Thread by @Noahpinion

1/This anti-immigration op-ed by nativist lecturer and gadfly Michael Anton is truly bad: washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-d…

2/First of all, he of course cites George Borjas' crappy research, when everyone else's research agrees that immigration doesn't lower wages for the native-born:
bloomberg.com/view/articles/…

3/Second, he says America's population is "320 million and rising", neglecting the fact that it's rising BECAUSE OF IMMIGRATION.

4/Third, he says America's fertility is the highest in the developed world, failing to realize that it's immigrants and the kids of immigrants who are responsible for much of this higher-than-usual fertility.

5/Fourth, he claims that immigrants raise housing prices, which depresses fertility rates, but there is no evidence of such an effect.

In fact, it smacks of the monumentally stupid "race suicide" arguments from 100 years ago, that claimed immigration reduced Anglo fertility.

6/Fifth, he ignores the most important economic reasons to want more immigrants.

First of all, immigrants pay a lot more in taxes than they take out; thus, immigrants support the comfortable retirements AND the educations of the native-born.

bloomberg.com/view/articles/…

7/Also, he ignores immigrant entrepreneurship, immigrant skills, immigrant contributions to industrial clusters, etc. etc. etc.

bloomberg.com/view/articles/…

8/In sum, Anton's case against immigration is both poorly informed AND conducted in bad faith.

The charitable interpretation of Anton is that he wants to keep out Democratic voters.

The uncharitable interpretation is that he's just racist.

9/In any case, this should be a lesson: Don't listen to nativists without fact-checking everything they say.

More often than not, they're either misinformed or feeding you a line.

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