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From: [Name Withheld]

As an immigrant American from the wretched classes, I, of course, disagree with your conclusions about about immigration. I am curious as to whether you believe, in any shape or form, that immigrants might have had a small hand in the prosperity of the nation that has existed for the last 10 years.

VDARE replies: Thanks for your letter. The short answer is no. There is a substantial technical literature on this, and the evidence seems to be clear that, while immigrants do increase GDP, they receive most of the benefits themselves, in the form of wages. Native-born Americans are not better off. You can check this argument by searching our site under, e.g., borjas – Harvard's George Borjas is the leading economist in the field.

The longer answer is that we think skilled immigrants can be mildly beneficial. But of course they displace articulate people - we could never have gotten up to a million skilled immigrants a year; the political backlash would have been too great. And anyway the current system isn't set up to produce skilled immigrants.

February 06, 2001