The Economic Arguments Used Against Immigrants, and Why They’re All Wrong

Undocumented populations don’t burden society — if anything, they keep it running

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

I distinctly remember my first economics course. It was held in a large lecture hall in the business building of my university, one of the nicer facilities on campus. Around 50 students would groggily shuffle into the room wearing sweatpants and baseball caps, some sporting hangovers under their eyes and others wearing mosaics of pizza stains and cheap Chinese food on their school T-shirts.

My professor was not an organized man. His lectures more resembled ramblings than a lesson plan. Every few sentences he would suddenly begin shouting a reference to a sitcom from the ’60s at the top of his lungs to momentarily jolt his bored audience back into reality. He zipped through examples like they were nothing, one of them being a supply-and-demand curve regarding labor and wages.

A simple supply-and-demand graph that can be found in any introductory economics course.

“Labor works the same way as any other commodity. What happens if there are fewer workers suddenly?”