When Conservatives Lose Their Minds

When we find batches of our fellow conservatives experiencing Sudden Tragic IQ Decline Syndrome (STIDS), the cause is almost always the same.

These poor souls have been afflicted by the materialist superstition. This stultifying delusion convinces people that wealth consists of material goods, though previously they grasped that all wealth is knowledge, and economic growth is learning.

The next thing you know, they begin to speak of “inputs” and “outputs”, “labor” and “capital” as if these things had any meaning apart from the people — and minds — that deploy them.

In the most recent STIDS outbreak, clusters of conservative pundits were gulled by a paper from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The paper showed that in recent years immigrants have taken some three quarters of new jobs in the United States, while only a remaining few went to U.S. born workers. According to CIS, between May 2019 and May 2024, employment among the U.S.-born rose by only about 971,000, whereas employment for immigrants increased by around 3.2 million.

Cacophonous were the cries of “we wuz robbed,” thunderous were the denunciations of  “foreigners stealing American jobs.”

Even as savvy a commentator as our friend David Strom from Hot Air fell for this delusion.

“One of the most striking statistics to emerge during the Biden administration,” wrote David, “was the ratio of jobs created by American citizens and those filled by immigrants. Late in Biden’s term, jobs for Americans declined, and jobs for foreign-born workers increased, suggesting that the longer Biden kept the border open, the more jobs immigrants took from Americans. (Emphasis added).

And there you have it: Americans “created” these jobs but foreigners “took them.”

This image suggests the existence of some storehouse of “jobs” from which job-seekers can pluck employment. But you better get there first and cheapest or the jobs will run out before you get yours. This is superstitious thinking. Just as we learned in middle school science that there is no work done unless an object is moved, there is no such thing as a job without a worker to do it. Workers come first, then the work is done. No workers, no jobs.

David elaborated: “In other words, immigrants indeed filled many jobs that would otherwise have gone to Americans, and this obviously had the effect of holding down wages. Given that 16% of the US population is foreign-born, that’s a pretty startling statistic. No matter how much you hem and haw about demographics or ‘jobs Americans won’t do,’ when 16% of the population snags over half the new jobs, it should shock you.”

Alas for immigration critics, this argument collapses on a simple set of statistics. Americans neither “created” nor “took” these jobs because the Americans were not here.

Graph 1 below shows the population of native-born Americans by year. From 1990 to 2000, the number rises fairly steeply by 9%. The graph flattens slightly over the next two decades. Then from 2020 to 2024, the native-born population actually drops by almost 6 million people, an unusual event in American history. Some of that decline is explained by the Pandemic and its remedies. But the number of births per American woman also dropped precipitously across these decades.

• In 1990, the overall birth rate was 16.7 births per 1,000 population for a fertility rate of 2.08 per woman, slightly below “replacement level.”
• By 2020 those numbers had fallen to 10.7 births per 1,000 population and 1.64 births per woman, far below replacement level.

Those 3.2 million new jobs could not have been “created” or “taken” by American born workers because they were not around. Wealth is created by the people who do the work.

The second graph, directly from the U.S. Census, shows a similar picture perhaps more dramatically. By 2021, “natural increase” (births to U.S. residents) had been reduced to a trivial source of population growth. Immigrants made more than five times the contribution to our population and thus to our incremental wealth. Judging from the immigrant domination of high-tech expertise, employment, and enterprise, their contribution may even be understated by this data.

Abstracting economic growth from the people who make it is a delusion that leads to anger, resentment, and ultimately poverty.