Can Immigration Hurt the Economy? An Old Prejudice Returns

This time, suspicion is being buttressed by some economists with a proposition not too dissimilar to Laughlin’s: that immigrants could sap America’s vitality by bringing inferior cultural traits from their dysfunctional home countries to erode American social norms. It’s an unsettling assertion. It is laid out with striking candor by Paul Collier, the noted British development economist from Oxford, in his 2013 book “Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World” (Oxford University Press). “Migrants bring their culture with them,” he wrote. Countries that receive them run the risk “that the social model will become blended in such a way that damagingly dilutes its functionality.” This idea has gained more currency in Europe — which until the recent influx from North Africa and the Middle East had experienced comparatively little immigration from poorer nations. But it is getting a hearing in the United States, too, giving shape to an argument that immigration, by bringing inferior norms and culture from abroad, may be eroding American productivity. Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, architect of the administration’s turn against immigration, might be drawn to some of this scholarship. The proposition that immigrants hamper productivity in their newfound homes could make a case for far more restrictive immigration controls than the United States has in place today. “Analogous to climate change, we do not know how large an unabsorbed diaspora would need to be before it significantly weakened the mutual regard on which the high-income societies depend,” Professor Collier wrote.