Not even then since the truth is(and Bush's platform explicitly requires it) that the extra people are needed to drive decent growth of the economy.
No it is not, Japan, Switzerland, South Korea.
The implicit assumption behind the economic argument for immigration appears to be something like this:
Labor x Capital = Economic Growth
So, for any given capital stock, any increase in labor (putting aside the question of its quality) will result in at least some increase in output.
This assumption is just wrong. Typically, technical studies that attempt to account for economic growth find that increases in labor and capital account for at most half and often much less of increases in output. Simon Kuznets`s survey of the growth of the West over the last two centuries concluded that increases in labor and physical capital together were responsible for less than 10 per cent of the greatest output surge in human history. The rest seems to be attributable to changes in organization—to technological progress and ideas. Or:
Economic Growth = Labor x Capital x {???}
And {???} is dominant.
The {???} factor is the explanation for the great counter-factual episode hanging like the sword of Damocles over contemporary pro-immigration polemics: the success of Japan since World War II. Despite its population of only 125 million and virtually no immigration at all, Japan has grown into the second-largest economy on earth. The Japanese seem to have been able to substitute capital for labor, in the shape of factory robots. And they have apparently steadily reconfigured their economy, concentrating on high value-added production, exporting low-skilled jobs to factories in nearby cheap-labor countries rather than importing the low-skilled labor to Japan.
It is highly significant of the false nature of the American immigration debate that, despite all the public hysteria about Japan, no attempt is ever made to look for lessons in its immigration policy. Incredibly, although his book is called The Economic Consequences of Immigration, Julian Simon simply ignores the subject altogether. Asked about it by Forbes magazine`s Jim Cook, he in effect struck out: “How Japan gets along I don`t know. But we may have to recognize that some countries are sui generi s.”
