Thanksgiving celebrates the fundamental American ideal of diverse groups coming together as part of a singular nation. But with the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric on immigration, that ideal feels like it is increasingly under threat.
Trump’s anti-immigrant stance not only violates American values; it goes against basic economic logic. It’s well-established that highly skilled and highly educated immigrants make up an outsized share of America’s science and technology workforce, eminent scientists and Nobel Prize winners, and high-tech entrepreneurs. And it’s not just high-skilled immigrants who benefit the American economy, but immigrants of all stripes and from all walks of life.
A new study examining the economic role of immigrants in America since the late 19th century finds that the presence of immigrants is a major factor in the long-term economic prospects of a particular place. The study, by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Viola von Berlepsch of the London School of Economics, compares the proportion of immigrants in U.S. counties in 1880, 1900, and 1910 to the economic performance of each county in 2010, measured as economic output per capita. Even when controlling for demographic factors like income, education, industry, unemployment, labor force participation, gender, race, and other variables that are typically thought to condition economic growth, the presence of immigrants a century ago had a significant effect on the long-term prosperity of a place—but only if the newcomers are integrated with the rest of the population.
[For more on this story by Richard Florida, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...r-immigrants/546488/]
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