Open the Doors
15 April 2006
Editor, The Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Editor:
Thomas Sowell asks rhetorically, "If more immigrants are a good thing, where do we stop - and why? Why not fling the doors open to all the people who want to immigrate here from Haiti or Cuba or anywhere else?" ("...and 'solutions': Part IV," April 15).
Indeed, why not? America had an open-door policy until the 1920s. Economists Cecil Bohanon and T. Norman Van Cott* find that this open immigration contributed mightily to America's impressive economic growth during the 19th century. Because immigrants then were a larger proportion of the U.S. population than they are today - and because there was then less social and economic infrastructure per capita than there is today** - it's implausible that more open immigration today will damage America's economy.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
* http://web.bsu.edu/cob/econ/research/papers/bohanon2005ir.pdf
** http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4206
Editor, The Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Editor:
Thomas Sowell asks rhetorically, "If more immigrants are a good thing, where do we stop - and why? Why not fling the doors open to all the people who want to immigrate here from Haiti or Cuba or anywhere else?" ("...and 'solutions': Part IV," April 15).
Indeed, why not? America had an open-door policy until the 1920s. Economists Cecil Bohanon and T. Norman Van Cott* find that this open immigration contributed mightily to America's impressive economic growth during the 19th century. Because immigrants then were a larger proportion of the U.S. population than they are today - and because there was then less social and economic infrastructure per capita than there is today** - it's implausible that more open immigration today will damage America's economy.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
* http://web.bsu.edu/cob/econ/research/papers/bohanon2005ir.pdf
** http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4206
Posted by Don Boudreaux on
Saturday January 20, 2007 at 10:04am