Immigration and the Welfare State

Jason Riley has a nice column in today’s WSJ about the interaction between welfare and immigration policies. He correctly notes that immigrants to the U.S. do not come mainly for the welfare benefits, but he worries this could change as welfare policies, like Obamacare, expand.

I share Riley’s opposition to Obamacare, as well as his support for legal immigration. My one disagreement is his endorsement of the Friedman view on the relation between the welfare state and immigration:

In countries such as France, Italy and the Netherlands, excessively generous public benefits have lured poor migrants who tend to be heavy users of welfare and less likely than natives to join the work force. Milton Friedman famously remarked, “you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” There is a tipping point, even if the U.S. has yet to reach it.

Riley and Friedman may be right, but my hunch is that they have the sequencing backwards: we should liberalize immigration because it will restrain the welfare state. The European examples that Riley cites might seem to argue against this view, but these countries still restrict immigration significantly.  My claim is that major expansions in legal immigration would cause substantially diminished support for generous welfare spending.

Categories: My Blog

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under My Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.