Topic > The role of immigration in the US economy

WhatsApp. eBay. Tesla. Google. These are just a few of the multi-billion dollar companies. Each of these is very different and operates in different sectors, from automobiles to social networks. However, the one thing they have in common is that all of these successful companies, along with thousands of others, were founded and rest on the backbone of immigrants. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayThe Immigration Report, released in 2016 in the United States of America, concluded that from 1990 to 2010, immigrants collectively contributed net benefits close to $50 billion per year. In 2016, nearly $3 trillion was added to the U.S. economy by the 26 million foreigners in the country. Yet despite the benefits being so great, immigration is still a topic with widely contrasting perspectives; both within a country and internationally. The United States of America is undoubtedly the best example of how crucial immigrants are to a country's economy, considering how it has the largest immigrant population (around 13.5% of the total population in 2015). They have the highest nominal GDP in the world ($19,417.144 billion), with companies like WhatsApp and eBay contributing greatly. This is a similar case with countries like the UK, Canada and Italy, which have relatively large populations of foreigners, whose GDPs all fall in the top 10. Why does this happen? What do immigrants who allow it bring and/or do? First, immigrants tend to enter a country at a relatively young age and do not make extensive use of public pensions or health care. In Italy almost 80% of immigrants are of working age and those who are retired represent less than 0.65%. It is a similar case in the UK. European migrants are said to pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, valued at a surplus of around $2 billion a year. Immigration increases the young population, prevents a contraction in the number of workers and an imbalance that shifts towards ageing. population. In January 2017, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that for the next decade there would be economic growth of 2 percent annually in the United States, and without the addition of immigrants to the workforce, this number would drop to as low as 0.5 percent. %. Between the 1950s and 1960s, population growth was more than double that of the last decade and the economy grew enormously. In Europe, immigrants have accounted for almost 70% of the increase in the workforce over the past decade, and these immigrants contribute significantly to the flexibility of the labor market. In direct contrast is Japan, with its extremely low immigration rate and immigrant population. They suffer from the increasing aging of the population, the highest percentage of people over 65 in the world. An increasing aging population means increased spending on healthcare, pensions, benefits, and so on, and fewer people working to boost the country's GDP. Japan's government has also tried monetary and fiscal policies to stimulate economic growth, but so far it has been unsuccessful. When we talk about increasing the workforce, one of the most obvious and common questions is what this would mean for the existing population. Does this increased competition mean fewer jobs for locals? In theory yes. Immigrants tend to work for lower wages than locals, as many of them are relatively unskilled and unemployed.