George Will Says Migrants — Not Generation Z — Will Revive America

Op-ed writer George Will, a pillar of the old-guard GOP establishment, is disgusted with Congress’s refusal to enforce more migration and used the Washington Post to air his grievances.

Migrants “could improve the nation’s dynamism, and its understanding of itself. … [but] neither political party will seize the moment for immigration reform,” wrote Will, who was born in 1941, five years before the first Baby Boomers arrived in 1946, and 24 years before Congress restarted mass immigration in 1965 after a fifty-year shutdown.

Will’s endorsement of more migration comes amid the growing public recognition of the economic damage caused by President Joe Biden’s inflow of illegal migrants and visa workers, including H-1Bs from India. The damage has exacerbated the widening optimism gap between older Americans and the younger Generation Z, of adults younger than forty.

“Went to an event tonight, talked to three different people with zoomer kids,” said a Nov. 9 tweet from Rasmussen Reports pollster Mark Pitchell. “They’re demoralized.”

“My friend group from high school, all graduated, great degrees from great schools,” recent graduate Nalin Haley told UnHerd, adding:

It’s been a year and a half, and not one of them has a job — not one. So I’m angry at that, because I’m having to try and help my friends get jobs when their parents got jobs immediately — not just after graduating college, but out of high school.

“I see Boomers are trying to make their counter-argument” towards younger Americans, said Rich Baris, director at Big Data Poll, and the chairman of the National Association of Independent Pollsters. He continued:

It’s pretty damned insulting to listen to people in older generations act as if these younger generations have all the options and opportunities they did. They do not. Boomers made sure of it. It’s even more insulting to see fools quote “Locke” in some ridiculous attempt to threaten them for not submitting to their way of thinking.

“In 10 years, there won’t even be an argument, and the younger generations will make sure history remembers you as the generation who inherited it all, and left nothing to be inherited,” Baris wrote.

Older Americans gained housing values and stock-market wealth from the huge technological advances since the 1940s, and from the vast economic stimulus provided by Congress’s policy of stimulating the economy with vast waves of legal and illegal migrants.

But young Americans have seen their wages flatline, their debts grow, and their housing costs spike amid the Boomers’ imported population of roughly 50 million legalized, quasi-legal, or illegal migrants.

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Yet columnist Will, aged 84, is all-in for more migration, saying migrants can rejuvenate the economy by forcing Americans out of low-wage jobs:

Migrants can also act as servants to free up better-educated Americans for commerce and possible childbirth, says Will, who was 29 when migrants were just 5 percent of the population in 1970

Regarding America’s sagging birth rate, research finds that low-skill immigrants (nannies, housekeepers, meal-preparers) “substantially” reduce hesitation about having children.

The flood of migrants — presumably including clan migrants from Somalia, casteist migrants from India, and Jew-hating Muslims from Syria — can replace complacent Americans because it will “improve the nation’s dynamism, and its understanding of itself,” said Will, who has an estimated net worth of $4 million and who voted for Vice President Kalama harris in 2024.

The main danger, Will argues, is that economic growth might be somewhat curbed by reduced migration:

Three economists writing for the American Enterprise Institute have estimated that net U.S. migration might be negative this year — for the first time in history — by more than 200,000. Most economists think the question is not whether but how much this will subtract from economic growth.

Will was referring to a report from a business-backed advocacy center, which concluded that “We find that the large drop in net migration in 2025 compared with 2024 will result in significantly slower labor force growth, slower employment growth, and a decrease in GDP growth of around 0.3–0.4 percentage points.”

Mass migration is good for the stock market, but less migration is better for per-capita wealth, according to an investor-funded study described by Breitbart News in October.

“At medium and low immigration levels, labor-based [skilled professional] immigration, characterized by fewer but more skilled population, produces higher GDP [Gross Domestic Product] per capita [emphasis added] growth,” compared to mass inflow of migrants and their extended families, says the September study published by Springer, titled “Demographic and Economic Implications of Alternative U.S. Immigration Policies.”

“That should be a no-brainer because we know we could annex Mexico and our GDP would be enormously higher, but our per capita income would drop,” Rosemary Jenks, cofounder of the Immigration Accountability Project, told Breitbart News. “That’s just ‘Duh!’”

The study is useful because “you have the advocates [for mass migration] themselves saying immigration is not a good deal for the average American,” Stephen Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. “It may be good for Wall Street, it’s not good for Main Street, ” he added.

The study matches reality in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, where the estimated quality of life is declining and productivity is stalling because elites are importing consumers, renters, and workers to grow the nation’s real-estate prices and stock values.

In contrast, President Trump and his deputies are pushing for greater productivity and automation instead of the mass migration favored by Will, progressives, and investors.

We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” Trump told Breitbart News in August, adding:

We don’t have enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient … we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically.

The promise of cheap labor is ” a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vice President JD Vance told an audience of Silicon Valley investors in May. He added:

And whether we’re offshoring factories to cheap labor economies, or importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies. And I’d say that if you look in nearly every country, from Canada to the UK that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you’ve seen productivity stagnate. That’s not a total happenstance. I think that the connection is very direct.

“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a 2024 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 of living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” Fink added.