I don't understand the assumption that a country can't procreate sufficiently to maintain its population. We need to fix what's broken there. I mostly blame socialism and welfare but maybe it's something else. Whatever it is we need to cure it, not band-aid it with immigration. It's a sick society that chooses extinction.
The decline in fertility is so broad based that to pin it on a cause like welfare seems far fetched. It is lower among the poor, low among the rich. It is declining globally.
Maybe not but there is a mechanism. Socialism spreads the benefits of raising productive children to the whole of society, not just the family. But the costs are still largely borne by the parents, and necessarily so since they are so physical and personal. This creates rational incentives for freeloading. There is no need to have children to ensure someone will care for you in old age. And when you do have children, the economic incentives are to minimize your investment in them. So we see estrangement becoming common.
The top 1% actually have more children. They have enough money to defy the economic incentives.
Good points. But I always thought the 1% had more kids because they can pay more easily pay the extra childcare, transportation, education costs of having kids
This discussion ignores the whole moral argument for more open borders. These are people first and foremost, not simply workers or consumers. Not to mention the empirical argument, people move, always have always will. The real questions should be how do we reduce migration caused by conflict, economic need, and environmental degradation? And how do we facilitate integration, not assimilation, into our society.
Thanks, these are important points and I don't dismiss them. I've addressed the moral and cosmopolitan case for open borders elsewhere, including in my book.
But this piece is deliberately written for an audience that isn't moved by those arguments—and probably never will be. The question I'm asking here is: even if you don't care about immigrants' well-being, even if you start from pure national interest, where does your own logic actually take you? Turns out it still takes you to a lot of immigration.
I appreciate your taking the time to reply Prof. Kustov and I look forward to reading “In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular”. This is your area of expertise, so I won’t pretend to have any insights you haven’t already considered. From an average Joe’s perspective, I feel if you discount the moral argument for economic self-interest, then you’re buying into a capitalist framing and have implicitly accepted immigrants as less than. That said, I’m truly curious to see if your book can change my perspective.
You have 3 examples of pro-immigration people making more moderate claims than you describe. The population point is mathematically true about population collapse. And the piece on the elderly has the word “Could” in the headlines. Hardly in the “we need ‘em in a cosmic sense of the word” arguments.
Good point--as before, I could have found stronger examples for the intro (they absolutely exist!). But unlike the previous piece, I'm not trying to argue that pro-immigration advocates are exaggerating. I'm trying to concede the restrictionist premise--even if you and I don't think it's quite right--and see where it actually leads. The argument of this piece isn't "stop saying we need immigration." It's "even if we don't need it, the case for it is still there even on restrictionists' own terms."
Immigration restrictionist here. A few specific proposals.
1) Transition Social Security from "pay as you go" to fully funded.
A generational task, but it would take much of the fiscal squeeze out of demographic crunch. Superannuation in Australia is a good model, which would have the added benefit of increasing investment, aiding capital expenditure for the technologies of the future.
2) Strengthen the student->employee pipeline.
High schools waste time teaching academic subjects to below-average students. Teach them marketable skills instead. Similarly, college students are misaligned with labor market demand (https://www.mercatus.org/research/research-papers/higher-education-and-school-work-mismatch-evolving-labor-market). Reserve federally subsidized student loans for training in in-demand fields. Permit such loans to be used for approved non-college training programs. Partner with industry leaders to develop exit exams to prove competence upon graduation. These measures should ease the employer demand for immigration.
3) End birthright citizenship.
Birthright citizenship is an end-around to illegal immigration enforcement. "Anchor baby" is an apt term, as the public doesn't have the stomach to break apart the family, and you can't deport a citizen. Even non-immigrant visa holders can eventually become citizens with family-based criteria.
Without birthright citizenship, the political threat of temporary work visa holders like H-2 is much less salient. Cheap strawberries secured!
4) Curtail certain family-based immigration.
Family-based immigration was introduced in the 1965 Act to assuage concerns about demographic change. Now it facilitates it.
Parents of US citizens shouldn't be an immigration eligibility criterion, let alone in an uncapped category. Similarly, abolish the F1 (unmarried adult children of US citizens), F2B (unmarried adult children of legal permanent residents), F3 (married children of US citizens), and F4 (siblings of US citizens) categories.
These measures alone would cut immigration by 20-25%.
Most people don’t realize how vast chain migration is. This is why I oppose any amnesty whatsoever. One illegal migrant turned green card holder = parents, siblings, siblings and kids, siblings spouses parents, sibling spouses siblings, etc. you don’t legalize 1 person, you legalize 15.
As an immigration restrictionist, my ideal immigration system would be ending asylum at the border - it's basically a scam at this point, near zero humanitarian admissions - the rest of the world is not my problem, immediate deportation for anyone who crosses the border illegally without exception, mass deportation of everyone who came illegally or claimed "asylum" post 2017, mandatory deportation without exception for any felony conviction.
On legal immigration, family visas must be restricted to exclusively spouses and minor children. For low skilled labour, basically only women should be allowed in, unless there just aren't as many takers as we need. Mandatory B2 English for green card and naturalization. Mandatory A2 English for entry. I am willing to increase high skilled STEM and medical migration by allowing students who get those relevant degrees an automatic green cards.
And anybody who writes articles like these, get out.
That plus strict country-of-origin quotas, to aid in assimilation, like we used to do in the middle of the last century. Minus the automatic green cards for STEM. I would leave high-skill employment to H-1B, at a managed volume and with origin quotas.
Also no green card pathway for HB-1. It wasn’t in that initial legislation but got added in later. Everything gets expanded.
Also HB-1 needs to be reformed with actual talent getting them. I read a story of an HB-1 HR woman complaining about not getting a green card. There are tons of Americans who can be HR. It’s not specialized, technical or requires immense intelligence.
It's not about that. It's that sociologically, young men with no attachment are the most unstable and crime prone demographic. But physical strength peaks in your 20s, so physical jobs need at least some 20 year olds, so let's just get women. Young women don't provoke the same amount of anxiety in people, don't commit the same amount of crime. We have an obligation to treat citizens equally, no such obligation extends to foreigners.
I think I disagree with your framing of Sweden's "failure" of immigration. The relevant question is not what the employment/wage gap is between native swedes and immigrants, rather what is the employment/wage gap between immigrants and the natives of their home countries.
If the immigrants are better off than if they stayed home, and native Swede's employment or wages were not much affected, then this is a success, regardless of if the immigrants became as successful as native Swedes.
You make a fair point: "failure" may be too harsh, and the gains to immigrants themselves are large and important. I don't discount that.
But I do think Sweden's immigration outcomes have been notably worse than those of most peer countries, at least from the perspective of national interest—which is the lens this piece is using. It's not just about immigrants earning less than native Swedes. Someone has to sustain a large population with 20+ percentage point employment gaps and their descendants, while also managing the various externalities, including crime, that come with poor integration. I discuss this at length in my book.
The cosmopolitan case that immigrants are better off than they would have been at home is real, but it's not the argument that sustains political support for immigration in a democracy. That's ultimately the tragedy here: Sweden's approach may have helped many individual immigrants while undermining the political viability of the system that let them in :(
I once analyzed the Fortune 500 claim, and firstly, they take very liberal use of the word "immigrant" and "founded by". For example, Facebook is seen as one such company, because one of the first investors was a Jewish Brazilian that Zuckerberg met at college. Apple is seen as such company because Jobs biological father was from .. Morocco? Syria? Amazon also because Bezos adoptive father (!) was from Cuba.
Secondly, if we go back in history, many of the highest ranked Fortune 500 companies were founded by Jewish from Russia and Slavic country. Italians and their children (who were as numerous as Jewish) founded only one (Bank of America). As for Mexican migrants and their children, I think they have founded zero, but I haven't checked.
My point is that those who point to "immigrants start companies" as an argument for open borders are dishonest. High skilled and intelligent immigrants start large companies. Not low skilled from [the country that is currently not sending their best to the US].
Good point. Folks should be more upfront about how they define immigrants when they come up with stats like that. Note, though, that Hanania's piece was explicitly about the value of high-skilled immigration, not an argument for open borders.
“But in 1800, the United States had just 5.3 million people—smaller than Sweden is today. If someone had argued then for “100 million Americans,” they would have sounded equally delusional. The country got there—and then tripled that number—largely through immigration.”
I also have to question this - the math is wrong.
The US had a TFR (total fertility rate) of about 7 in 1800, which would lead to an expected doubling of the population roughly every generation. Fertility dropped slowly during this period, with expected doubling period increasing to roughly 30-35 years by the end of the century.
5.3 x2= 10.6 million generation 1
10.6x 2=21.2 million generation 2
21.2 x2= 42.4 million generation 3
42.4x2=84.8 million generation 4
84.8x2=165.6 million generation 5
Next doubling would have gotten you to around 330 million. (In practice it didn’t/couldn’t get there solely from natural increase because TFR dropped sharply after the baby boom.)
With TFRs that high, and still at 4 by 1900, you were going to hit 100 million fairly quickly with or without immigration. Most of this was expected natural increase. If you look at old records from back then, families were huge, especially farm families.
In practice, the majority of Americans are descended from BOTH early immigrants and later immigrants because of inter marriage patterns. It’s really weird to frame it as one or the other - they’re not mutually exclusive.
Fair point on the TFR math. With fertility that high, natural increase alone would have gotten the US past 100 million eventually. But timing also matters. Three-quarters of the populations of New York, Chicago, and Boston in early 1900s were immigrants and their children. They staffed the industrial revolution when it happened, not a generation later. And when immigrant labor was cut off in the 1920s, native-born workers from the South only then started migrating north in large numbers—the domestic supply wasn't filling the gap on its own timeline.
As for intermarriage making it "weird" to separate the two populations—I'd say that's actually the strongest evidence that immigration worked in a sense. The populations are so intertwined that imagining America without immigration is almost incoherent. But yes, "largely through immigration" probably overstates it.
Natural increase with a TFR of 7 is doubling the population every 20-25 years. TFR in the US dropped slowly, too. Finally hit a TFR of 4 by 1900, which is still a rate that represents doubling every 30-35 years. The time difference to hit 100 million would not have been that big. TFR of 7 is a very fast growth rate.
1900 US population was about 76.2 million. Rural population then was about 46 million.
New York was about 3.4 million, Boston about 0.6 million, Chicago about 1.7 million. They were together about 7.5% of the population. If three quarters were immigrants or kids of immigrants, that’s about 5.6% of the overall population from immigrants in those cities. Overall immigrant population was about 13.5-14%, which suggests initial urban clustering.
Modern people tend to really under estimate early rural population numbers. 1920 is around when it hit the tipping point in the US of more people in cities, towns, and suburbs than rural. Has to do with farm productivity, until it increased you needed that many farmers so everyone could eat.
“that you want native-born Americans picking strawberries at $50 an hour rather than learning a skill”
That is not the option. The options are robotic picking, either in or out of greenhouses, or the existing low wage human labor. Strawberry picking is largely a solved problem.
Essentially, with current technology, humans are still picking strawberries because it’s still slightly cheaper and more efficient than using machines. If wages increased - not to $50 per hour - and technology improved slightly, it would tip the balance to the robots.
“The results show that at current market wage rates and harvest efficiencies presently attainable by leading robotic harvest technologies, manual harvest is more profitable than robotic harvest. Of course, this is not surprising, as there are not yet robotic harvest systems in widespread commercial operation in the United States. The results also show that if the robotic harvest systems can achieve efficiency rates above 70% or 80% of human harvest efficiency, and wage rates increase as expected over the next couple of years, the industry will see adoption of robotic harvesters become economically feasible for large strawberry growers or as a custom harvest service.”
They are selling their strawberries now through Driscoll’s. I believe this approach is still a bit a of a work in progress.
Robotic harvest technology has been developed for multiple other fruits and vegetables - it’s a long solved problem for grains. Milking machine technology is pretty mature, and is IIRC is in use in the majority of European dairies - 55% is the number I have heard bandied about. Implementation on a lot of this is really a factor of wage rates and labor availability.
Thank you for this, I genuinely appreciate a comment I can learn from. Clearly, strawberry picking was not my strongest example! For the piece, I probably should have stuck with eldercare where the shortages are acute and the robots are nowhere near ready. Japan has tried hard to automate senior care and still ended up recruiting millions of foreign workers instead.
We can have temporary visas for these workers. No families coming with them though and we’d need to eliminate automatic birthright citizenship regardless of parental citizenship. Isn’t this what Israel does? It imports foreigners(mostly women) as elder care workers.
> I would like to hear an immigration restrictionist describe, concretely, the immigration policy they would actually be happy with.
For the US, Mark Krikorian does this in Chapter 7 "What Is To Be Done?" of the book "The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal". I would be curious what you think of it.
I’m not opposed to immigration but I feel like there should be an asterisk next to the 46% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
While the number is still impressive, and one I’m proud of, it seems disingenuous to include companies founded over 100 years ago (Edison, Levi’s, Bank of New York in 1784) in that list. I get what’s trying to be conveyed, but it smacks of that thought terminating cliché “well we’re all immigrants.”
I set up and ran a business in Japan and would endorse your assessment. The practical implementation of a xenophobic policy is truly impressive. I would not like to live there but it works. In contrast, having set up and grown a business in London for 25 years I have lost count of the number of second generation ( Bangladeshi, Indian, Hong Kong Chinese…..) team members I have worked with. Their siblings were also generally in professional jobs. This injection of dynamism into the British economy can never be captured by a points based immigration system - most of their parents would not have been allowed in. Similarly, my daughters are the only kids in their respective (private) school classes who have two British parents. The other (largely second generation South Asian) parents are in highly paid professional jobs. I suspect their backgrounds are similar to my ethnic minority colleagues. I accept there are serious problems in specific minority communities in Britain but this issue is far more complex than is recognised by most commentators.
I don't understand the assumption that a country can't procreate sufficiently to maintain its population. We need to fix what's broken there. I mostly blame socialism and welfare but maybe it's something else. Whatever it is we need to cure it, not band-aid it with immigration. It's a sick society that chooses extinction.
The decline in fertility is so broad based that to pin it on a cause like welfare seems far fetched. It is lower among the poor, low among the rich. It is declining globally.
Maybe not but there is a mechanism. Socialism spreads the benefits of raising productive children to the whole of society, not just the family. But the costs are still largely borne by the parents, and necessarily so since they are so physical and personal. This creates rational incentives for freeloading. There is no need to have children to ensure someone will care for you in old age. And when you do have children, the economic incentives are to minimize your investment in them. So we see estrangement becoming common.
The top 1% actually have more children. They have enough money to defy the economic incentives.
Good points. But I always thought the 1% had more kids because they can pay more easily pay the extra childcare, transportation, education costs of having kids
Interesting points.
This discussion ignores the whole moral argument for more open borders. These are people first and foremost, not simply workers or consumers. Not to mention the empirical argument, people move, always have always will. The real questions should be how do we reduce migration caused by conflict, economic need, and environmental degradation? And how do we facilitate integration, not assimilation, into our society.
Thanks, these are important points and I don't dismiss them. I've addressed the moral and cosmopolitan case for open borders elsewhere, including in my book.
But this piece is deliberately written for an audience that isn't moved by those arguments—and probably never will be. The question I'm asking here is: even if you don't care about immigrants' well-being, even if you start from pure national interest, where does your own logic actually take you? Turns out it still takes you to a lot of immigration.
I appreciate your taking the time to reply Prof. Kustov and I look forward to reading “In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular”. This is your area of expertise, so I won’t pretend to have any insights you haven’t already considered. From an average Joe’s perspective, I feel if you discount the moral argument for economic self-interest, then you’re buying into a capitalist framing and have implicitly accepted immigrants as less than. That said, I’m truly curious to see if your book can change my perspective.
The moral argument is to take care of your own. The opposing sides have different moral bases for immigration. Your focus is on outsiders v insiders.
You have 3 examples of pro-immigration people making more moderate claims than you describe. The population point is mathematically true about population collapse. And the piece on the elderly has the word “Could” in the headlines. Hardly in the “we need ‘em in a cosmic sense of the word” arguments.
Good point--as before, I could have found stronger examples for the intro (they absolutely exist!). But unlike the previous piece, I'm not trying to argue that pro-immigration advocates are exaggerating. I'm trying to concede the restrictionist premise--even if you and I don't think it's quite right--and see where it actually leads. The argument of this piece isn't "stop saying we need immigration." It's "even if we don't need it, the case for it is still there even on restrictionists' own terms."
“Stasis isn’t stability” is exactly right.
But the deeper reason states turn to immigration is that it’s often easier than reforming execution bottlenecks at home.
Immigration becomes a pressure valve for institutional inertia.
Immigration restrictionist here. A few specific proposals.
1) Transition Social Security from "pay as you go" to fully funded.
A generational task, but it would take much of the fiscal squeeze out of demographic crunch. Superannuation in Australia is a good model, which would have the added benefit of increasing investment, aiding capital expenditure for the technologies of the future.
2) Strengthen the student->employee pipeline.
High schools waste time teaching academic subjects to below-average students. Teach them marketable skills instead. Similarly, college students are misaligned with labor market demand (https://www.mercatus.org/research/research-papers/higher-education-and-school-work-mismatch-evolving-labor-market). Reserve federally subsidized student loans for training in in-demand fields. Permit such loans to be used for approved non-college training programs. Partner with industry leaders to develop exit exams to prove competence upon graduation. These measures should ease the employer demand for immigration.
3) End birthright citizenship.
Birthright citizenship is an end-around to illegal immigration enforcement. "Anchor baby" is an apt term, as the public doesn't have the stomach to break apart the family, and you can't deport a citizen. Even non-immigrant visa holders can eventually become citizens with family-based criteria.
Without birthright citizenship, the political threat of temporary work visa holders like H-2 is much less salient. Cheap strawberries secured!
4) Curtail certain family-based immigration.
Family-based immigration was introduced in the 1965 Act to assuage concerns about demographic change. Now it facilitates it.
Parents of US citizens shouldn't be an immigration eligibility criterion, let alone in an uncapped category. Similarly, abolish the F1 (unmarried adult children of US citizens), F2B (unmarried adult children of legal permanent residents), F3 (married children of US citizens), and F4 (siblings of US citizens) categories.
These measures alone would cut immigration by 20-25%.
Most people don’t realize how vast chain migration is. This is why I oppose any amnesty whatsoever. One illegal migrant turned green card holder = parents, siblings, siblings and kids, siblings spouses parents, sibling spouses siblings, etc. you don’t legalize 1 person, you legalize 15.
As an immigration restrictionist, my ideal immigration system would be ending asylum at the border - it's basically a scam at this point, near zero humanitarian admissions - the rest of the world is not my problem, immediate deportation for anyone who crosses the border illegally without exception, mass deportation of everyone who came illegally or claimed "asylum" post 2017, mandatory deportation without exception for any felony conviction.
On legal immigration, family visas must be restricted to exclusively spouses and minor children. For low skilled labour, basically only women should be allowed in, unless there just aren't as many takers as we need. Mandatory B2 English for green card and naturalization. Mandatory A2 English for entry. I am willing to increase high skilled STEM and medical migration by allowing students who get those relevant degrees an automatic green cards.
And anybody who writes articles like these, get out.
https://substack.com/@albertrowan/note/c-216622784?r=5f3mjt&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
That plus strict country-of-origin quotas, to aid in assimilation, like we used to do in the middle of the last century. Minus the automatic green cards for STEM. I would leave high-skill employment to H-1B, at a managed volume and with origin quotas.
Also no green card pathway for HB-1. It wasn’t in that initial legislation but got added in later. Everything gets expanded.
Also HB-1 needs to be reformed with actual talent getting them. I read a story of an HB-1 HR woman complaining about not getting a green card. There are tons of Americans who can be HR. It’s not specialized, technical or requires immense intelligence.
Wives for incels? Sign me up!
But unironically, preferring women for low-skilled labor is a sharp proposal, especially for Europe.
It's not about that. It's that sociologically, young men with no attachment are the most unstable and crime prone demographic. But physical strength peaks in your 20s, so physical jobs need at least some 20 year olds, so let's just get women. Young women don't provoke the same amount of anxiety in people, don't commit the same amount of crime. We have an obligation to treat citizens equally, no such obligation extends to foreigners.
I was just joking. I understand the rationale and agree—it’s a good idea.
> And anybody who writes articles like these, get out.
Get out and go where? If you don't want our country to accept foreigners, why should foreign countries accept us?
I’d love to see numbers on the Number of Americans immigrating legally or guest workers v those coming here. I bet it’s a trickle.
Your home country. In this guy's case, Britain
I write articles like this. Where should I go?
I think I disagree with your framing of Sweden's "failure" of immigration. The relevant question is not what the employment/wage gap is between native swedes and immigrants, rather what is the employment/wage gap between immigrants and the natives of their home countries.
If the immigrants are better off than if they stayed home, and native Swede's employment or wages were not much affected, then this is a success, regardless of if the immigrants became as successful as native Swedes.
You make a fair point: "failure" may be too harsh, and the gains to immigrants themselves are large and important. I don't discount that.
But I do think Sweden's immigration outcomes have been notably worse than those of most peer countries, at least from the perspective of national interest—which is the lens this piece is using. It's not just about immigrants earning less than native Swedes. Someone has to sustain a large population with 20+ percentage point employment gaps and their descendants, while also managing the various externalities, including crime, that come with poor integration. I discuss this at length in my book.
The cosmopolitan case that immigrants are better off than they would have been at home is real, but it's not the argument that sustains political support for immigration in a democracy. That's ultimately the tragedy here: Sweden's approach may have helped many individual immigrants while undermining the political viability of the system that let them in :(
Isn't there a somewhat serious increase in crime associated with the immigrants? That could mitigate the "success", no?
By that logic, it would be a "success" the moment a Somali sets foot in Sweden. This is not a sustainable analytical framework.
I once analyzed the Fortune 500 claim, and firstly, they take very liberal use of the word "immigrant" and "founded by". For example, Facebook is seen as one such company, because one of the first investors was a Jewish Brazilian that Zuckerberg met at college. Apple is seen as such company because Jobs biological father was from .. Morocco? Syria? Amazon also because Bezos adoptive father (!) was from Cuba.
Secondly, if we go back in history, many of the highest ranked Fortune 500 companies were founded by Jewish from Russia and Slavic country. Italians and their children (who were as numerous as Jewish) founded only one (Bank of America). As for Mexican migrants and their children, I think they have founded zero, but I haven't checked.
My point is that those who point to "immigrants start companies" as an argument for open borders are dishonest. High skilled and intelligent immigrants start large companies. Not low skilled from [the country that is currently not sending their best to the US].
Good point. Folks should be more upfront about how they define immigrants when they come up with stats like that. Note, though, that Hanania's piece was explicitly about the value of high-skilled immigration, not an argument for open borders.
Hanania's merely trying to own the chuds. He'll scrape together any set of arguments he can find.
“But in 1800, the United States had just 5.3 million people—smaller than Sweden is today. If someone had argued then for “100 million Americans,” they would have sounded equally delusional. The country got there—and then tripled that number—largely through immigration.”
I also have to question this - the math is wrong.
The US had a TFR (total fertility rate) of about 7 in 1800, which would lead to an expected doubling of the population roughly every generation. Fertility dropped slowly during this period, with expected doubling period increasing to roughly 30-35 years by the end of the century.
5.3 x2= 10.6 million generation 1
10.6x 2=21.2 million generation 2
21.2 x2= 42.4 million generation 3
42.4x2=84.8 million generation 4
84.8x2=165.6 million generation 5
Next doubling would have gotten you to around 330 million. (In practice it didn’t/couldn’t get there solely from natural increase because TFR dropped sharply after the baby boom.)
With TFRs that high, and still at 4 by 1900, you were going to hit 100 million fairly quickly with or without immigration. Most of this was expected natural increase. If you look at old records from back then, families were huge, especially farm families.
TFR was 3.6 in 1960, around the end of the baby boom. It didn’t drop below replacement until the 70s, and bumped above and below after that. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA
In practice, the majority of Americans are descended from BOTH early immigrants and later immigrants because of inter marriage patterns. It’s really weird to frame it as one or the other - they’re not mutually exclusive.
Fair point on the TFR math. With fertility that high, natural increase alone would have gotten the US past 100 million eventually. But timing also matters. Three-quarters of the populations of New York, Chicago, and Boston in early 1900s were immigrants and their children. They staffed the industrial revolution when it happened, not a generation later. And when immigrant labor was cut off in the 1920s, native-born workers from the South only then started migrating north in large numbers—the domestic supply wasn't filling the gap on its own timeline.
As for intermarriage making it "weird" to separate the two populations—I'd say that's actually the strongest evidence that immigration worked in a sense. The populations are so intertwined that imagining America without immigration is almost incoherent. But yes, "largely through immigration" probably overstates it.
Natural increase with a TFR of 7 is doubling the population every 20-25 years. TFR in the US dropped slowly, too. Finally hit a TFR of 4 by 1900, which is still a rate that represents doubling every 30-35 years. The time difference to hit 100 million would not have been that big. TFR of 7 is a very fast growth rate.
1900 US population was about 76.2 million. Rural population then was about 46 million.
New York was about 3.4 million, Boston about 0.6 million, Chicago about 1.7 million. They were together about 7.5% of the population. If three quarters were immigrants or kids of immigrants, that’s about 5.6% of the overall population from immigrants in those cities. Overall immigrant population was about 13.5-14%, which suggests initial urban clustering.
Modern people tend to really under estimate early rural population numbers. 1920 is around when it hit the tipping point in the US of more people in cities, towns, and suburbs than rural. Has to do with farm productivity, until it increased you needed that many farmers so everyone could eat.
“that you want native-born Americans picking strawberries at $50 an hour rather than learning a skill”
That is not the option. The options are robotic picking, either in or out of greenhouses, or the existing low wage human labor. Strawberry picking is largely a solved problem.
Essentially, with current technology, humans are still picking strawberries because it’s still slightly cheaper and more efficient than using machines. If wages increased - not to $50 per hour - and technology improved slightly, it would tip the balance to the robots.
“The results show that at current market wage rates and harvest efficiencies presently attainable by leading robotic harvest technologies, manual harvest is more profitable than robotic harvest. Of course, this is not surprising, as there are not yet robotic harvest systems in widespread commercial operation in the United States. The results also show that if the robotic harvest systems can achieve efficiency rates above 70% or 80% of human harvest efficiency, and wage rates increase as expected over the next couple of years, the industry will see adoption of robotic harvesters become economically feasible for large strawberry growers or as a custom harvest service.”
See https://californiaagriculture.org/article/108642-robotic-strawberry-harvest-is-promising-but-will-need-improved-technology-and-higher-wages-to-be-economically-viable/attachment/213576.pdf
There are also companies expanding into growing strawberries in greenhouses, with automation through the entire process, who are already successful doing so with lettuce. See https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/plentys-high-tech-robot-farm
They are selling their strawberries now through Driscoll’s. I believe this approach is still a bit a of a work in progress.
Robotic harvest technology has been developed for multiple other fruits and vegetables - it’s a long solved problem for grains. Milking machine technology is pretty mature, and is IIRC is in use in the majority of European dairies - 55% is the number I have heard bandied about. Implementation on a lot of this is really a factor of wage rates and labor availability.
Thank you for this, I genuinely appreciate a comment I can learn from. Clearly, strawberry picking was not my strongest example! For the piece, I probably should have stuck with eldercare where the shortages are acute and the robots are nowhere near ready. Japan has tried hard to automate senior care and still ended up recruiting millions of foreign workers instead.
Agree, senior care is arguably the area hardest to automate.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, and to respond so thoughtfully.
We can have temporary visas for these workers. No families coming with them though and we’d need to eliminate automatic birthright citizenship regardless of parental citizenship. Isn’t this what Israel does? It imports foreigners(mostly women) as elder care workers.
> I would like to hear an immigration restrictionist describe, concretely, the immigration policy they would actually be happy with.
For the US, Mark Krikorian does this in Chapter 7 "What Is To Be Done?" of the book "The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal". I would be curious what you think of it.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. Haven’t seen much persuasive stuff from Mark yet, at least given my own biases, but I’ll try to keep my mind open.
I doubt you'll find it persuasive, but it is a concrete plan meeting the specifications you asked for.
Excellent. A breath of fresh air in the debate. I liked your comments below too.
I’m not opposed to immigration but I feel like there should be an asterisk next to the 46% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
While the number is still impressive, and one I’m proud of, it seems disingenuous to include companies founded over 100 years ago (Edison, Levi’s, Bank of New York in 1784) in that list. I get what’s trying to be conveyed, but it smacks of that thought terminating cliché “well we’re all immigrants.”
I set up and ran a business in Japan and would endorse your assessment. The practical implementation of a xenophobic policy is truly impressive. I would not like to live there but it works. In contrast, having set up and grown a business in London for 25 years I have lost count of the number of second generation ( Bangladeshi, Indian, Hong Kong Chinese…..) team members I have worked with. Their siblings were also generally in professional jobs. This injection of dynamism into the British economy can never be captured by a points based immigration system - most of their parents would not have been allowed in. Similarly, my daughters are the only kids in their respective (private) school classes who have two British parents. The other (largely second generation South Asian) parents are in highly paid professional jobs. I suspect their backgrounds are similar to my ethnic minority colleagues. I accept there are serious problems in specific minority communities in Britain but this issue is far more complex than is recognised by most commentators.
Why does a foreigner inject dynamism? What is it about being of a different cute, race or background make you dynamic?
Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican! Puerto Rico is part of the USA, he is not a foreigner!
Yep, see footnote 1! I even wrote a paper about that :)
Agree, but they can be better off by being attractive enough to immigrants as to be able to select a few million of the best ones yearly.