Everything that most reasonable people would call a problem, like an open border and homelessness, puts money in somebody’s pocket. From Edward Ring at amgreatness.com:
That California politicians like Kamala Harris have succeeded in selling open borders to the American people as necessary to solve the twin crises of “climate” and “equity” is a con job for the ages.
The common refrain among supporters of the Democratic Party’s open borders policy is that immigration helps the economy. A very recent example of this was published in MSNBC Daily last month, where the author, David Bier of the Cato Institute, claims that “The Congressional Budget Office finds that the surge will boost the economy by $7 trillion and reduce the federal debt by nearly $1 trillion by 2034.” That’s actually an unimpressive statistic since the cumulative GDP of the United States over the next decade will easily exceed $300 trillion, but Bier is probably not wrong in his assertion that immigration increases GDP.
So what?
What Bier and most libertarians fail to emphasize in their analysis is not merely the quantity of economic growth caused by immigration but the quality of that growth. We should not be surprised. Adhering to orthodox dogma at the expense of real-world consequences is just another trait libertarians share with socialists, who are their equally doctrinaire, equally out of touch supposed ideological antagonists.
For example, libertarians support free trade without recognizing that it is impossible for our manufacturers to compete against subsidized imports, manufactured in the absence of environmental and labor standards applicable in the United States. Libertarians support the abolition of residential zoning laws while doing nothing to stop the proliferating array of subsidies and tax incentives that artificially incentivize developers to demolish homes to build apartments. And libertarians only tepidly challenge urban containment policies that prevent new suburb developments on open land outside of existing cities. In what is perhaps some odd bid to find common ground with socialists, they have even claimed the infrastructure needed for urban expansion would “subsidize the car.”
