In the wake of the attacks on Paris last week, governors across the U.S. have lined up to say that they won’t accept Syrian refugees, citing concerns that they could carry out terrorist attacks in the U.S. That’s despite the fact that so far all of the people involved in the attacks have been identified as European Union nationals, just three of the 784,000 refugees the U.S. has resettled since 9/11 has been arrested for planning terrorist activities, and tightening borders and targeting certain groups could end up playing into ISIS’s hands.
But there are other reasons to accept refugees into the United States: economic ones.
Beyond fears of terrorism, refugee opponents also tend to warn that accepting more refugees or immigrants of any kind will be a drag on the economy, by draining public resources, lowering wages, or taking jobs from the native born. But the evidence points in the other direction.
The economies of countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey that had already been accepting refugees before the European Union have been growing steadily despite — and in some cases, because of — the influx of new people. Meanwhile, Jordanians’ unemployment hasn’t increased in the areas where Syrians have resettled. A study of Germany found that if the country let in 1 million refugees over three years, the growth of its labor force would increase its GDP by 0.6 percent by 2020. Further research conducted in Denmark looking at influxes of refugees between 1991 and 2008 found that they didn’t impact the probability of being unemployed for native workers — and they even increased their wages. Another in Uganda found that while some refugees relied on humanitarian assistance, many were employed or were employers of native Ugandans themselves, while nearly all contributed to the economy through consumption. A macro look at research on refugees in Australia didn’t find a single model or study indicating that they pose a burden on the country’s economy in the long run.
This is true in the U.S. as well. A study of the Cleveland area found that while it spent about $4.8 million in services for the 598 refugees resettled in the area in 2012, those same refugees generated an estimated $48 million in economic impact as well as 640 jobs. It took about five months for the refugees to find employment, and within a few years, their labor market participation and income increased while their need for government assistance dropped.
All of these benefits hold true for immigrants generally. People who are foreign-born, including refugees, are already more likely to be in our workforce than those born here. As of last year, their labor force participation rate was 66 percent, compared to just over 62 percent for the native born, and they had a lower unemployment rate. That comes to 25.7 million people in the workforce who were born elsewhere, or 16.5 of the total, helping to grow the economy. U.S. businesses founded by immigrants employed about 560,000 people and generated $63 billion in sales in 2012. Granting more immigrants legal status could increase GDP by $700 billion, or 3.3 percent, over a decade and increase tax revenues by $2 billion a year.
As Michael Clemens, a senior fellow leading the Migration and Development Initiative at the Center for Global Development, told the Washington Post, “There’s not any credible research that I know of that in the medium and long term that refugees are anything but a hugely profitable investment.”
Some of the economic benefit depends on how much support refugees are given once they arrive. And that is where the real damage could come from governors who are saying they will block Syrian refugees. While they can’t legally do anything to keep refugees out of their states, they can refuse to spend any state resources on helping them get settled and integrated into their new communities. Meanwhile, the country will miss out on the economic benefits, as well as the moral obligation, if it doesn’t increase the number of refugees it is willing to accept from the current level of 10,000. France, the country actually hit by the attacks, has already vowed to let more refugees in, increasing its limit to 30,000.