George Borjas Interview—Part 2: Borjas On Open Border Libertarians:

" I Don’t Really Miss Them, Actually"

By Peter Brimelow

[An abridged version of an interview published in Immigration and the American Future. See also Heaven’s Door After A Year, By George Borjas, June 10, 2001]

Peter Brimelow writes: Everyone knows, or concedes, that immigration is good for the economy—except economists. Amazingly, since the early 1990s, a consensus has existed among labor economists that the current unprecedented influx into America is of no particular economic benefit to native-born Americans in aggregate. I reported this consensus in my 1995 immigration book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster and it was confirmed by the National Research Council’s 1997 study The New Americans, the survey of the technical literature on the economics of immigration done at the behest of the Jordan Immigration Commission. Equally amazingly, this consensus has been totally ignored in the public discourse on immigration—one of the most startling failures of democratic debate of which I am aware.

No-one has more to do with the new consensus about the economics of immigration than Professor George J. Borjas, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Borjas first began to depart from the optimistic orthodoxy with his 1990 bookFriends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy. His most recent full-length treatment of the subject is his 1999 book Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has every emotional reason to favor immigration. That he does not is entirely a function of the data—and his scrupulous scholarship.

I spoke to him in his Cambridge office and began by asking him to summarize the findings of the NRC’s The New Americans.

[See Part One—George Borjas On The Media's Immigration Economics: "People Now Are Getting That It’s Complete Nonsense"]