Is American Economic Freedom Determined by Ancestry, Ethnicity, and Immigrant Countries of Origin?

Alex NowrastehThe best potential counter argument against vastly expanding legal immigration is that immigrants might bring the less-efficient economic institutions, political systems, or cultural mores of their homelands with them to the United States. Ultimately, the United States and other rich countries are prosperous because of our economic and politicalinstitutions with some variation potentially explained by culture.Most immigrants come from poorer countries with worse economic institutions, especially as measured by theEconomic Freedom of the World Index. My co-author Benjamin Powell and I investigated whether immigrants worsened domestic economic institutions in our new bookWretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions,and we found it either to be unsupported by the evidence or that the evidence suggests that more immigration can sometimes increase economic freedom and improve institutions. There ’s not much worry that immigrants would kill the institutional goose that the lays golden eggs of economic growth.Some supporters of the so-calleddeep rootshypothesis, that events many thousands of years ago affected culture, genes, or both in such a way that our economic outcomes were basically determined long ago, are also worried that immigrants could undermine our institutions. Proponents of this view argue that it ’s impossible for immigrants tonotbring support for the bad economic institutions of their ancestral homelands with them. Althoug...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs