America's Failed Immigration Strategy Leads To Labor Force Destruction

A great post from Jason Bayz on how immigration policy has derailed the U.S. economy. It begins with a CIA report arguing that America would surpass Japan and Europe due to importing more foreign workers to up GDP:

Europe and Japan fail to manage their demographic challenges. European and Japanese populations are aging rapidly, requiring more than 110 million new workers by 2015 to maintain current dependency ratios between the working population and retirees. For these countries, immigration is a controversial means of meeting these labor force requirements. Conflicts over the social contract or immigration policies in major European states could dampen economic growth. Japan faces an even more serious labor force shortage and its strategies for responding— enticing overseas Japanese to return, broadening the opportunities for women, and increasing investments elsewhere in Asia— may prove inadequate. If growth in Europe and Japan falters, the economic burden on the US economy would increase, weakening the overall global outlook.

This is the idea sold by pro-immigration political and business interests.

At the opposite side is the Japanese model of relying on automation, while having little to no immigration.

The data shows that on a per capita basis, Europe, Japan and the U.S. have seen their economies grow at roughly the same rates over the past couple of decades. The impact from immigration was supposed to give the United States an edge, but instead all it did was make it possible for more people to go on welfare, both immigrants and natives.

The pictures tell the story. Remember when looking at these that Japan is supposed to be the demographic disaster and America is supposed to be the economic miracle, relatively speaking. The labor force participation shows the exact opposite.

The assumption was that a worker is a worker is a worker, Mexican high school dropouts would be just as productive as the median American worker and pay the same amount of taxes and use the same amount of welfare. Yet even by their own standards our elites have failed.

Particularly if one considers the lowest income earners:

Figure 3: Growth, real average income, for bottom 90%

Index, 1950=100 (log scale)