This country’s most intense debate in fifty years is happening today about immigration and our economy. National-security concerns are one element of this debate, but the anxiety over immigration from a broader set of countries beyond the Middle East is almost entirely economic: with wages stagnant until last year, and millions of jobs being lost to globalization and automation, Americans have asked how many immigrants we should continue to admit rather than taking better care of the people already here.
We often discuss this as a tradeoff between our melting-pot ideals and our pocketbooks, and speculate on how our economy will absorb different levels of immigration over the coming decades. But why speculate? 353 U.S. cities with populations of immigrants that vary from 1% of the population in Huntington, West Virginia, to 40% in Miami can tell us what the economic impact of immigration has already been.
And it turns out there is no tradeoff: taking the simplest, most sensitive economic indicator of household wealth as the value of the house itself, immigration is correlated with rising rather than falling wealth levels. U.S. Census Bureau data on immigration and home prices show that for the 20 metropolitan areas with the highest home-price appreciation from 2012 to 2015, immigrants constituted nearly 20% of the population. For the 20 metropolitan areas with the lowest home-price growth, immigrants constituted about 5% of the population.