Best Days Lie Ahead

Occasionally I’ll get a rather negative question from the audience about immigration and its impact upon the agurbs®. My response is that we stand to gain greatly if we can encourage immigrants to settle in our communities. It is not unlike what occurred when my forefathers emigrated from Germany to the USA in the mid 1800s.

Just as we are currently in a third wave of migration from the suburbs to the agurbs®, with the first two waves being the waves from the farms to the urban areas and the second from urban to the suburbs, we are in the fourth wave of immigration in the USA. The first was from Europe during the founding; the second was in the mid 1900s when we began to industrialize; and the third was the Ellis Island phenomenon of the first two decades of the 20th century when almost one million immigrants/year were landing on American shores.

This fourth wave, which started in the early 80s, has been almost as dramatic as the earlier three waves. Over 20 million immigrants have chosen to make the USA their new home in the past 25 years—in fact one in eight in the USA are here by choice, not by birth. They’ve come here because of the unique opportunities found in the USA that are a beacon to the rest of the world.

And, have we as a country benefited from this influx? In the past 25 years our assets have quadrupled in real terms, the fastest period of wealth creation in the history of the USA. Unemployment has fallen from during this period from high single digits to only 5.1% today, the second lowest rate of industrialized countries in the world. And, Richard Vedder, labor economist from Ohio University, has shown that those states with the greatest influx of immigrants have generally had the lowest, not highest unemployment rates.

It is a case of a rising tide lifting all boats. Granted some have risen more than others, but generally our policy of open immigration has been beneficial to the USA in the past and will continue into the future.