A FEW NOTES ON THE DANGERS OF IMMIGRANTS AND THE DAMAGE THAT THEY DO
I am reading Age of Discovery by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutaarna.
Highly recommended.
It's a comparison between the impact of the invention of the printing press in 1452 and the invention of the Internet and how disruptive they both were and how the responses were quite similar.
Both, in a way, precipitated a massive increase in immigration, for a variety of reasons, mostly owing to economic dislocations caused by new industries that suddenly arose, and a massive increase of wealth that they brought about. That spike in immigration also brought about a predictable reaction from those 'left behind' in the creation of new economies -- The Renaissance then, the Digital Age and Globalism now.
The recent Brexit vote and the support for Donald Trump largely stem from a similar kind of Immigrant Anxiety -- close the borders, control your borders, build that wall, leave the EU and so on.
As such, I thought it might be instructive to take a look at the actual impact of immigrants on both the U.S. and UK economies in the past decade:
1. In the first decade of the 21st century, immigrants paid in, via taxes some $150 billion into the UK than they took out. By contrast, natives took out a net of $1 trillion more than they paid in.
2. In the US, 2/3rds of the country's scientific workforce are immigrants, and 10% of IT jobs go unfilled because no one has the right qualifications to fill them.
3. In the UK 12% of the whole workforce are immigrants, but they fill 50% of new jobs because they are doing work no one else wants to do or no one else is qualified to do.
4. The founders of PayPal, Intel, Google, and Tesla, among others, were immigrants.
5. Immigrants head up 52% of all Silicon Valley companies founded in the past 10 years and 25% of all US technology and engineering firms founded in the past 10 years.
6. Immigrant Nobel laureates, National Academy of Science Members and Oscar winning directors outnumber their native-born peers by a ratio of 3:1.
Yes, so by all means. Shut down those borders. Build that wall. Leave the EU. Wreck your economies out of fear of the unknown. But at least now you can't say it was unknown.