alt Hacker NewsThis is just GDP, which isn't that relevant. If you add a million people and only one of them works, GDP will still go up. It doesn't take into account the following:
- no-one's talking about immigration in general. They're talking about mass immigration. So any general "look how immigration can be good" is not addressing the issue.
- mass immigration means that housing becomes scarce, driving up prices. This again makes GDP look good, because stamp duty revenue goes up and so do estate agent fees. But all the many negative externalities, such as everyone is now buying houses 10 years later, and leaning on their parents, and their dwellings are all being subdivided because even a tiny place is now worth renting out or selling, are totally ignored. The housing costs drive every other cost up. Minimum wage / living wage needs to skyrocket just to combat this one thing, both because people need more money to pay for their own accommodation, and people need to afford goods and services that are all also being made more expensive because their salary costs need to increase for the same reason.
- mass immigration spikes up demand for power. Power is often a large capital investment, which means that the country borrows a load of money from Macquarie Group to build it, with lots of interest paid back over decades. Seems to generate GDP as people are being paid to build things; actually a net negative all told over the lifetime of the investment.
- the same as power but for water.
- the same as power but for roads. Traffic and congestion are now being actively managed by computerised systems because there are so many cars on the road.
- the same as power but for pollution. Another negative externality of driving up population for GDP reasons. Every person imported is more pollution generated in and by the local country.
It's important we have young people entering the workforce. But adding more people from external sources is not sustainable. When they all get old do we import more people? Or should we just be repurposing the millions of young people who are doing less important but less icky jobs to do the jobs that we're currently getting immigrants to do. "Who will pick the cotton?" is not a good question.
Net economic benefit is not only GDP, it includes net tax over government spending. Immigrants are younger so they have more regular taxable income (vs capital gains), while spending more of it (vs saving) and drawing less government benefits.
The housing shortage is driven by NIMBY and regulatory capture. You are right that perpetual growth is unsustainable but we are not remotely near the possible carrying capacity of our land and resources. We have had periods of much greater population growth that were accompanied by greater prosperity overall.
Immigrants are not the problem, they are the convenient scapegoat of the business interests that have systematically hollowed out the middle class over the last 50 years.