I had another dream, I had another life
So remember that wall Trump keeps promising? Seventy percent of it was completed by previous administrations. Which is to say that immigration idiocy didn’t suddenly begin in 2016. When it comes to deportations, the Trump administration hasn’t reached the heights of the Obama administration. According to Axios, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported more immigrants … Read more
From a new study: In a recent paper (Bratsberg et al. 2019), we ask what the impact is of such a large immigration-induced labour-supply shock on occupational wages, labour costs, and the industry mix of the economy. The impact of immigration on labour markets has received substantial attention over the last decades. However, most studies … Read more
From a recent NBER Digest: In Skill of Immigrants and Vote of the Natives: Immigration and Nationalism in European Elections 2007-16 (NBER Working Paper No. 25077), Simone Moriconi, Giovanni Peri, and Riccardo Turati explore the relationship between immigration and European elections. They develop an index of “nationalistic” attitudes of political parties to measure the shift … Read more
According to Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, Cities aren’t full of poor people because cities make people poor, but because cities attract poor people with the prospect of improving their lot in life. The poverty rate among recent arrivals to big cities is higher than the poverty rate of long-term residents, which suggests that, over time, … Read more
The link between political ignorance, immigration policy preferences, and support for redistribution are well-established. I’ve shared this portion from my BYU Studies Quarterly article before, but it’s worth repeating: A particularly interesting aspect of public attitudes toward immigration is that of political ignorance. Multiple studies have shown that political ignorance is rampant among average voters, and this holds true when it comes … Read more
Back when I published my immigration article in BYU Studies Quarterly, I was asked to write a condensed version for Deseret News as part of their “Faith & Thought” column. It was initially meant to provide more publicity for the latest issue of the journal. However, the article apparently ran into a few hiccups along … Read more
The following is from my article in the latest BYU Studies Quarterly: Another objection [to immigration] is what is known as the “epidemiological case,” which argues that immigrants may bring with them foreign values that undermine the culture and institutions of the host country. In essence, immigrants transmit to rich countries those elements that make their … Read more
Economist Jonathan Portes has an excellent summary of the research on immigration’s effects in the UK: Employment: “To the considerable surprise of many economists, including me, there is now a clear consensus that even in the short-term migration does not appear to have had a negative impact on the employment outcomes of UK natives. Studies … Read more
From a recent job market paper: In this paper, I exploit variation in the number of immigrants received by US cities between 1910 and 1930 to study the political and economic consequences of immigration. Using a leave-out version of the shift-share instrument (Card, 2001), I show that immigration had a positive and significant effect on … Read more
A new working paper provides some interesting results about the interplay between immigration and minimum wage laws: Our first empirical strategy exploits the non-linearity of the minimum wage across U.S. States to investigate the role played by the minimum wage in shaping the impact of immigration on the wages and employment of competing native workers. … Read more