Larry Fink: Migration Is Bad for Productivity and Wealth

Wall Street’s most influential mega-investor says migration makes it difficult for developed countries to embrace the high-tech, productivity-boosting technologies that will raise the income of ordinary people.

“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:

That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …

If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.

In contrast, countries with expanding populations need to focus on basic issues of education and the “rule of law,” said Fink, who oversees $10 trillion worth of investments worldwide:

So for those countries that have rising populations, the answer will be education … [and] for those countries that do not have a foundation of rule of law, or education, that’s where the [economic] divide is going to get more and more extreme.

“This is a guy who tried very hard to profit off mass migration … and then realized it backfired and now he’s regretting his choices,” said Rosemary Jenks, cofounder of the Immigration Accountability Project.

“The United States has a history of proving that you can increase productivity and increase per capita GDP with low immigration –we did that all through the 1950s….. the World War II era until the mid-1960s,” Jenks said. Since the 1960s, “what we have also proven is that mass immigration is a detriment … it reduces per capita GDP, it reduces quality of life, it reduces inequality,” Jenks added.

Throughout history, labor shortages have bumped up wages, boosted innovation, and reduced economic divides.

The economic damage caused by immigration is increasingly recognized in Washington, Jenks said:

Obviously not by the Chamber of Commerce — they’re still crying about a labor shortage even though every single economic data point says not —  but an increasing number of Republicans recognize that mass migration is not the answer. I think Democrats realize that mass migration is not the answer for our economy — [but] I think they have different reasons for wanting it … [so] I don’t want to give Fink any credit for anything.

In recent months, U.S. and foreign economists, policymakers, and politicians have been admitting that mass migration has fueled inflation, housing prices, and interest rates.

Worse, economists admit it shrinks CEOs’ willingness to pay for the vital growth in the automation and productivity that allows voters to earn more wages by doing more work each day.

Yet President Joe Biden, age 81, is still championing the pro-migration policy touted by investors — who want more low-wage workers, consumers, and renters — and by government progressives.

“One of the reasons why our economy is growing is because of you and many others. Why? Because we welcome immigrants,” Biden said on April 30, according to a report by a pool reporter. He continued:

Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants! …Immigrants are what makes us strong. Not a joke. That’s not hyperbole, because we have an influx of workers who want to be here and just contribute.

Biden’s economic strategy of Extraction Migration serves his coalition well — it bumps up stock prices for many investors and imports many poor dependents for federal, state, and local governments.

In contrast, President Donald Trump has promised to end illegal migration. But he has not discussed how to revamp legal migration to raise innovation and incomes for white-collar and blue-collar voters, despite the potential for an election-day reward.

“The paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing,” Fink told the World Economic Forum meeting. “The social problems that [we] will have in substituting humans [work] for machines work] is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations.”

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.

The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.

The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.

The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.

The colonialism-like policy has damaged small nations, and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.