On the first day of his presidency, President Biden signed executive orders reversing many of former President Donald Trump’s immigration restrictions and announced plans to introduce major immigration reform legislation. Immigration reform is long overdue, and free-market conservatives should support much of what Biden proposes.
One of Biden’s first executive orders reversed Trump’s restriction on immigration from predominantly Muslim and African countries. Those concerned with national security need not worry. In prior academic research, published in October 2019 in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, three co-authors and I examined migration data from 170 countries over 25 years (1990-2015) and found no relationship between immigration from Muslim majority or conflict-torn countries and terrorism in the destination countries.
Biden also reinstated protection for so-called Dreamers, immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. A permanent path to legal status for these is probably the least controversial aspect of immigration reform. A 2020 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans, including 54% of Republicans or those leaning Republican, favor granting legal status to Dreamers. The fact that their status has yo-yoed under the presidencies of Barack Obama, Trump, and Biden is evidence that legislation is long overdue, rather than executive orders.
To his credit, Biden is proposing major immigration reform legislation that would address not just the Dreamers’ legal status but would also provide an eventual path to citizenship for all of the approximately 11 million immigrants currently residing in the U.S. illegally. President Ronald Reagan, with bipartisan support, signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act that provided a similar opportunity for 2.7 million immigrants who were residing in the U.S. illegally 35 years ago. Biden’s proposal deserves similar support.
Many people in the U.S., including some of Trump’s supporters, oppose such measures because they fear increased immigration will cause native-born Americans economic harm, including job losses. These fears are largely unsupported by economic research. But even if the fears were justified, they are not relevant in this case. Providing a path to legality doesn’t alter the number of immigrants in the U.S.; it merely changes their legal status.
Even if Biden were to increase deportations to the levels that occurred under Obama or Trump, it would hardly put a dent in the total number of undocumented immigrants. If they are going to be in the U.S. anyway, legalizing them would better integrate them into our economy and bring them onto the tax rolls.
Conservatives may worry that providing these immigrants a path to legal residence or citizenship would bolster the ranks of Democratic voters and cost Republicans elections down the road. In truth, that largely depends on the rhetoric and actions of politicians, rather than the ideology of immigrants, many of whom are fleeing discredited socialist governments.
In our recent book, Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, Alex Nowrasteh and I systematically study how immigrants affect economic freedom in their destination countries. Nowhere did we find that immigrants reduce economic freedom; rather, we found that economic freedom often improves with the arrival of more immigrants.
Our results are broadly consistent with surveys of immigrants’ policy views in the U.S., which mostly align with the political mainstream. If they’re drawn to Democrats, it’s not because they oppose hard work, entrepreneurship, and free markets. It’s because the Republicans’ rhetoric is perceived as being anti-immigrant — and in many cases, it is.
Reagan was known for both his pro-free enterprise and pro-immigrant sentiments. In his first year in office, he wrote that “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.” His message was consistent all the way through to his farewell address when he spoke of America as a shining city on the hill; “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
Conservatives today should abandon the rhetoric of fear and resentment, follow Reagan’s example, and provide the bipartisan support needed to pass Biden’s immigration legislation. It’s the right thing to do.
Benjamin Powell, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, Oakland, California, is director of the Free Market Institute, professor of economics at Texas Tech University, and co-author of Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.
