“**How to moderate on immigration without destroying the country or throwing immigrants under the bus**
I’m an abundance liberal, so I look at the problem of immigration and see a lot of similarities to other pro-growth problems like housing development: concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. With housing, the costs are construction, congestion, and uncertainty. With immigration, the costs are both spatially and temporally concentrated.
Abundance liberalism is about creating pro-growth constituencies. What better way to do this than to take part of the tax benefit that immigrants provide and provide bonus federal dollars to places that take immigrants? This would insure localities against the short-term costs of new entrants. Crazy idea, right?
Actually, no; this would just be expanding an already-existing program run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement that provides grants to offset resettlement costs over a very limited period of time while immigrants achieve self-sufficiency. In November 2023, [139 mayors, both Republicans and Democrats, asked the Biden administration to do exactly this](https://knowlegis.cq.com/file/download/1vF9R1CHj6P/Mayors+Letter+to+Congress+on+Security+Supplemental+110723.docx.pdf/).”
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“**How to moderate on immigration without destroying the country or throwing immigrants under the bus**
I’m an abundance liberal, so I look at the problem of immigration and see a lot of similarities to other pro-growth problems like housing development: concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. With housing, the costs are construction, congestion, and uncertainty. With immigration, the costs are both spatially and temporally concentrated.
First, while [*mountains*](https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/11/immigration-worker-wages-myth-jobs/680523/) of evidence demonstrates the economic benefits of immigration, there are real, unavoidable fiscal costs associated with bringing in new people. Immigrants tend to be younger, but that includes kids, who are the biggest fiscal burden on local communities (more than [$15,000 per pupil in fiscal year 2022](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/04/public-school-spending.html)). Further, if the current work authorization policy remains, some new entrants will go six months without being able to legally work.
Abundance liberalism is about creating pro-growth constituencies. What better way to do this than to take part of the tax benefit that immigrants provide and provide bonus federal dollars to places that take immigrants? This would insure localities against the short-term costs of new entrants. Crazy idea, right?
Actually, no; this would just be expanding an already-existing program run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement that provides grants to offset resettlement costs over a very limited period of time while immigrants achieve self-sufficiency. In November 2023, [139 mayors, both Republicans and Democrats, asked the Biden administration to do exactly this](https://knowlegis.cq.com/file/download/1vF9R1CHj6P/Mayors+Letter+to+Congress+on+Security+Supplemental+110723.docx.pdf/).”