Immigration and Population Growth Essay Example for Free

Immigration and Population Growth Essay Immigration is when someone or people move to a country from another country. It can be due to various purposes like a student going for study, getting married to a national of another country or to take up an employment. Immigration has been known to cause population growth. Population growth is the quantifiable change of population in an area. Immigration can be defined into two that of high skilled personnel and that of low skilled personnel. Economic impacts of immigration depend on the skills of immigration. The impacts are felt by both the country from which the people are moving from and the country they are going to. Negative Impacts Immigration and population growth causes scarcity of resources. Economics standard definition is the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends. Immigration and population growth makes the task more difficult because it create more competing ends hence bad economic outcome. In other terms if there are more people living in the same land with the same amount of resources then there will be fewer resources and land available per person thus less wealth. There is also overburdening on the infrastructure talk of roads, social amenities like water, hospital beds and others. They existing facilities cannot cope with the increasing population growth before we put into consideration immigration (Holzer, 2005). Immigration and population growth cause wages decrease, this is due to increased labor supply. An increase in labor supply relative to capital supply and supply of natural resources will in a free labor market cause wages to fall. Unemployment is the other major impact of immigration; the local residents miss jobs to the immigrants who come to their country. These create more risk of unemployment. Shortage of affordable housing, this may lead to people living from hand to mouth due to increased cost of living. It in turn reduces chances of investments. Most of the income goes to up keep hence little savings and investment. Environmental degradation due to the huge population growth results to massive loss of biodiversity and wide spread degradation of the landscape. This leads to salinity of t he soil and topsoil erosion this have adverse effects on the productivity of the nation. All these have impacts on the economy in that no people can work while hungry and food is a key element of economic development. If reduced it causes a decline in the work output hence on income of a nation (Nilsson, 2005). Positive Impacts Immigration and population growth produce increased and cheap labor. Many business and public service make use of the skills and hard work of immigrants. Immigrants may never mind the amount of work they do and money they are being paid. This increases the productivity of a county in that they work for more hours and do the kind of jobs the normal civilians of a nation may not be willing to take. This increased productivity improves the income levels of a country hence the living standards are increased. The immigrants are paid declined wages due to saturation of laborers in the market hence the cost of production is low this leads to increased profit to the industries hence to the nation. Immigration increases the economy in terms of labor demand, thus creating new vacancies. Immigration improves the way of life of the residents of the country they move to; they carry out duties that are a bother to the residents like dish washing, cooking, laundry work and many more. Immigration of high skilled personnel fills the labor and skills shortages. These increase the productivity of a country. The skills also improve existing skills and train others hence labor force of a country and reduced threat of immigration (Rowthorn, 2004). Conclusion In conclusion immigration and population growth are interrelated and are beneficial though they also have negative impacts.The benefits depends on the type of skill immigrating. References: Holzer, H. J. , (2005): Economic Impacts of Immigration. Retrieved on 6th Jan, 2009 from: http://www. urban. org/UploadedPDF/900908_Holzer_111605. pdf Nilsson, T. , (2005): Negative economic impacts of immigration and population growth. Retrieved on 6th Jan, 2009 from: http://www. pc. gov. au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/9572/sub009. pdf Rowthorn, R. , (2004): The Economic Impact of Immigration. Retrieved on 6th Jan, 2009 from: http://www. civitas. org. uk/pdf/Rowthorn_Immigration. pdf