Finance

Trump Administration Continues To Ignore History, Science, And Its Own Conclusion That Refugees Actually Improve America's Finances

We are truly living in the dumbest timeline.

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This weekend was the 80-year anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. While the German authorities didn’t officially condone the violence, they looked on and did nothing. Only a few dozen were killed. It was the start of something worse. Eight months later, 309,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had applied for the 27,000 places available under the quota system in place at the time for migration to the United States. Congress had soundly rejected a bill that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children to come to the U.S. over and above the annual quota for German immigrants. In the summer of 1939, a ship called the St. Louis with over 900 passengers — almost all of them German Jews — was intercepted by the Coast Guard a few miles from Miami, and was ultimately turned back to Europe. Two hundred fifty-four of the passengers were killed in the Holocaust. We would have had plenty of room for them.

I noted all of this on my personal Facebook account over the weekend, and within minutes had a comment questioning the economic wisdom of admitting migrants, because of course I did. So, let’s leave the value of human life aside for a few minutes, and look instead at the cold hard dollars and cents of migration, specifically that involving refugees.

Donald Trump’s own Administration concluded that refugees are a net economic positive for U.S. coffers. Last fall, The Failing New York Times reported on a study by the Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services that found refugees accounted for $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost. In other words, the Trump Administration itself found that the taxes refugees paid outstripped the costs of the government services they consumed — by a lot. That finding, however, was scrubbed from the three-page report ultimately submitted by the agency, which only compared the costs of refugees to other Americans without mentioning the revenues refugees contributed. The three-page submitted report said only that between 2005 and 2014, per-person costs for Health and Human Services programs were $2,500 for the U.S. population in general, but per-person costs for refugees were $3,300. Well, okay, but even if they are costing just barely more in government services than others in America, refugees are simultaneously contributing more than they cost, making admission of refugees a net gain for taxpayers. That’s a good investment for the U.S. government any way you slice it.

Looking more broadly, a recent paper authored by Oxford University’s Stephen Nickell and Jumana Saleheen of the Bank of England found that the share of migrants working in menial jobs like cleaning did have a depressing effect on wages for those jobs. However, a 10 percent rise in the share of migrants in menial positions only depressed wages for those positions by a paltry two percent. In a separate study of refugees arriving in Denmark between 1991 and 2008, Giovanni Peri and Mette Foged similarly found that refugees did indeed force low-educated natives out of low-paying jobs, but it actually ended up being a positive for the displaced workers — rather than dropping out of the workforce, they switched to other positions involving less manual labor (some of them at higher salaries than they’d been earning before).

Perhaps the most recent comprehensive word on the subject is a study published in the journal Science Advances this summer. This analysis examined economic and migrant data from 1985 to 2015 in 15 Western European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Led by Hippolyte d’Albis of the Paris School of Economics, researchers looked not only at GDP growth and average incomes, but also at the amount of money the countries spent on public programs like welfare. Their findings consistently indicated that within two years of an influx of migrants, unemployment rates dropped significantly and the economic health of the subject countries improved, with those effects likely tied to migrants increasing market demand, providing services, adding jobs, and paying taxes. This economic activity far outweighed costs governments paid to support the newcomers, perhaps explained by the fact that immigrants tend to be young and middle-aged adults, age groups which are less reliant on state benefits than are older people. While asylum seekers, who reside temporarily in a country while their applications for refugee status are processed and who often face work restrictions in their host countries, took a while longer to benefit an economy than migrants legally allowed to settle in a country, even asylum seekers were shown to benefit economies within three to seven years.

Trump Administration researchers confirmed the scientific consensus and found that the economic impact of accepting refugees is a net positive. But instead of doing the fiscally responsible thing, never mind the morally right thing, the Trump Administration chose to double down on the same policy that led us to turn away the St. Louis some 80-years ago following the Kristallnacht. Unlike our great-grandparents, we won’t have the excuse that we didn’t know sheltering refugees served our economic self-interest.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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