The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report titled “Economic Impact of a Migration Surge” projects that the surge in immigration under President Joe Biden’s administration will grow the US economy by $8.9 trillion over the next two decades, an increase equivalent to 2.9 cents on the dollar by 2034. The report, however, has focused on the numbers favored by pro-migration lobbyists, which is a misleading way of looking at the data.
The actual impact of the migration wave will be much less than what is projected in the report. Most of the growth comes from a bigger consumer economy, not from a more productive, high-tech, high-wage economy. The economy grows because of more consumption by migrants – more housing for more migrants, plus more “personal consumption” of gasoline, TV shows, clothes, and food, such as hot dogs and hamburgers. Moreover, much of that growth will be gained by China, whose automated factories will produce much of the TVs, clothes, furniture, and household goods bought by the taxpayer-supported migrants.
Just one-tenth of the 2.9 percent in economic gain is business-related investment, including “purchases of equipment, structures, and intellectual property products, such as software.” Worse, the migrant workers are less educated than Americans, so their arrival drags down the per-capita productivity of Americans, the CBO report admits. Less productivity means more poverty, more taxes, and more government anti-poverty programs.
This government-imposed loss of productivity will be offset, the report promises, by the 1-in-33 migrants who have specialized education in “STEM.” But that 1-in-33 claim ignores the reality that employers use cheaper migrants to displace many well-paid American STEM graduates now doing the high-tech work that raises productivity.
Many American STEM professionals have already been pushed into early retirement and into non-technical work by employers’ preference for cheap and compliant visa workers imported from India, China, Russia, and South America.
Moreover, the report states — without evidence — that unskilled migration will drop to pre-Biden levels by 2028, thus avoiding further productivity losses. The reality that migration displaces productivity is being spotlighted by Larry Fink, the CEO of Wall Street’s $10 trillion BlackRock investment firm, who has spoken out against the U.S. government’s “Extraction Migration” strategy which imports migrants to inflate the nation’s consumer economy.
I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a pro-globalist event in April, hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued.
That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology.
If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.
In contrast, countries with expanding populations need to focus on basic issues of education and the “rule of law,” said Fink, who oversees $10 trillion worth of investments worldwide.
So for those countries that have rising populations, the answer will be education … [and] for those countries that do not have a foundation of rule of law, or education, that’s where the [economic] divide is going to get more and more extreme.