George Borjas On The Media's Immigration Economics: "People Now Are Getting That It’s Complete Nonsense"

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.