Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [37]
According to the authors, sans immigrant labor “the output of the state’s manufacturing industry would likely be lowered by about $1.4 billion—or about 8 percent of the industry’s $16.2 billion total contribution to the gross state product in 2004.” Immigrants also saved the state a bundle in manufacturing wages. It would have cost $95 million more for the same output without immigrants. Not only could those savings be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices, but they also help keep Arkansas businesses competitive.
In 2006, the University of North Carolina (UNC) issued a similar report profiling that state’s immigrant population. There, researchers found immigrants to be a small net cost ($61 million) to the state budget—estimated at $102 per Latino resident—though the authors cautioned that, for a proper understanding of the overall impact, the cost “must be seen in the broader context of the aggregate benefits Hispanics bring to the state’s economy.”
Like Arkansas’s, North Carolina’s economy is better off because of immigrants. By expanding the population—and thus the demand for housing, cars, clothes, refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, and countless other consumer goods and services—these newcomers expand markets and help business revenues grow. Imported human capital also translates into more economic output and cost competitiveness in important industries. According to the UNC study, without Hispanic immigrants North Carolina’s construction industry output would almost certainly be much lower, and the state private sector would be paying nearly $2 billion more in wages. The state has also benefited from more trade with Latin America, which was responsible for some seventy thousand jobs and $231 million in state and local taxes in 2004.
What’s happened in Arkansas and North Carolina is important because their immigrant populations are among the fastest-growing in the country. Arkansas ranked fourth nationwide in immigrant population growth between 1990 and 2000. Between 2000 and 2005, its Hispanic population grew by 48 percent, or faster than any other state in the United States. In North Carolina, Latinos accounted for more than a quarter of the population growth between 1990 and 2004. Between 1995 and 2004, 38 percent of these newcomers migrated from abroad, and 40 percent came from other parts of the United States.
More than half of Arkansas immigrants are here illegally, as are nearly half of North Carolina’s. If importing large numbers of low-skill Latino immigrant “welfare cases” is bad news for a state’s economic health, it would be manifest in these states. Instead, the opposite is true. Both states are experiencing economic boons and record-high immigration simultaneously, which is the story of much of the south-eastern United States in recent years.
And if, as restrictionists insist, immigrants are coming here not to work but to take advantage of our “magnetic” social welfare programs, why are they flocking disproportionately to states that are so skimpy with benefits for the poor? Social welfare spending in Arkansas is among the lowest in the country. It’s slightly higher in North Carolina but still well below the national average. The same holds true for other states that are experiencing big increases in immigrant populations, including South Carolina, Utah, Georgia, Arizona, Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa.
There appears to be no correlation between generous state welfare benefits and growing immigrant populations. If Arkansas is the Scrooge of welfare benefits, California is closer to the Santa Claus. Yet it’s the latter’s immigrant population growth that’s slowing. Latinos are economic migrants first and foremost. They