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continue to grow by 90 million, from 327 million today, over the next 40 years or so, assuming
5
immigration continues at its historical rates.
That assumption is critical, however. The only way the United States has avoided the
demographic pressure facing other rich countries is through immigration. The census
estimate of population growth includes around 1.4 million immigrants a year.
The birthrates for women born in the United States have been dropping, just as they have in
other rich countries. The fertility “replacement rate” needed to sustain the existing population
level is around 2.1 children per woman. But last year, the birthrate in the United States dropped
Redefining America
to 1.73, approaching the dwindling rates in the European Union, China and Japan.
Without sustained immigration, economic growth will be notably slower. Moody 10
Analytics analyzed the data and estimated that if annual United States immigration stayed
at only 200,000 rather than a more normal one million, gross domestic product would be
$1 trillion lower a decade from now.
In addition, lower immigration portends big problems because the basic American
retirement system — Social Security and Medicare — relies on workers to pay for retirees, and
the entire expansion of the work force over the next 15 years will come from immigration.
Lower immigration rates will mean serious funding shortfalls for older Americans.
The final reason the low immigration number is so frightening is not really about
population growth at all. It’s that the evidence increasingly says having immigrants here
makes workers born in the United States more successful.
That’s partly because immigrants start companies at twice the rate of native Americans.
Almost half the companies in the Fortune 500 were started by immigrants or their children,
and without them, jobs are likely to be scarcer in the future.
Also, as the American economy becomes more dominated by knowledge work,
immigration restrictions are likely to have an increasingly severe impact. In recent research,
the New York University economists Petra Moser and Shmuel San examined the economic
effects of the national quota system of the 1920s. That was the last time the United States
engaged in mass immigration restrictions based on ethnicity.
These laws of the 1920s were designed to block the entry of immigrants from Southern 15
and Eastern Europe and from Asia in order to preserve the ethnic “character” of the United
States. With these laws, immigration fell below 300,000 in 1925, from more than 800,000 in
1921, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Quotas remained until the 1960s, and the
United States did not return to 1921 immigrant levels until 1989.
Professor Moser and Professor San have found that those quotas seriously curtailed
immigration of scientists and inventors of specific ethnicities (Jews from Eastern Europe,
for example). The scholars gathered biographical information on 82,000 scientists and
inventors in the United States from 1921 to 1956, including details on their areas of specialty,
the number of patents they received and their places of birth. They wanted to know how
excluding immigrants affected American-born scientists and inventors.
In reality, they found, the quotas didn’t protect domestic scientists and inventors. It hurt
them, and it decimated their work. Patents for American scientists who worked in fields with
many East European scientists fell almost 60 percent compared with those in other fields.
And, over time, fewer American-born people became scientists and inventors at all. The net
effect was a substantial reduction in invention in the United States.
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