Peter Brimelow: Immigrations hidden costs

Amidst all the hooting and hollering over the great economy a lot of Americans don't feel as if they're better off. This is often swept under the rug or poo-pooed as rich folk griping they're not rich enough.

Perhaps there's another explanation...

This is the amazing truth about immigration: the consensus among labor economists—the consensus—was that the great inflow triggered by the 1965 Immigration Act (legal), and the simultaneous breakdown of the southern border (illegal), is not beneficial in aggregate to native-born Americans.

It does increase Gross Domestic Product—the economy’s output. But that is essentially all captured by the immigrants themselves in their wages. Americans are not better off.

The NRC ran a microstudy for California. It found that for every native-born family in California, the immigrant presence in 1996 was costing them something like $1,000 a year. Every native-born family in the state of California is subsidizing the immigrant presence by about $1,000 a year. Essentially, Americans are subsidizing their own displacement.

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