The Truth About Immigration | An Excerpt from the 2024 Porchlight Current Events & Public Affairs Book of the Year
In a chapter about the failures of using tax incentives to lure foreign companies to our communities and how immigration spurs investment and creates jobs, Zeke Hernandez explains how "Investment done right is a human activity." The entirety of his research-based, resource-rich, and evidence-guided book The Truth About Immigration backs that statement up. The main thrust of it all is that immigrants are great for our country and our economy.
In the excerpt below, from the book's Introduction, Hernandez writes about how he became an immigration scholar and the importance of moving past viewing immigrants as either villains or victims and turning toward the evidence of how they really affect our communities and our country.
The truth is, I’m an accidental migration scholar. I never intended to dedicate my career to the topic. I came to study it via an indirect route—one that gives me a unique perspective.
After finishing my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting and working at a large technology company, I decided it was time to tackle the question I’d started asking … what creates economic prosperity? Seeking an answer, I pursued a PhD in business, where I learned theories of the economy rooted in both economics and sociology.
Months into the program, I stumbled onto a simple realization: standard models of economic growth didn’t take sufficient account of the movement of people. If they considered immigration at all, it was as a sideshow—something individuals may or may not do to improve their personal well-being. It wasn’t something fundamental to how societies operated economically.
But that didn’t match what I’d seen growing up. My formative experiences hinted that national prosperity and human mobility go together. My family’s moves exposed us to new ideas and possibilities, in contrast to the poor people I’d lived among who didn’t have the option of moving. And on a grander scale, people’s moves seemed to go hand in hand with the flow of ideas, capital, and talent so central to the models of economic growth I was learning.
It made me wonder. What if immigration was a feature and not a bug in economic models? What if it was central to everything that makes for successful societies: jobs, investment, innovation, cultural vitality, national security?
That simple idea kicked off nearly twenty years of research that continues to this day. As a professor of management at the Wharton School, I’ve led studies on how immigrants impact the investments, strategies, and performance of companies—with critical implications for immigration policy and economic growth. As I pursued my own research, I discovered remarkable work by others showing that immigration affects a host of crucial economic and social outcomes. The bottom line: immigrants are net positive contributors to everything that makes a society successful.
But that bottom line—so strongly and clearly supported by evidence—is surprisingly different from the dominant narratives in our public conversation about immigration.
Those narratives paint immigrants as either villains or victims. The villain story tells us that immigrants pose a threat—to our economy because they steal our jobs, to our way of life because they change our culture, and to our safety and the rule of law because of their criminality. The victim argument, in contrast, tells us that we have a moral obligation to help the poor huddled masses of Emma Lazarus’s poem and lift them up at our own expense if that’s what it takes.
[…]
But with all due respect for the idealism and morality of the victim argument, it’s weak. It tells people that immigration is good for immigrants, but it doesn’t tell them how much natives benefit from it as well. The villain argument is more effective, albeit factually wrong, because it makes a case for how immigration directly affects the native-born. It causes outrage and mobilizes voters.
Most books about immigration perpetuate either the victim argument or the villain argument. They either tell heroic stories about individual immigrants’ success or spin arguments about how that success comes at the expense of the host nation. Both types of books are obsessed with how immigrants enter our country—for economic, family, or humanitarian reasons, legally or illegally. But they’re short on what immigrants do for the rest of us once they’re here.
This book, in contrast, is all about how immigrants actually affect you and your community. And no matter how conservative or progressive your views tend to be, I’ll bet the results will surprise you.
Simply put, the evidence shows that without immigration we would have a “swamp society” that stagnates because it lacks inflows of novel ideas, talent, motivation, and investment. Immigration ensures that we live in a “lake society” with a healthy renewal of those critical inputs.
For years, I kept expecting someone to write the go-to book on immigration—the one with everything you’ve always wanted to know in one place. The facts and the data were plain to see. Excellent books and research articles contained pieces of the puzzle. It was just a matter of assembling them. My expectation increased as the events of the recent past—rising nationalism, a global pandemic, chaos at the border—brought arguments about immigrants to a fever pitch. Surely it was just a matter of time before someone added clarity by painting the full picture.
In an effort to steer the conversation away from the victim and villain narratives, I started presenting my findings to a range of audiences: academics, alumni associations, business leaders, congressional staffers, church groups, journalists, Rotary Clubs, and students. In talking with them, I saw how deeply uninformed most people are about immigration, no matter their politics. I also saw that they were open and even thankful to have someone set the record straight.
Presenting to those audiences made me wonder if we academics weren’t partly to blame for the public’s ignorance about such an important topic. We’re good at producing rigorous research, but we fall short when it comes to sharing it with the world. We often bury our most exciting discoveries in obscure journals and couch them in confusing jargon. Because we’re so specialized, we don’t bother to connect the dots. One of us might study the social integration of immigrants, another the relation between immigration and crime. Still others might write about the effects of immigration on jobs, innovation, or investment. A good book narrowly focused on one of those issues might come out now and again. But we rarely talk to each other across disciplines, let alone link our findings into a coherent and accessible narrative.
This book is my attempt to do just that by providing you the full story, assembling the pieces I’ve gathered in nearly twenty years of research.
I want to challenge you to get beyond the simplistic villain/victim framing. That framing is advantageous to politicians who grossly distort the impact of immigrants in order to rally their bases. In the absence of a coherent narrative backed by rigorous evidence, those political distortions work really well to garner votes. But this book will show that our society suffers tremendous costs by allowing our immigration policies to be hi- jacked by the uninformed.
Those who manipulate public opinion create fear of newcomers by telling us lies about their similarities and differences. They claim that immigrants compete economically with locals because of their similarities, such as wanting the same jobs as native workers. They also claim that foreigners fail to socially assimilate because of their differences, including their unassimilable cultures.
But you’ll see that it’s exactly the opposite! Newcomers bring enduring economic benefits because of their differences and integrate successfully to our communities because of their similarities.
From the book THE TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION by Zeke Hernandez, copyright © 2024 by Zeke Hernandez. Published with the permission of St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of the St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
