Immigrants and Idiots

A couple days ago, I was debating with one of those no-nothing anti-immigrant morons, when he came up with what he imagined was an utterly devastating reply to the facts I presented showing that immigrants are, despite his fevered imaginings to the contrary, not a detriment to society.

His so-called argument was that, since immigrants send the money they make home to their families in whatever country they come from, they're stealing it from the American economy, and that's bad.

Let's pause a moment while you consider the sheer mindlessness inherent in the argument presented. What's that? Yes, you, in the back of the class. You don't understand why I say the argument is mindless? Well, let's review some basic economics then, shall we?

The American dollar, like most other national currencies, is what we call a fiat currency. What this means is that the dollar has value only because the U.S. government says it has value.

I'll repeat that, because it is very important to understand. The U.S. Dollar has value only because the U.S. government says it has value.

So what does this have to do with the argument above? It's really quite simple.

Unlike a representative currency, which is backed by something of real value (gold, silver, crude oil, diamonds, whatever), a fiat currency is valuable only in relation to the country it represents. In addition, a fiat currency is not removing something of real value from the treasury of the country it was printed in, because there is nothing of real value backing it. 

So let's take our hypothetical immigrant, who is working his tuchis off in America, saving his money, and sending it home to his family. What is he actually sending home? Pieces of paper that the U.S. government says have a certain value. But -- and this is important to remember -- it is only in relation to the U.S. economy that those pieces of paper have the value promised by the U.S. government. 

In other words, those pieces of paper are worthless anywhere else in the world, until the bearer chooses to exchange them for his own government's fiat currency. When those pieces of paper are exchanged, they begin their journey back to America, whether as a part of a string of exchanges, or as the currency used in purchase of American goods. Either way, it is only when those pieces of paper are used in an economic exchange that returns them to America that they are of any value at all. 

The only way you could believe that an immigrant sending his savings overseas is somehow stealing dollars from the American economy, is if you believe that the dollars have intrinsic value, rather than merely being glorified IOUs with nothing but trust in the government to support them AND you believe that the immigrant does not have the right to engage in economic exchanges on his own behalf. Even those beliefs are wrong, but they're not the point of this post. If you want a discussion of them at a later time, we can go into them, but the point I'm making is that as long as the currency in question is a fiat currency, it has no value except in relation to the economy of the nation in which it was printed, and therefore can not be"stolen" from the economy merely by being temporarily in another nation.