Why Immigration Matters for Global Economies

Our Global Chief Economist explains what stricter immigration policy in key markets around the world could mean for economic growth and inflation.

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Seth Carpenter: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter Morgan Stanley's Global Chief Economist. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I'll discuss a key driver of the global economy, migration.

It's Monday, August 19th at 10am in New York.

Migration has always been an important feature of the global economy.

Not surprisingly, migrants typically move from lower income countries to higher income countries and for more than 50 years, it has added something like three-tenths of a percent per year to the growth of high-income economies. But in recent years, migration trends have been hit by a couple of major events.

One was COVID. International travel restrictions during the pandemic slowed, or stopped, migration for a while. Despite a strong rebound over the past two years, many economies still have not fully recovered to pre-COVID migration trends. Another is geopolitical unrest. The Ukrainian refugee crisis, for example, is the largest population displacement in Europe since WWII with increasingly global repercussions.

But how does immigration affect economies? One way that I frame the discussion is that immigration can boost both aggregate supply and aggregate demand. It's likely some of each -- and the relative importance of those two affects how inflationary or disinflationary the phenomenon is.

In 2023, with a very large influx of immigrants into the US labor market, the economy was able to grow rapidly while still seeing inflation fall. The supply effect dominated the demand effect. In Australia, by contrast, with more of the immigrants in school or otherwise not in the labor market, prices -- especially for housing -- have gone up because demand was relatively more important.

But some of the effects will only play out over time. Across many developed market economies, economic activity has risen less than population, meaning that measured productivity is lower. But we think that is just a lagged effect of the response of capital investment to the rise in labor. Over a longer time horizon, immigration can also offset demographic declines. Since 2021 population growth in many high-income economies has turned negative, if you exclude immigrants. Sustaining economic growth and managing government debt loads are made much more difficult with an aging, and then declining population, as a baseline.

We assume that immigration will revert to pre-COVID trends in 2024 and [20]25 for most economies. This delta is largest for the economies with the highest immigration rates, like Canada or Australia; but for other economies, policies, cultural norms, those will determine the path for immigration.

The key, however, is that immigration can be a critical component of demographic trends. In the US, the best estimate of net immigration was about 3.3 million people in 2023, and we assume it will taper from there to something closer to 2.5 million in 2025. That addition to the labor market created what Fed Chair Powell called “a bigger, but not tighter economy.”

For people following the economy in real time, the extra availability of labor is also why we have argued that the rise in the unemployment rate over the past year or so is not the harbinger of recession that it has been in past cycles.

Now, looking ahead, one key risk to our forecasts -- well everywhere around the world -- would be an abrupt tightening in immigration policy that causes the flow of workers to fall quickly or even end. Such a scenario would imply a much sharper economic slowdown and possibly higher inflation in the economies where the supply boost has dominated. That's yet another reason why elections and government policy remain key to the economic outlook.

Well, thanks for listening. And if you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or a colleague today.