration in recent decades was low-skill.)
“Immigrant and Native Consumption of Means-Tested Welfare and Entitlement Benefits in 2023” classifies Social Security as “welfare”. The Social Security Administration calculates a real rate of return on taxes paid into the system at 2-4 percent/year for a medium-wage worker and, thus, someone who invested in the S&P 500 and received a 6 percent/year real return would be a “welfare queen”.
“Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023” says that low skill immigrants are the reason that we can afford our magnificent government. Much of the study hinges on birthright citizenship. If a migrant has 10 U.S.-born children and each child costs the Treasury $3 million (public school education, public housing, Medicaid, etc.) the costs of those 10 kids are put into the “native” category. One fun part:
Indirect property tax revenue: The one semidynamic element that we incorporate into the NASEM model is the effect of immigration on housing values. By increasing the demand for housing, immigration increases the value of property, which increases property tax revenues.
In other words, one benefit of open borders is that the tens of millions of people who walk across will drive up the value of residential real estate and, thus, property tax revenue. I.e., contrary to other propaganda in which Econ 101 supply-demand curves don’t apply, the Cato nerds say that a migrant-expanded population drives up housing costs for native-born Americans.
(I don’t think that Cato is correct, incidentally, that more valuable real estate leads to more property tax revenue. The typical city has a budget and then sets a property tax rate sufficient to fund that budget given the total assessed value within the city. If Ayatollah Mamdani drove every successful person from NYC down to Florida and property values in Palm Beach County doubled, the county wouldn’t keep the rates the same and immediately double its spending.)
Cato used to believe in markets. This is plainly no longer true. They didn’t ask the obvious questions, e.g.,
- If low-skill immigrants are a gold mine, why won’t some other country pay us to send them the migrants whom we are deporting?
- Why don’t other countries compete with us for migrants, then? If we offer a green card via diversity lottery to a person in Mali, for example, why don’t Australia, Taiwan, Mexico, or Canada jump in and try to persuade that person to go elsewhere? Why don’t Japan and France have offices in northern Mexico offering to fly U.S.-destined migrants to their nations?
What kind of Scientists at Cato could do a study proving Scientifically that every low-skill migrant is worth $1 million despite the fact that no country anywhere in the world has offered to pay even $1 for one of our deported migrants?
The answer arrived via direct message. A rich Democrat who lives in the Boston area recently criticized me for referring to his state as “Maskachusetts” and noted that Science had proven (“data shows”) 500 million to 1 billion lives saved from people wearing their saliva-soaked face rags. How does this relate to Cato’s contrary-to-the-market conclusions regarding immigration?
Nobody right now will pay for Scientific proof that forcing 2-year-olds to wear cloth masks prevents an aerosol respiratory virus from spreading. The Scientists who did that research can now apply their nonbinary selves to proving that low-skill migrants from the world’s least successful and most violent societies are a huge plus for any country wise enough to welcome them.