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The Economy Needs More High Skilled Immigrants

This article is more than 10 years old.

NEW YORK CITY- SEPTEMBER 22 (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Over at the Atlantic I have an articleco-written with economist Noah Smith arguing for more high skilled immigration. We discuss reasons why everyone should support this, and reasons why conservatives and liberals each should support it as well. We hope that it says something about this issue that it has the two of us writing in agreement, despite the big differences we have ideologically, and the many policy disagreements we have.

Here is one part where we appeal to everyone:and the fact that we disagree on many other things.

From the very beginning, the United States has enjoyed a unique advantage held by almost no other country on the planet: the ability to attract and retain a huge number of the world's best and brightest. Before independence, for example, America was the beneficiary of perhaps the most elite immigrant group in history. Millions of Scots, who constituted much of the intellectual and technological elite of the British Empire, left Great Britain to seek religious freedom and better economic opportunities in the 13 Colonies. Many of the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson and Hamilton, were partly or wholly descended from that Scottish wave, as were many of America's greatest early inventors, such as Thomas Edison.

High skilled immigrants represent an easy pareto improvement that everyone should agree on, and allowing more of them would reduce an important global distortion that would increase wealth. This would improve our long and short-run growth prospects, and really we should do it now.

But I don't mean to imply by this article that we shouldn't let in low-skilled immigrants. This is what, for instance, the blogger Daniel Kuehn seemed to take away from the article. Low skilled immigrants make an important contribution to the economy. As Alex Tabarrok has argued, someone who mows a physicists lawn so that he doesn't have to is making a contribution to physics. There are many other reasons to support low-skilled immigrants, including because it makes their lives much better off and we should care about their welfare.

I'd prefer if we'd act now to let many more immigrants of all skill levels in. But if we're not, then we should at least let in high skilled immigrants, whose benefits should be much easier for people to see, and realistically, whose benefits should be greater. We wouldn't argue that trade in goods shouldn't be liberalized until people can be convinced that trade in labor (immigration) should be fully liberalized, so why argue that trade in high skilled labor should wait until people can be convinced we should liberalize trade in low skilled labor? You take the pareto improvements you can get when you get them.