OPINION:
The media have been playing up the “civil war” inside the GOP between what Politico calls the “MAGA Republicans and Big Tech.” The restrictionists in the party want fewer visas, and the pro-growth wing wants more.
President-elect Donald Trump announced this past weekend that he supports expanding immigrant worker visas. He told the New York Post: “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them.”
It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about special visas for seasonal workers or high-tech (H-1B) visas. But he has the right strategy: legal immigration, yes; illegal immigration, no.
The evidence is overwhelming that legal immigrants are assets to the economy.
The most recent 2024 report by the Congressional Budget Office on the economic and fiscal impact of immigrants finds that immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in federal services, thus “reducing the deficit by nearly $1 trillion over the period 2024-2034.”
Despite some traditional nativist concerns that immigrants take jobs from American workers, the most recent meta-study published in 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, on balance, immigrants are “job creators, not job takers.” That is because immigrants today, as always, have high rates of starting businesses, filling niches in the workforce and creating jobs with their purchases of American goods and services.
The nonpartisan American Immigration Council recently found that “immigrants and their children founded 45% of all of America’s Fortune 500 companies.”
These entrepreneurial American businesses extend well beyond high-tech. They include retail (Kohl’s); telecommunications (Verizon, AT&T); finance (JP MorganChase, Citigroup); pharmaceuticals (Pfizer, Moderna); media (News Corp., Fox); transportation (Boeing, JetBlue) and petroleum (Phillips 66, Occidental Petroleum), to name a few. And let’s not forget Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX.
The revenue of these first- and second-generation immigrant companies exceeds that of any other nation:
Mr. Musk, who co-chairs the advisory Department of Government Efficiency, says he thinks we should issue twice as many visas for skilled immigrants “yesterday.” He added: “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low. … If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.”
It is clear that hardworking and entrepreneurial immigrants, combined with good old Yankee ingenuity, are one of the greatest comparative advantages the United States has over nearly every other nation in the world — especially China.
I can’t think of a better way to make America great again.
• Stephen Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and co-author of the new book “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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