Dec 16, 2018 3 min read

Cruel.

Licentious.

Murderers.

“Drunken, dirty, indolent and riotous, so as to be the objects of dislike and fear to all…”

Those were some of the things that were said about Irish immigrants to the United States in the 1800s. Germans came in for similar opprobrium, as did Italians, Chinese, and the Africans who were brought here in chains. While we are steadily becoming more and more tolerant, xenophobic fear is something some Americans have never been able to entirely shake off.

It was the Chinese and the Irish then. It’s Mexicans and Middle Easterners now.

The notion that the latest group of despised immigrants is bringing mayhem and contagion may be as old as the United States itself, but a study published earlier this month by The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, forcefully punctures this mythology. The Lancet found that migrants do not damage public health, do not strain public services and, in fact, provide a boost to economies.

“Populist discourse demonizes the very same individuals who uphold economies and bolster social care and health services,” said Ibrahim Abubakar, who chaired the commission that produced the report. “Questioning the deservingness of migrants for health care on the basis of inaccurate beliefs supports practices of exclusion, harming the health of individuals, our society and our economies.”

Abubakar went on to call migration “the defining issue of our time. How the world addresses human mobility will determine public health and social cohesion for decades ahead.”

The Lancet study found that, overall, international migration has held relatively steady over the last three decades, with 2.9 percent of the planet’s population being classified as international migrants in 1990, with the number increasing to only 3.4 percent in 2017. While noting that the number of international migrants in high-income, developed countries has increased from 7.6 percent to 13.4 percent in the same span, the study pointed out that the majority of these migrants are not asylum seekers or refugees but laborers or students.

Moreover, the study indicated that for each 1 percent increase in the number of migrants within a community, the gross domestic product per person increases by 2 percent. Rather than being an economic drain, migrants are a source of economic strength.

Do they bring diseases with them when they arrive? No. The Lancet looked at mortality estimates on a little more than 15 million migrants from 92 countries and determined that international migrants had lower rates of death compared to their native-born counterparts in a host of categories, including respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and mental and behavioral disorders. Rather than bringing pestilence, many new arrivals in high-income nations help the native-born stay healthy by working in the health care industry. According to the study, “migrants are more likely to bolster services by providing medical care, teaching children, caring for older people, and supporting understaffed services.”

Hot-button issues rarely get much hotter than immigration. But the debate should be grounded in facts, not hysteria and scaremongering.