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The US' economic health is heavily tied to immigration
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It's not clear that this is the case in the modern economy, though. The Portland, Maine story in this thread is kind of an example of that - "the economy" is becoming more and more a question of resource allocation as opposed to the raw ability to extract resources. In other words, in the 1800's, there was a lot of work to be done simply in the field of basic resource extraction. The supply of labor required to dig a canal to facilitate ships which transported raw materials, etc., was a big constraint.
Now, we have a labor force participation rate in the US which is stuck around its rate in the late-1970's, when many women still didn't work at all:
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
This indicates that "the economy" as a modern system doesn't need as much raw labor input in order to sustain itself, and in fact, many people are on the outside of that system with no obvious means of ingress. It would make more economic sense in that context to have a nation of 200 million with a higher standard of living and more wealth per capita than trying to "juice" an abstract metric like GDP by pumping up the population numbers.
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There's no inherent difference between someone's impact if they live here vs. their impact if they stay in their home country or move to Australia instead.
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I'm not really sure what that means. Someone who stays in a country where per capita resource usage is lower will use fewer resources over a lifetime than someone from that environment who moves to the US or to Australia.