"Immigration reform now!" would be a sign I could stomach. This, not so much. Source: NYT.
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Those crafty, evil Canadians
The Donald seems very concerned about the Mexicans and the Chinese, but meanwhile he is largely ignoring the more serious threat from north of the border. Not only are the Canadians our top trading "partner" (globalism! bad!), but it seems that their primary objectives are to take in scary Muslim refugees and make us look bad and ashamed of ourselves while they're at it. Not to mention that their PM has a very French-sounding name. Something needs to be done! Canuxit!
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Partisan divergence on immigration
This is pretty amazing. The whole report, from Pew, is fascinating. Clearly Trump is tapping into a real phenomenon, but given the generational divide revealed in the report, the trends are not favorable for the xenophobic America First-ers. Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Yellow Pad Report
This week's Santa Clara Economics Department seminar was presented by Giovanni Peri, who took the Amtrak down from his home department at UC-Davis. He presented his latest paper on a topic he has been studying for some time now: the effect of immigration on native-born workers. The paper, with Mette Foged, analyzes an extraordinarily rich longitudinal data set of Danish workers.
As is the case in the United States, low-skilled workers are overrepresented among recent Danish immigrants. The most basic "Econ 101" analysis would predict that these low-skilled immigrants would compete with native-born low-skilled workers, increasing the supply and depressing the wage along the demand curve. Indeed, one of the most influential economists working on immigration effects, George Borjas, has a paper elaborating on precisely this claim, entitled "The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping."
Well I'm sure Giovanni would agree that the demand curve slopes downward, but it turns out that immigration does not necessarily drive down the wages of low-skilled native workers. In fact, as his new paper shows, low-skilled Danes actually benefited from the waves of low-skilled refugees who settled in Denmark after 1995. The reason appears to be that as low-skilled foreigners filled jobs as manual laborers, many Danes who had held these positions were upgraded to new jobs that were complementary to the manual labor and actually paid a little better. For example, a construction laborer might have been upgraded to foreman to supervise the new foreign workers. Thus the effect of the shift in supply of low-skilled workers was more than offset by a shift in the demand for low-skilled native workers. This is a recurring theme of Giovanni's work: low-skilled workers are not homogeneous, and in particular native-born and foreign-born workers are not perfect substitutes.
The beauty of the paper is in the empirics. Studying immigration effects is notoriously challenging because of the endogeneity problem– determining the direction of causation. For example, suppose we observe immigrants flooding into a city or region, and wages rising at the same time. Can we conclude that immigrants caused the wages to rise? Or is it the reverse: that a growing regional economy, with increasing labor demand and rising wages, attracted the flow of immigrants to those employment opportunities?
Giovanni's solution to this tricky problem exploits some special features of the refugee flows to Denmark and some details of Danish refugee policy, along with careful application of modern panel econometrics. A fine paper cogently and enthusiastically presented, with interesting lessons for immigration policy.
As is the case in the United States, low-skilled workers are overrepresented among recent Danish immigrants. The most basic "Econ 101" analysis would predict that these low-skilled immigrants would compete with native-born low-skilled workers, increasing the supply and depressing the wage along the demand curve. Indeed, one of the most influential economists working on immigration effects, George Borjas, has a paper elaborating on precisely this claim, entitled "The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping."
Well I'm sure Giovanni would agree that the demand curve slopes downward, but it turns out that immigration does not necessarily drive down the wages of low-skilled native workers. In fact, as his new paper shows, low-skilled Danes actually benefited from the waves of low-skilled refugees who settled in Denmark after 1995. The reason appears to be that as low-skilled foreigners filled jobs as manual laborers, many Danes who had held these positions were upgraded to new jobs that were complementary to the manual labor and actually paid a little better. For example, a construction laborer might have been upgraded to foreman to supervise the new foreign workers. Thus the effect of the shift in supply of low-skilled workers was more than offset by a shift in the demand for low-skilled native workers. This is a recurring theme of Giovanni's work: low-skilled workers are not homogeneous, and in particular native-born and foreign-born workers are not perfect substitutes.
The beauty of the paper is in the empirics. Studying immigration effects is notoriously challenging because of the endogeneity problem– determining the direction of causation. For example, suppose we observe immigrants flooding into a city or region, and wages rising at the same time. Can we conclude that immigrants caused the wages to rise? Or is it the reverse: that a growing regional economy, with increasing labor demand and rising wages, attracted the flow of immigrants to those employment opportunities?
Giovanni's solution to this tricky problem exploits some special features of the refugee flows to Denmark and some details of Danish refugee policy, along with careful application of modern panel econometrics. A fine paper cogently and enthusiastically presented, with interesting lessons for immigration policy.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
You go, Barry!
I like his strategy of piling up ambitious executive actions on climate, immigration, and... use your imagination! Daring the Republicans to sue his ass, or run on it in 2016. If the American people don't like it, they've always got Rick Perry or Chris Christie or Sarah Palin... bring it on!
Sunday, December 1, 2013
A fine quandary for left liberals
This provocative column by Paul Collier offers up an object lesson in applied ethics. Collier argues that liberals who advocate open immigration usually overlook or undervalue the adverse impact on less developed countries of self-selective migration: emigration drains away the brightest, most ambitious, hard-working, and talented individuals, harming the home country even as it helps the migrants and their families.
Let's grant for now his factual premise, which is that for small countries at least, the brain/ talent drain of emigration imposes a real net cost on those left behind. Do liberals concerned about helping the "bottom billion" then have a duty to oppose liberal immigration policies, at least with respect to immigration from smaller countries vulnerable to the brain drain? If the answer is in the affirmative, we must live with our message to the would-be migrants: You will be forced to stay where you are, for what we judge to be the good of your countryfolk.
From the perspective of distributive justice-- say a Rawlsian stance-- we may be tempted to concur with Collier that it is worth sacrificing the interests of the better-off of the poor to help the worst-off of the poor: maximin is a demanding taskmaster. I am generally down with Rawls, but why then my discomfort at Collier's conclusion? We needn't look far: Let's consider a bright and ambitious young African-American woman from the South Side of Chicago. She earns a scholarship to an Ivy League school and leaves town, never to return. So much the worse for the South Side. Should Yale or Princeton have ignored her application... or should Connecticut or New Jersey have declined to issue her an "interstate visa," in the interests of economic development on the South Side?
These Nozickian worries impose themselves whenever I think about immigration policy. Collier is a smart rhetorician, and he smartly pushes some liberal buttons: Allowing the most talented of the poor to immigrate, he writes, "appeals to economists as efficient, since the [migrants] are indeed more productive in the rich world than the poor.... It appeals to libertarians as freeing human choice from the deadening weight of bureaucratic control." He need not add: "Too bad it hurts the poorest of the poor."
Well played, Paul, but must the Rawlsian throw in the towel? Let's not forget that Rawls himself insisted on the "priority of liberty." If we require freedom of movement for a Chicagoan, why not a Ghanaian? Is that national border not "arbitrary from a moral point of view," as Rawls would put it? From behind the veil of ignorance, would we not place a very high value on guaranteeing a person the opportunity to escape from poverty, and pursue their life plan where it had a good chance of succeeding? Ultimately, Collier's argument demands an answer to the vexing problem of borders: What is so important about national sovereignty that it can trump the requirements of justice?
Let's grant for now his factual premise, which is that for small countries at least, the brain/ talent drain of emigration imposes a real net cost on those left behind. Do liberals concerned about helping the "bottom billion" then have a duty to oppose liberal immigration policies, at least with respect to immigration from smaller countries vulnerable to the brain drain? If the answer is in the affirmative, we must live with our message to the would-be migrants: You will be forced to stay where you are, for what we judge to be the good of your countryfolk.
From the perspective of distributive justice-- say a Rawlsian stance-- we may be tempted to concur with Collier that it is worth sacrificing the interests of the better-off of the poor to help the worst-off of the poor: maximin is a demanding taskmaster. I am generally down with Rawls, but why then my discomfort at Collier's conclusion? We needn't look far: Let's consider a bright and ambitious young African-American woman from the South Side of Chicago. She earns a scholarship to an Ivy League school and leaves town, never to return. So much the worse for the South Side. Should Yale or Princeton have ignored her application... or should Connecticut or New Jersey have declined to issue her an "interstate visa," in the interests of economic development on the South Side?
These Nozickian worries impose themselves whenever I think about immigration policy. Collier is a smart rhetorician, and he smartly pushes some liberal buttons: Allowing the most talented of the poor to immigrate, he writes, "appeals to economists as efficient, since the [migrants] are indeed more productive in the rich world than the poor.... It appeals to libertarians as freeing human choice from the deadening weight of bureaucratic control." He need not add: "Too bad it hurts the poorest of the poor."
Well played, Paul, but must the Rawlsian throw in the towel? Let's not forget that Rawls himself insisted on the "priority of liberty." If we require freedom of movement for a Chicagoan, why not a Ghanaian? Is that national border not "arbitrary from a moral point of view," as Rawls would put it? From behind the veil of ignorance, would we not place a very high value on guaranteeing a person the opportunity to escape from poverty, and pursue their life plan where it had a good chance of succeeding? Ultimately, Collier's argument demands an answer to the vexing problem of borders: What is so important about national sovereignty that it can trump the requirements of justice?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)