President Donald Trump reveled in campaign trail crowds chanting, “Build the Wall! build the wall!”
He clearly wants to more closely control the flow of immigrants coming into the U.S. Trump is now mulling over a new immigration policy to be released next week.
“The new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision,” Trump said, referring to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that blocked his travel ban. That executive order prevented travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“The importance of immigration trends are an often underappreciated” aspect of U.S. economic growth, says Hedgeye U.S. Macro analyst Christian Drake in the video above.
“If you simply think about GDP, it’s a base level growth in the number of people times the number of stuff they can make, which is productivity.” As domestic birth trends and U.S. population growth decelerate, immigration will play an increasingly important role in bolstering population growth and hence GDP growth.
Here are some facts about U.S. immigration submitted without commentary:
- 40% of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants or their children.
- Immigration has accounted for 30% of total population growth over the last three decades.
- In 2016, the number of people immigrating to the U.S. was at the 1 million mark for the second year in a row.