I had another dream, I had another life
Yes, this is another immigration post. A 2017 article in the St. Louis Fed’s The Regional Economist looks at the impact immigration has on U.S. labor markets. The researchers drew on “state-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010 for wages and immigration figures…For wages, we used inflation-adjusted pretax … Read more
According to The New York Times, President Trump on Wednesday began a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration, ordering the immediate construction of a border wall with Mexico and aggressive efforts to find and deport unauthorized immigrants. He planned additional actions to cut back on legal immigration, including barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States. … Read more
The pro-institution case for increased immigration continues to get better. A new working paper by Benjamin Powell and others looks to Israel as a natural experiment. From the abstract: The relaxation of emigration restrictions in the Soviet Union and the State’s subsequent collapse led to a large exogenous shock to Israel’s immigrant flows because Israel allows … Read more
The National Academy of Sciences released a new report in September that “provides a comprehensive assessment of economic and demographic trends of U.S. immigration over the past 20 years, its impact on the labor market and wages of native-born workers, and its fiscal impact at the national, state, and local levels.” Here are the highlights from the … Read more
This is part of the DR Book Collection. Immigration has been getting quite a bit of attention in the news and here at Difficult Run lately. With political debates shifting from the typical Right/Left to Open/Close, tackling the economic literature on immigration became a priority to me. Hence, my recent completion of the Oxford-published The … Read more
With Donald Trump making waves (again) via his immigration speech last week, I thought I’d highlight an NBER paper from last year on immigration’s impact on local economies. The abstract reads: Most research on the effects of immigration focuses on the effects of immigrants as adding to the supply of labor. By contrast, this paper studies … Read more
The graph above from researchers Chris Lawton and Robert Ackrill at The Conversation “shows the proportion of Leave votes for all local authorities in England and Wales (on the vertical axis) against the proportion of residents who stated that they had been born outside the UK in the 2011 census (on the horizontal axis). It shows … Read more
Comedian Steve Gerben has a new talk entitled “On Increasing Immigration” that is funny, informative, and to some extent moving. If you wonder why some people advocate for (more) open immigration, but prefer your academia presented in an entertaining fashion, then Gerben’s talk is for you. Check it out below.
I’ve blogged before about the benefits of immigration reform and (more) open borders. I also think our path to citizenship is a mess. So, my initial reaction to the President’s announcement regarding immigration was mixed. Peter Suderman at Reason has a pretty balanced take on why my reactions were mixed. In response to the claims that President Obama’s actions are … Read more
Immigration is in the news again with the influx of Central American children across U.S. borders. Some of the responses to these child immigrants have shown the ugly side of American nationalism. This skepticism toward immigration can be traced back to several of the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, … Read more