Mass Immigration is Not a Prerequisite for Real Economic Growth
Growth that leads to a future no one actually wants is immoral
Mass immigration has long been touted as ‘necessary to avoid a recession’.
You hear it all the time.
‘Who’s going to drive the cars? Who’s going to work at the cafes? Who’s going to pick the fruit?’
‘If not the immigrants, then who? We will have a recession without them!’
We’ll get back to this.
But first, look around you.
Look at the economy we now live in.
House prices are on the moon, a hot girl almond milk latte costs $7 and energy costs are skyrocketing.
So, I ask these ‘economists’ who say immigration is necessary to avoid a recession a simple question:
Why?
Why do we want to avoid a recession?
A recession is technically defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
The sky is not going to fall down if we enter a recession.
But you know what would happen?
If we stopped mass immigration, GDP would likely decline, because there would be less people in our economy, hence less consumers.
Shortly thereafter, we would hear from the business lobby that there is a ‘labour shortage’.
But really, this would not be an accurate summary of the situation.
We wouldn’t have a ‘labour shortage’ per se, we would have a ‘labour shortage at the price businesses want to pay that labour to perform work’.
In other words, because there would be less people available to perform the jobs, the price of labour would have to rise to incentivise people to work these jobs.
All else equal, it would be inflationary for the sectors that employ the most immigrants.
What are these sectors?
Well, it’s stuff like retail jobs, restaurants, cafes, Uber drivers, etc.
A lot of these are jobs that used to be performed by young people - high school or university students.
Now, instead of this, we import their replacements, which businesses love not only because the labour is cheaper, but because they can exploit them easier.
Someone whose visa relies on work rights, or is just more desperate for the money because they came here from overseas to earn more and then send it back, cares less about their ‘rights’, and businesses know this.
So we’ve created a situation where we are favouring immigrant workers at the expense of investing in the future of young people.
And the argument rarely ever gets framed this way.
You know how they frame it instead?
