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Newsflash: What's good for immigration is good for America
Across the industrialized world, governments have dreamed up various schemes for reinvigorating deflated economies, from blood-sucking austerity budgets to paying for scrap metal. Nowhere is the desperation more evident than in the rightward shift of immigration policy toward a convulsive xenophobic backlash. Yet the OECD, a think tank that monitors rich industrialized nations says in its annual immigration outlook report that part of the solution to the economic crisis is more, not less, immigration.
Progressive economists agree that immigrants' long-term contributions to economic productivity on balance far outweigh the feared disruptions associated with migration. More importantly, in an interconnected world, the transnational movement of people is simply an inevitability: overall, according to OECD, international immigration has accounted for roughly 40 percent of recent employment growth in OECD countries.
But neither the potential wealth generated by labor migration, nor the fact that we couldn't stop it even if we tried, has deterred xenophobic sentiment in rich countries.