Immigration

Economist Tarnell Brown explains.

Ilya Somin | 12.23.2025 4:46 PM

In an insightful recent post, economist Tarnell Brown explains why the economic effects of immigration restrictions are similar to those of racial discrimination and segregation. He builds on Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker's famous theory of discrimination and South African economist W.H. Hutt's classic critique of apartheid, The Economics of the Colour Bar:

Racism and immigration restrictions are often sold as hard-headed realism: protecting "our" jobs, "our" communities, "our" way of life. The sales pitch leans on a simple story—exclude the "wrong" people and the "right" people will prosper. Gary Becker and William Hutt both spent careers dismantling that story, and the empirical record has been quietly backing them up ever since. Once you translate prejudice into costs, discrimination looks less like realism and more like an especially expensive luxury good.

As Brown explains, Becker and Hutt's insights explain that racial discrimination and segregation are economically harmful because they force employers to forego more productive workers from the disfavored group in favor of less productive ones from the dominant group. That obviously harms the excluded group. But it also lowers economic growth and innovation, ultimately harming even most members of the more privileged group. Immigration restrictions have much the same effects:

If Becker's discriminator is willing to pay more for the same output, and Hutt's white unionist is willing to shrink the industry........

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