by George Borjas, perhaps the US’ pre-eminent immigration economist
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Mike Kimel considers the following as important: George Borjas, hypocrisy, immigration, labor costs, Uncategorized
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George Borjas, perhaps the US’ pre-eminent immigration economist notes:
Maybe it’s just me because I instinctively read in between the lines whenever I read anything about immigration, but I’m beginning to detect such a seismic shift in the immigration debate. We all know the party line by now: Immigrants do jobs that natives don’t want to do. As a result, natives do not lose jobs, and natives do not see their wages reduced. And anyone who claims otherwise is obviously a racist xenophobic moron. They obviously don’t like immigrants, and they obviously are not educated/credentialed enough to understand and appreciate expert opinion.
The flurry of immigration restrictions proposed by the Trump administration demands a switch in tactics–with a corresponding switch in the argument linking immigration and wages. The party line must now be that less immigration is bad. But how can one show that in simple-to-grasp economic terms that can be mass-marketed to the masses? By far the simplest way is to come up with examples that less immigration raises labor costs and makes us miserable because everything becomes more expensive.
Borjas goes on:
There is no upper bound to the hypocrisy of experts. It might be a lot of fun to keep track of this over the next few years, watching the dominos fall and all those “immigration-does-not-affect-wages” experts fall all over themselves as they switch to proving the economic awfulness of Trump’s actions because fewer immigrants mean higher labor costs, higher prices, more inflation.
But don’t hold your breath for any admission that they were wrong in the past. They will instantly switch to the former party line the minute the Trump immigration restrictions fade into history.
I have nothing to add.