“High-skilled immigration is key to America’s success.” That’s what Richard Hanania writes at the Cato Institute’s excellent Human Progress page. Hanania is not alone in making what he might agree is a trite assertion.
Humans aren’t a cost or jobs taken, rather they’re inputs. To then assert that the arrival of high-skilled “treasures” (J.B. Say) boosts prosperity is like saying that the sky is blue.
To which some might credibly come back with the argument that the genius of high-skilled human capital must be relentlessly restated. It sounds correct at first glance (high-skilled immigration proponents reasonably point out that immigrants start and run some of the U.S.’s most valuable companies), but given a second pass, what an obnoxious conceit.
To see why, imagine if Hanania had written that the import of 2 million computer chips from Taiwan Semiconductor is key to America’s success. Again, it may be true, but Hanania can’t possibly know what the U.S. economy needs in an inputs sense. If he did know, it’s a safe bet that he would have purchased newly floated shares in TSMC in 1994. And whether or not retired in 2025, he would certainly be in the financial position to not be working.
It's possible Hanania did make the above-mentioned purchase in 1994, but it’s a safe bet that he did not. Which is the point. TSMC wasn’t TSMC in 1994, and it wasn’t because the commercial future is opaque. If we knew in the present what would be instrumental to global economic health in the future (arguably the surest sign China will never bomb Taiwan is TSMC’s most important factory being located there), we would all be billionaires. Or not. If the future were fully priced in the present, there would be fewer options to get in early not just with TSMC, but also with Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon, and all manner of other companies that spent a long time not so great in the eyes of the wise.
It's useful to think about how difficult it is to the see the future of commerce through the prism of Hanania’s comment about “high-skilled immigrants.” Supposedly they’re “key to America’s success,” but as you’re reading this opinion piece, the biggest driver of consumption (economists errantly focus on consumption when there’s only production) in Mexico is remittances from productive Mexicans working in the U.S.
Something like $60 billion is remitted annually from Mexicans working in the U.S. to relatives in Mexico. The previous number indicates loudly that “high-skilled” is not just of the fancy degree kind embraced by Hanania, but also that in making his tautological claim that high-skilled immigration is additive to U.S. growth, Hanania is leaving a lot out.
$60 billion+ is not a small number. It’s indicative that people, regardless of what they allegedly learned in classrooms from professors instructing them about the past (no, educators cannot train us for a future that they likely don’t foresee because, well, they’re educators), are essential to a nation’s economic success. Let people in, as opposed to empowering government officials and high-end scholars like Hanania to plan who comes in. Stating the obvious, they don’t know whom to let in.
Which is vivified yet again by annual remittances. The latter is a reminder that there are central plans, and there are markets. It’s evident that markets are demanding what Hanania is glossing over, and will continue to even if Hanania has a say in planning whom to let in. Except that he doesn’t know. No one does.
