Tweet [1]
… is from page 209 of GMU Econ alums Alex Nowrasteh’s and Benjamin Powell’s superb 2021 book, Wretched Refuse? [2] (footnotes deleted; links added; emphasis added):
Across the world today, support for welfare, redistribution, and government provision of public goods is inversely correlated with the share of the population that is foreign born and diverse [3]. Besides allowing for mass unionization, closing the border also allowed the government to create a large welfare state while avoiding a powerful political counterargument: Immigrants are going to come here to take advantage of these benefits. Consequently, American progressives and other supporters of a large welfare state were near-uniformly against continuing the system of open immigration [4].