Symposium on Immigration: An Introduction

Immigration to the United States has increased substantially in recent decades, rising from about 330,000 per year in the period 1961-70 to 1,050,000 per year in the period 2009-15 (Cohn 2017). In the process, the foreign-born population has risen from 9.7 million to 43.2 million, with the portion of foreign born rising from 5.4 percent of the population to 14.1 percent (Lopez and Radford 2017)-not far below the record of 14.8 percent in 1890. This pattern is not unique to the United States: 20 percent of Canada's population is foreign born, and nearly 30 percent of Australia's population were born elsewhere. In a familiar historical pattern, high levels of immigration have made immigration policy a potent political issue. Unsurprisingly, the topic has drawn keen attention from social scientists. Many American economists argue that theories demonstrating positive net benefits from international free trade in goods and services also carry over to the free movement of workers. One noted exception to this "economistic" perspective is George Borjas-author of a stream of important research articles on the economics of immigration and a recent, influential book: We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative (2016). This symposium features Borjas's overview of the key arguments and evidence in his book and two responses to his essay.