The free market think tank Unleash Prosperity released a report highlighting the role of immigration in boosting the U.S. economy, though not all in President Donald Trump’s base were won over by its data.

The report’s authors, Richard Vedder, professor emeritus at Ohio University; Matthew Denhart, president of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation; and Unleash Prosperity founder Stephen Moore highlighted the positive economic impacts of immigration. In a Tuesday press conference, Vedder laid out their arguments for why the U.S. should increase immigration on economic grounds.

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Vedder began by stating a number of statistics from the study, such as their finding that 48% of the growth of the U.S. labor force from 2013 to 2023 was due to immigration.

Immigrants, he argued, “have been highly associated with the most dynamic aspects of the American economy.”

“If all of America were like immigrants, we wouldn’t be tearing this world apart… We wouldn’t be worried quite as much about China. We wouldn’t be worrying quite as much about Russia,” Vedder added.

Vedder then suggested selling 8,000 visas for all 250 business days of the year on the stock exchange, hypothetically making $100 billion in a year, with another $1 trillion over ten years. The scheme would add two million immigrants per year.

“What would a trillion dollars do to the current budget hassle that we’re having in Washington right now? It would lower the deficit, get rid of the deficit,” he said.

In a statement, Moore argued that young migrant workers were needed to compensate for losses from other workers aging out of the workforce.

“We need these young workers to grow the economy,” Moore said. “Without legal immigration, we don’t have the labor force to meet demand, expand output, or keep prices in check. Fighting legal immigration is a direct threat to growth and to Trump’s economic strategy. 10,000 Americans are retiring each day, and there aren’t that many young Americans entering the workforce.”

The study endorsed an increased number of visas for seasonal workers, H1b visas targeting high-skilled immigrants, EB5 investor immigrants who invest at least $1 million in depressed areas, and the overall raising of immigrant quotas to significantly increase the number of new arrivals.

Unleash Prosperity went so far as to suggest that Trump’s economic growth agenda was reliant on an increase in immigrant workers. 

The proposals have their fair share of detractors, however, particularly among Trump’s base. The Washington Examiner spoke with Director of Research for the Center for Immigration Studies Steven Camarota and CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian, who took issue with the argument that more immigration is needed to fix the U.S.’s workforce woes.

Camarota pointed to a recent study from CIS focusing on the phenomenon of the skyrocketing number of native-born Americans who are of working age, but not working since 1960. The number of these people has increased by 13.2 million from 1960 to 2024, while the number of working-age immigrant men increased by 14.1 million over the same period.

If the same proportion of native-born working-age men were in the labor force as in 1960, the U.S. would have nine million more native-born men in the workforce. If it returned to 2000 levels, 4.4 million would be added.

“We have a kind of crisis of all these idle men, no matter how you look at it. And if we really are having a tight labor market, if we really do need a lot of workers, this is a great opportunity to draw some of those folks back in that are on the sidelines,” Camarota said.

The issue of ballooning idle working-age men is more than simply an economic problem, with the growth accompanied by other social ills.

“You might say, ‘Yeah, okay, Steve, but you know, maybe they’re lazy bums, so the hell with them. Or maybe they’re living a bohemian lifestyle. And, you know, good for them.’ But the problem is, all the research we have shows the opposite, that men who are out of the labor market and who are working age… suffer a host of social problems, both for themselves, and they create large problems for society,” he said.

Working-age people out of the workforce suffer from political and social alienation, leading to disproportionate rates of suicide, obesity, crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, and overdose deaths.

Camarota believes that immigration is directly linked to the growth of working-age men out of the workforce, partially by crowding native-born Americans out of the labor market.

“Does immigration crowd native born people out of the labor market? Yeah, almost certainly it does, to some extent,” he said, pointing to the correlation with the massive immigration increase since the 1960s.

With that in mind, he said the Unleash Prosperity study’s finding that 48% of the U.S. workforce’s growth from 2013 to 2023 was not only accurate, but that the percentage had likely increased since then.

The study also suggested that all of the U.S. workforce’s growth from 2020 to 2040 would be attributable to immigrants and the children of immigrants.

The speakers addressed the argument that a tight labor market is beneficial to native-born workers at Tuesday’s press conference, dismissing it as a myth. 

“Everything that we’ve seen in our surveys with people coming and going, wages becomes really the second or third or fourth element in somebody’s life,” one of the speakers said. “They want a job that’s meaningful, a career that’s meaningful, and they want work that’s useful to them and the people around them, and so that process just doesn’t work. It’s really a myth that’s been created by those people who think we could just turn a dollar number on and you’re going to solve the problem.”

Vedder agreed, claiming this was proven by empirical evidence. He said that the U.S. experienced the greatest wage growth in its history from 1870 to 1920, when the country saw a major influx of immigrants.

“It was a period when we went to become the number one nation in the world. This nation was built on immigration, and wages went up a lot in that period,” Vedder continued. “People bought their first car in that period, they got the toilet, indoor toilet. In that period, I could go on and on and on. Not that immigration is the reason we have indoor plumbing, but it contributed to it.”

Turning to immigrant workers would be a grave mistake, Camarota argued, as it would allow policymakers an excuse to ignore the “disastrous” problems posed by the increasing alienation and exit from the workforce of working-age men and rely on new foreign workers instead.

The connection between increased immigrant workers and the growing decrease in able native-born workers exiting the workforce is multifaceted. One major issue, Camarota argued, is that it incentivizes employers to neglect training younger workers in favor of older, trained foreign workers. Employers may prefer a 27-year-old worker from Guatemala to a 17-year-old native-born worker, as the latter is usually less effective, being burdened with the problems and distractions of adolescence.

This neglect of young workers during this key phase of development may lead to cascading problems down the road. He pointed to research showing the importance of teenagers working, allowing them to cultivate valuable work experience early on.

“It’s very important for people to work as teenagers, because they have to learn the value of work and what it takes to hold a job,” Camarota said. “Like not telling your boss he’s an idiot, even if he really is, and showing up on time, and treating customers right, and all of those things. And if they don’t learn it when they’re young, it turns out it’s hard to learn it when you’re old.”

“So if you’re not employed as a teen, and you don’t go on to college, the probability you won’t be employed at 27, and you’ll be one of these dropouts, is much higher,” he added.

Krikorian also touched on the issue of foreign workers who will accept far worse conditions than native-born American workers would, driving down wages and work conditions. He estimated that there are “easily” 100 million people worldwide who would work in the U.S. for no wages, only room and board, just to be able to live in America.

“Because there’s more to quality of life than GDP measurements. You know, these kind of reports are just by economists who don’t look beyond their Excel spreadsheets, but the United States is a more orderly society,” he said.

“People actually stop at red lights. The police don’t shake you down at every turn. That’s worth an enormous amount to somebody from a developing country, whether they’re high-skilled or low-skilled. So my point is, the competition is not on an even playing field,” Krikorian added.

Camarota also argued that immigrant workers largely offset anything they contribute to the system with disproportionate welfare use, especially among illegal immigrants. A CIS analysis of 2022 data found that 52% of immigrant-led households and 59% of illegal immigrant-led households are on some kind of welfare, compared to 39% of native-born-led households. He explained that this is largely due to welfare being targeted toward low-wage earners, who make up the vast majority of immigrant workers.

The authors of the Unleash Prosperity study argue that new immigrants to the U.S. shouldn’t be eligible for welfare programs.

Unleash Prosperity’s study was split in focus between high- and low-skilled immigrants, but it focused much of its pitch on the benefits of high-skilled immigrant workers. They found that 47% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Of the “Magnificent Seven” American tech companies, worth more in valuation than all European companies combined, three of them were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Krikorian offered a counter view, suggesting several issues to offset this data.

He doubted that there was a high-skilled labor shortage, saying that wages in high-skilled fields weren’t going up a considerable amount. A recent study by Camarota found that the only high-skilled field with significant wage growth was petroleum engineering, a trend that coincided with the growth of fracking.

Immigration as a solution for any labor shortage is a bad move either way, Krikorian argued, saying it “short-circuits” the market. If they even exist, a shortage is a “market signal” of high demand for particular skills. In a continent-spanning country of 340 million people like the U.S., the signal leads to a response of more people going into said field, clearing the shortage.

“What immigration does is it short-circuits the natural workings of the market within the United States by essentially creating a global labor market in which every American is competing with people abroad,” Krikorian added. “And this applies in high and low skill.”

Krikorian said the current U.S. system for obtaining foreign top talent, through H1B lotteries, is hopelessly flawed.

“Nobody disagrees with allowing in truly exceptional talents. Einsteins, the people who are the top people in their field on the planet,” he said. “But humanity doesn’t create that many Einsteins.”

The U.S. immigration system’s approach to talent acquisition, as it currently exists, isn’t specifically targeting “Einsteins,” Krikorian argued.

“They want numbers. They want lots of people,” he said.

Aside from domestic concerns in the U.S., Krikorian also warned about the disastrous effects of brain drain on the third-world countries the U.S. is taking high-skilled workers from.

“It’s one thing if you take a handful of Einsteins, but in a lot of these African countries, the majority of people born in those countries who are now physicians or nurses no longer live in those countries,” he said.

Krikorian recalled a study on Malian physicians, which found that most Mali-born physicians had left the country to work elsewhere.

“Does France need one more Malian doctor? More than Mali could use one?” he said.

THIS ISN’T THE WAY TO GET ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS TO SELF-DEPORT

The “strip mining” of top talent in the third world could lead to the countries being permanently stuck in a dysfunctional state, causing instability, which leads to a constant stream of unsustainable new immigration to the U.S. and elsewhere. The only way to prevent unsustainable immigration pressures in the long term is to allow developing countries to develop.

“It’s not like from China, if we took the 1,000 top Chinese researchers and scientists every year. I mean, that could have an effect, but China will be fine,” Krikorian said. “We take 1,000 skilled people from West Africa every year, that could really be detrimental to the successful thriving of those societies.”