Comments 27

民族主义，移民与经济成就

Jul 18, 2018 Jason Furman

发自剑桥——增长放缓已经成为了世界发达经济体面临的主要挑战之一。过去十年中发达经济体的增长率平均为1.2％，低于过去25年3.1％的平均值。

历史经验表明，经济增长放缓可能会使社会变得不那么慷慨宽容，也会降低其包容性。因此有理由表明正是过去十年的增长低迷导致了席卷多国的破坏型民粹民族主义不断激增。

正如二十世纪那最为黑暗的几十年那样，今天的民族主义采取的形式是对移民的强力反对，以及——在较小程度上——对自由贸易的抵制。更糟糕的是，眼下这种毒害性的民族主义将进一步加剧推动其崛起的经济放缓。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 27 in all 27 Comments on this article

Anders Skoldberg Aug 3, 2018

Yes, assuming they do get jobs. In some countries, this could take up to 10-15 years, hence not boosting productivity and per capita growth.
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B Wilds Jul 30, 2018

Immigration may or may not the answer for a country and several factors determine whether it is a benefit. Quantity simply does not make up for poor quality, we are talking about two totally different animals.

The false narrative that simply growing the size of an economy even by using deficit spending undercuts the importance of a solid economic and the long-term stability of the financial system. The article below delves into how its not just about growth.

http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2017/08/economic-growth-does-not-equal-economic.html
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nigel southway Jul 26, 2018

Once again… a quasi-liberal piece that says that nationalism is bad, and globalism is good…

These comments are NOT racist, it’s about being practical.

Many in the west now believe it’s time to call a halt on both economic and cultural grounds.

And no amount of perfect world articles like this will change the more recent nationalistic thinking that is emerging.

Its plain nonsense that immigration is essential… here is why…

The quality of immigrants into the west has decreased… whereas the quantity has increased, also the diversity of religion and social norms of these new immigrants is far less compatible to the social baseline than past generations of immigration. (don’t say multiculturalism works…. it just does not on balance.)

The big picture is …. We are over populating the planet… we are past the life support line by almost a factor of 2

Most babies are now born into poverty and due to elevated expectations brought on by globalization will seek migration to mature economies rather than build their own nations. …
And already we have more people than global demand for their work effort by a factor of 25%.

They want in far more than we need them!

In the same time frame we are planning to automate work yet again with the next generation of disruptive technologies. So, the notion that we need more people to feed the western economies is just wrong, especially when we are letting in mostly what amounts to low grade under-educated/under trained labor that cannot even talk the language and is overloading our educational and social systems…

So NO. its nonsense to even consider the continuance of such immigration activities.

Trump is correct.. current citizens first and strong borders..
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Joey Viljoen Jul 23, 2018

Immigrants that are able to contribute to an economy are fine. However, just taking in everybody who feels like coming will not be positive for an advanced economy, since many of these people will not be able to function in such an economy, let alone contribute. They could in fact become a drag on the economy, eating up resources that would otherwise have gone to the coutry's own less well off. Also, the idea that advanced economies are obliged to take in all manner of immigrants, including illegal ones is silly. The first responsibility elected politicians have is towards the people that elected them. The citizens and people who came to a country legally should always come first. It seems to me this is often forgotten. A country is not a charity.
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Joe Frink Jul 23, 2018

Unfortunately, the current US immigration system has priorities upside down. The median age of admitted immigrants is 8 years OLDER than native born Americans.

It is not hard to see why. When someone is lucky enough to be sponsored through employment or marriage, the first thing she does is to sponsor elderly parents for immigration. This needs to stop.

More than any other, the parent of a US citizen category should be eliminated. Many of these elderly people from India and Central America not only have no skills and do not speak English, but many are also illiterate and feeble. They add to the strain of the health care system and contribute nothing to the economy.

Canada factors in age for immigration. The US should too. We should not be letting in immigrants who are over 40 unless they are rich or a STEM professional.
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Frank Pecarich Jul 23, 2018

Mr. Furman, you are incorrect to say that economics has anything to do with altruism. In multicultural democracies, repeated studies show that voters are unwilling to support social welfare programs if they are perceived as supporting foreign groups. As Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore put it, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

The evidence that diversity and solidarity are negatively correlated comes from many different settings:
Across workgroups in the United States, as well as in Europe, internal heterogeneity (in terms of age, professional background, ethnicity, tenure and other factors) is generally associated with lower group cohesion, lower satisfaction and higher turnover (Jackson et al. 1991; Cohen & Bailey 1997; Keller 2001; Webber & Donahue 2001)

Across countries, greater ethnic heterogeneity seems to be associated with lower social trust (Newton & Delhey 2005; Anderson & Paskeviciute 2006;

Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, lower investment in public goods and infrastructure (Poterba 1997; Alesina et al. 1999; Alesina & La Ferrara 2000, 2002; Costa & Kahn 2003b; Vigdor 2004; Glaeser & Alesina 2004; Leigh 2006; Jordahl & Gustavsson 2006; Soroka et al. 2007; Pennant 2005;
•
Among Peruvian micro-credit cooperatives, ethnic heterogeneity is associated with higher default rates; across Kenyan school districts ethno-linguistic diversity is associated with less voluntary fundraising; and in Himalayan Pakistan, clan, religious, and political diversity are linked with failure of collective infrastructure maintenance (Karlan 2002; Miguel & Gugerty 2005; Khwaja 2006).
• •
Across American census tracts, greater ethnic heterogeneity is associated with lower rates of car-pooling, a social practice that embodies trust and reciprocity (Charles & Kline 2002).

Francis Fukuyama points out, shared norms and altruistic values - persistence, thrift, honesty and reciprocity - create a bond of trust between inhabitants within productive societies. Fukuyama recognizes the importance of biology, in terms of how kin ties and reciprocal altruism are “hard-wired” into humans. The element of trust fails to take root in severely corrupt nations like Nigeria, primarily because of the lack of human qualities essential for “social capital” and the endurance of civil society. Most research seems to conclude that the difference between economically prosperous nations and backward third world countries is directly attributed to selected cultural traits.
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Peter Cook Jul 23, 2018

Professor Furman claims that "In general, it is much better to be a fast-growing country with a vibrant, expanding population than a country with a dwindling population, like Japan." This is a fatuous incantation of the foundational cliche of mainstream economics. Think about it for a moment, are you seriously suggesting that every nation should be "fast-growing" and have a "vibrant, expanding population", for ever and a day? Have you considered the possibility that growth might have limits, on a finite planet? Many of the people whom you deride as populists or 'toxic nationalists' may only be seeking a reduction in the rate of immigration, rather than a complete cessation. Is that unreasonable?
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Jane O'Sullivan Jul 23, 2018

Let's get rid of the 'aging population' fallacy. Yes, Japan's 'working age population' has been shrinking, but its proportion of people in employment hasn't. The quantity of employment is far more strongly determined by demand for workers than by their supply. So far, aging has not meant less employment anywhere - just less unemployment, underemployment and exploitative employment. Nor does immigration have much impact on aging in the long run.
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Jane O'Sullivan Jul 23, 2018

Furman's arguments are unprofessionally tendentious from the get-go: "There can be no question that immigration provides a net economic benefit to advanced economies..." is a statement at odds with a vast body of literature. The 'evidence' he cites for each of his assertions generally does not demonstrate that point at all. In some, he is claiming correlation as causation. It is only by his assertion that all people who object to unlimited immigration are 'nationalists', when in most cases they are merely trying to restore the lower rates of immigration that previously prevailed and were never considered to be isolationist. The idea that the rise of this 'nationalism' has come out of the blue is denied by his own account of the rapid rise in proportion of foreign-born in many developed countries. The trigger has not been slowing GDP growth, but rapidly escalating immigration, and the demonstrably negative experiences that members of receiving communities have had as a result. That his assertions of benefit are unqualified by any quantity of migration or extent of population growth it causes shows an inability to acknowledge that the natural resource base has any impact on the economy and quality of life.
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Raja Rajamani Jul 22, 2018

I do not understand why there should be 'growth' all the time. If Japan's population is decreasing, can it not plan for a decrease in an orderly way. Why should always only new roads, new subways be built. Can there be a time, when sufficient of these has been constructed to satisfy the existing population. I think bringing in alien culture to old societies, is kicking the problem of assimilation down to the next generations. even Koreans, so similar to the Japanese, have not been assimilated over 100 years. Even the Jews did not assimilate into Christendom in 2 milleniums. Do we think the current Muslim immigrants would do anything different? What are their attitudes towards the host country. In these days of instant communication, line of relationships to the mother culture is intact. Solution is to develop these countries and provide a market for their goods.
- S Chenchi Jul 22, 2018
  
  Who are the most willing people to develop these countries? The immigrants. Can you tell me why all the people should be the same? Can you deny the Jews are belonging to a small group of people dominating wealth although they don't believe in Christ?
  Who takes care of these old people (when the existing population get old)? The old people themselves? Who repairs the "existing" roof? The old people? Can all of them afford such high price if there are only few local young workers in the market?
  I didn't say open the gate to let the flood of immigrants in is good. Immigrants should come legally and selectively.
  Anyway, your comment reflects you don't have enough knowledge and strategic mindset to understand the paper. I suggest you to read SUN instead of reading Project Syndicate. :)
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Stephen Gwynne Jul 22, 2018

True reducing prosperity has created social tensions
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/131-not-about-brexit/
But ideologically driven open borders is not the solution. More equitable distribution of the goods and services produced and imported by this nation is the solution. There is no conclusive evidence that immigration increases prosperity and in fact the evidence shows that mass immigration within the context of stagnating growth increases social tensions, reduces natural resilience as #greenspaces are given over to house builds and other grey infrastructure. In economic terms it puts a downward pressure on wages (economics 101) and increases prices through increase demand (economics 101). According to theory of economic liberalism, immigration only increases overall prosperity when it is not continous.
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Henk Crop Jul 20, 2018

What is misleading in this article is also the photo of the nice, innocent looking, moslim girls.
It ridicules a major issue on immigration. The Islam makes 1,4 billion people happy.
But Islamic countries have a high birth-rate and slow economic development ( except for the oil states). Many engage frequently in thousand year old religious conflicts.
This all leads to a never ending flow of immigrants.
As immigrants in the West they often do not integrate at all, but try to implement their values in the West.
Many of these values are not compatible with fundamental Western values such as: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, citizen law, democracy, equality of women, homo rights.
This all limits the realization of the rosy prospects you describe and cannot be hidden by a pretty picture.
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Prashant Kotak Jul 19, 2018

There is an entire debate to be had around the consequence for the home countries of high-end, high-education migrantion out of poor countries into rich ones. Not to put too fine a point on it, those countries are potentially de-nuded of their best talent.

At the top-end of migration, it is often hard-working and self-reliant people that have the gumption to actually leave, surely the very talent that those countries can ill afford to lose. For example, those with sellable skills have left Greece in droves recently, precisely the people Greece needs to get it's head back above water. The cost of a Polish Doctor who comes and works in the NHS in the UK would be evidenced by an even longer waiting list in a Hospital in Poznan or some-such that lost the Doctor.
But of course that would never be reported in PS, which would happily let the gentle implication float around the ether: that of course there is no ageing demograpic
in Eastern Europe, and in any case, surely old people in Eastern Europe don't actually need their Doctors as much as we in the UK need their Doctors anyway, given that they don't live as long, being poorer, right? Note that said Doctor would have been educated and trained by a nation that is significantly poorer than ours, and only a cynic
would class the vast subsidies being poured into those countries by the EU as blood-money.

Migration is an awkward topic for me (as someone who came to the UK as a refugee out of Africa in the early 70s). I know a little about global migration flows in IT related professions - so not exactly your low-skill low-wage workers. Over the years I have flip-flopped in my views on the positives and negatives of these flows. At various Universities in the UK 80s, I came across many Indians doing postgrads, who came from elite Indian grad schools like IIT. Of course, even bigger numbers ended up in Universities in the US, getting to which was regarded as the holy grail even more so than to the UK. These were the very brightest produced by India, often educated with state-paid scolarships.
So the most talented of one of the poorest countries on earth, were leaving in droves for the richest countries on earth - to make those countries even richer. Of course, no one can remotely be blamed on a personal level because every one has the right to look for the best outcomes for themselves and their dependents.
But there is undoubtly an irony in there somewhere.

There is a postscript to this little rant, perhaps even two.
Twenty years on, and it turned out I was wrong on the consequences for India of the IT exodus, at least in the first instance. That IT and management oriented Indian mafia rose over the years ever higher within corporate America (I cite as evidence for example the CEOs of Microsoft and Google, but there are lots), and knowing about the huge pool of dirt cheap, well educated labour available back home and how to monitize it, opened out the entire Indian outsourcing industry, and created a huge outsourcing boom in India - a great plus for Indian employment (even though it may well have cost the poor of the rich countries).
Another decade on, and I now look at the Indian IT scene and wonder if I wasn't right all along after all. Indian IT is massive, but about bodyshopping and little else. Product companies are few and far in-between, there is hardly any innovation and no IP. Tellingly and ominously, no culture of open-souce contribution either. None of the high-end tech that drives the world belongs to Indian companies. To me, it indicates large numbers pouring into IT professions because it provides well paid employment - there is no innate love of programming, the reason which many of us grouchy old gits originally came to computing all those years ago, and the purist in me baulks just a little at that.
- Peter Schaeffer Jul 19, 2018
  
  PK, Good comments. So far, India hasn't created the same sort of Tech companies you see in China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. Perhaps losing high-end talent (to the USA) had something to do with it.
  - Prashant Kotak Jul 20, 2018
    
    Peter, thankyou for your kind words.
    Absolutely, the loss of high-end talent has cost India heavily over the years. I guess one of the things that facilitated migration out of India compared to the far-East, is the English language. I am equally obliged to ask if that talent would have thrived if it had stayed at home or if it would have largely withered, given the chaotic and unhelpful nature of Indian governments since Independence, until the recent Modi government, which is a bit better - the Indian Congres Party has historically been crony-riven Corruption Central, totally betraying the trust they were handed on a plate.
    - Peter Schaeffer Aug 3, 2018
      
      PK, That's pretty much my take on Modi as well. For a long time, I thought the BJP were the bad guys and Congress was/were the good guys. Not any more. I live in the USA and have plenty of familiarity with rise and fall of Enron. Congress approved the Dabhol Power project. The BJP opposed it. The BJP was right.
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Henk Crop Jul 18, 2018

When in the twentieth century Antwerp was overrun by the Catholic Spanish the protestant citizen fled to Amsterdam. They were wealthy businessmen and contributed tremendously to the wealth and culture of the Netherlands.
The great majority of immigrants today are uneducated people from non-western cultures who try to start a new life in a highly sophisticated economy. This cannot become the success that the author suggests.
In the Netherlands over the past 40 years ca. 2 million immigrants settled.
Mainly from Marocco, Turkey and the West Indies.
Including the benefits of their labor it has cost ca. 200 billion Euro's to the Dutch taxpayer. That is Euro 100.000.- per immigrant.
There are exceptions but overall it has developed in a number of parallel communities.
Many are Moslims and they do not want to integrate at all. They hold on to values which are incompatible to Western Values.
Why would the Dutch have to admit these people ?
Following the ideas of the author, they would be Nationalists if they just prefer to protect their own society and culture.
The huge economic growth is also questionable. If the immigrants would not have been there the production would have been replaced.
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Michael Public Jul 18, 2018

Immigration: It all depends on who the immigrants are. Canada takes phds by the boatload while my country (South Africa) accepts only illiterate peasants fleeing failed states.
- Peter Schaeffer Jul 18, 2018
  
  MP, It is deeply shameful for South Africa to take these people. Almost all of them are coming from countries poorer than South Africa. Since people always make a country richer, a relatively rich nation (SA) is making its neighbors poorer. That's just terrible.
  - Raja Rajamani Jul 22, 2018
    
    South Africa, at the end of apartheid, abolished the pass laws. The immediate effect was open borders. From far away Ghana and Nigeria to nearby Mozambique, SA is inundated with sharp witted and 'willing to do illegal' immigrants. Result is that the South African blacks have been marginalized. There have been open fights against these. But unless SA resorts to mass expulsion, the country is not going to improve. Remember, for those who migrate here, SA is still heaven, compared to their home countries.
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Bernhard Kopp Jul 18, 2018

Immigration into a flexible labor market, and the requirement to work for a living, is economically beneficial. But, the European welfare state and its benefits and entitlements require a new look. It is obvious, that immigration that is statistically on the dole for 5-plus year on average, as it is largely the case in Germany, Sweden, Austria and others, including full health care benefits and the rest of it, is not beneficial for a very long time, probably not for a generation (35 years). Furthermore, if the education and skill level of immigrants is on average much lower than the indigenous population, than the contribution to the GDP, taxes and social security contributions is much lower as well. Such immigrant groups are net beneficiaries of the welfare state at the expense of everybody else.
- Peter Schaeffer Jul 18, 2018
  
  BK, It is shameful to allow "facts" (a four-letter word with an s) to get in the way of PC ideology.
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Peter Schaeffer Jul 18, 2018

Lee Kuan Yew had some important comments on immigration. Predictably he told the truth, even if it wasn't PC. See

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXHPmIcy-kI&feature=youtube&t=3m14s

Quotes

Charlie Rose: “And immigrants have been America’s strength.” Lee Kuan Yew: “Absolutely … But, mind you, immigration of the highly intelligent and highly hard-working, very hard-working people. If you get immigration from the fruit-pickers [chuckles for several seconds at the idea], you may not get very far!” – Lee Kuan Yew, Former Prime Minister of Singapore
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Peter Schaeffer Jul 18, 2018

"Yet, on balance, the available evidence suggests that immigrants do not reduce wages for native-born workers. In fact, it is more likely that immigrants increase wages overall."

Not exactly. California has the largest immigrant population in the USA. It is also has the highest poverty rate in the nation (according to the Census). Did I mention that California ranks 50th in Quality of Life? The schools are almost the worst in the nation (sometimes the worst)? Housing is massively uaffordable? Gridlock? Extreme inequality?
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Peter Schaeffer Jul 18, 2018

Whether immigration helps a nation or hurts a nation has been studied to death. The results are massively negative. Read the quote from George Borjas at the end. In a welfare state poor immigrants are always a burden. Of course, you can find claims otherwise. Check the assumptions the author's used. Typically they are bizarrely fraudulent. For example, unaffordable housing is sometimes treated as a "benefit" of mass immigration. For a few real studies check out the following.

See "Look North, Chancellor Merkel" (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/423935/look-north-chancellor-merkel-andrew-stuttaford). A few quotes should help.

"Sweden takes in more refugees per capita than any other European country, and immigrants – mainly from the Middle East and Africa – now make up about 16 per cent of the population. The main political parties, as well as the mainstream media, support the status quo. Questioning the consensus is regarded as xenophobic and hateful. Now all of Europe is being urged to be as generous as Sweden. So how are things working out in the most immigration-friendly country on the planet? Not so well, says Tino Sanandaji. Mr. Sanandaji is himself an immigrant, a Kurdish-Swedish economist who was born in Iran and moved to Sweden when he was 10. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and specializes in immigration issues. This week I spoke with him by Skype. “There has been a lack of integration among non-European refugees,” he told me. Forty-eight per cent of immigrants of working age don’t work, he said. Even after 15 years in Sweden, their employment rates reach only about 60 per cent. Sweden has the biggest employment gap in Europe between natives and non-natives. From Davos to Brussels, the conventional wisdom is that a massive influx of immigrants is needed to prop up Europe’s welfare states. Unexplained is how the unemployed are meant to pay for the pensions of the retired."

Let's take a look at some facts from the Netherlands...

"Of the country’s 16.9 million people, 2.1 million are non-Western migrants, mostly Turkish and Moroccan, and their Dutch-born children. Pew Research calculates that about 1 million of those — 6% of the population — are Muslim. The number of Muslims increased by an estimated 1% annually over the last ten years.

While 2.9% of the overall population receives welfare, a worrying 49.9% of non-Western migrants do. While an average of 27% of all youngsters drop out of school, more than 50 percent of non-Western migrants do. The overall Dutch unemployment rate is 6.9%, but it’s 15.2% for non-Western migrants. The police have detained over 60% of Moroccan-Dutch boys under age 23 at least once, many of them five times or more. In 2014, there were 81,000 arrests of non-Western migrants out of more than 2 million living in the country, compared to 111,000 arrested non-migrants out of a population of 13.2 million."

From Bernhard Kopp

"The advanced European welfare states have, in their social contract developed over generations, defined benefits for people in need, within their borders, that amount to € 20,000.- per person, per year, including the administrative cost. Unaccompanied minors cost some € 50,000.-- per person, per year. It is quite simple math how quickly the financial affordability and the political acceptance come to an end. Even after 5 years in a country, at least 50% of immigrants are dependent on transfer payments. Labor markets are not able to absorb large numbers of less qualified people. Within the EU there are some 22 million registered and benefits-receiving unemployed, and some 30 million more who have some work, but earn hardly more than the defined subsistence minimum within the country. Some 80- 90% of all arguments against immigration from Arabian and African countries are economic. "

A report just came out in Norway showing that each Middle-Eastern immigrant costs taxpayers $700,000 (net). From “Immigration Will Bankrupt Norway” (http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/04/immigration-will-bankrupt-norway/). Quote

”Non-Western immigration is unprofitable Finansavisen [Norwegian financial newspaper] has gone through figures released by SSB [Norwegian Bureau of Statistics] and concludes that each non-Western immigrant, on average, costs Norwegian society NoK 4.1 million ($700,000). The sums are astronomical, especially when considering that in 2012 alone, 15,400 non-Western immigrants arrived in Norway.

When Sigrun Vågeng was the director of NHO [The Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise] she presented a study which concluded that the entirety of Norwegian oil-generated wealth would disappear if this non-profitable immigration wasn’t halted. Back then the story was mostly ignored. In the meantime several years have passed, and today the numbers are even higher. Even so the MSM and politicians keep describing the official immigration policy as strict. The figure is NoK 4.1 million:

This figure includes all taxable incomes minus public expenditures,” according to Erlend Holmøy, senior researcher for SSB. Based on the approximately 15,400 non-Western immigrants that arrived here in 2012 this means an outlay of NoK 63 billion ($11 billion). This is the equivalent of two foreign aid budgets, or roughly half of the NoK 125 billion ($21 billion) taken from the Norwegian oil fund (wealth fund) that the authorities intend to spend this year.

“The cost of it all will have to be covered by the average Norwegian taxpayer, or it will lead to a reduction in capacity and quality of various publicly funded services,” says Holmøy to Finansavisen. If the non-Western immigration continues on a level equal to 2012, the funding costs will soar to NoK 2,900 billion ($493 billion) in the period between 2015-2100.”

From Germany

“But Sarrazin is more interested in the failure of the Muslim background Turks and north Africans—about half of Germany’s ethnic minority population (which altogether is now about 15 per cent of the total). And he describes the failure in shocking and pitiless detail. The poor German spoken by third-generation immigrants, the abysmal performance in school (72 per cent of Turks living in Germany, aged 20 to 64, have no qualifications at all), the high crime rates, the fact that they take far more out of the welfare state than they put in (only 33 per cent of Muslim Germans live mainly from their labours). According to Christopher Caldwell—who is wrongly described by Sarrazin as British and liberal; in fact, he is American and conservative—the number of foreign-born residents rose from 3m to 8m between 1971 and 2000, but the number of employed foreigners stayed the same at 2m.”

From France

“This prison is majority Muslim -- as is virtually every house of incarceration in France. About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are Muslim, according to Muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though Muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country's population.”

From the UK

“In Britain, 11 percent of prisoners are Muslim in contrast to about 3 percent of all inhabitants, according to the Justice Ministry. Research by the Open Society Institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the Netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are Muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent Muslim. In Belgium, Muslims from Morocco and Turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.”

For a decent U.S. summary, see "The ageing, crisis-prone, welfare state is bad news for welfare migration". Quote

"Edmonston and Smith (1997) look comprehensibly at all layers of government (federal, state, and local), all programs (benefits), and all types of taxes. For each cohort, defined by age of arrival to the U.S., the benefits (cash or in kind) received by migrants over their own lifetimes and the lifetimes of their first-generation descendents were projected. These benefits include Medicare, Medicaid, Supplementary Security Income (SSI), Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food stamps, Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), etc. Similarly, taxes paid directly by migrants and the incidence on migrants of other taxes (such as corporate taxes) were also projected for the lifetimes of the migrants and their first-generation descendents. Accordingly, the net fiscal burden was projected and discounted to the present. In this way, the net fiscal burden for each age cohort of migrants was calculated in present value terms. Within each age cohort, these calculations were disaggregated according to three educational levels: Less than high school education, high school education, and more than high school education. Indeed the findings suggest that migrants with less than high school education are typically a net fiscal burden that can reach as high as approximately US$100,000 in present value, when the migrants’ age on arrival is between 20-30 years."

From George Borjas (America's leading immigration economist)

“There’s also been a lot of fake fog thrown into the the question of whether immigrants pay their way in the welfare state. It’s time for some sanity in this matter as well. The welfare state is specifically designed to transfer resources from higher-income to lower-income persons. Immigrants fall disproportionately into the bottom part of the income distribution. It is downright ridiculous to claim that low-skill immigrants somehow end up being net contributors into the public treasury.”
- Safis Hajjouz Aug 1, 2018
  
  Many immigrants, especially from poor or low education families are not accepted and face many implicit and explicit discremination. You talked about France? What are / were the chances for a Muslim to find a decent job even if is better or more qualified from a French with non Muslim name? My point is that for many of these statistics you present across countries they hide deeper forces and main determinats of why an immigrant is more likely to stay unemployed (hence more likely rely on welfare state), not finish school, commit a crime etc. The single most important condition where I do believe that immigrants are net contributors to country's growth is integration. Not superficial one, and one sided. But, one where natives would also learn to integrate with immigrants. How many natives for example avoid to live where immigrants or expats live? In Denemark the government forced an exchange of population, where native-locals had to move in areas where immigrants live and the other way around. So, all these statistics may say alot. But, mask the Human causes behind the negative side of immigrantion. Don't foeget that an immigrant has to struggle twice as much and put substantial more effort to achieve things that for a native are either given or easy. When in that process things go wrong, immigrantion may indeed produce various negative effects. But, we should be more clear about the TRUE frictions and ultimate causes that lead immigrantion to have negative effects.
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民族主义，移民与经济成就

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