Tag Archives: immigration

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...

Economics is a simple field. Just about everything can be described in terms of supply and demand. If the supply of something is scarce but the demand for it is strong, its price rises. On the other hand, if there is a lot of supply but little demand, its price will go down. Now, buyers and sellers can engage in certain strategies to weight the scales. For example, sellers of a product can band together (perhaps by buying each other out) to achieve some...

I’ve just written a blog post about social assistance in Canada. Points raised in the blog post include the following: -Social assistance has two contradictory objectives: 1) to give people enough money to live on; and 2) to not give people enough money to live on. -Very few immigrants receive social assistance (relative to the general population). -Several Canadian provinces have seen a rise in persons with disabilities receiving social assistance. -The inadequacy in social assistance...

In this post, I want to look at the murder rate, by state. I ran a regression with the state murder rate for 2015 as the dependent variable, and literally threw the kitchen sink at it: demographics, weaponry, income, education, population density, etc. Basically, if its something some reasonable percentage of the population believes matters, and I could find data for it, I threw it into the hopper. I also included variables relating to immigration status. The...

Some years ago I read this NBER working paper. (Note – a couple years later a slightly modified version appeared in the American Economic Journal but I will quote from the earlier, non-paywalled version since it is available to everyone.) Here’s the issue, in a nutshell: In this paper, we use administrative data from the Houston Independent School District and the Louisiana Department of Education to examine whether the influx of Katrina and Rita students...

This is a really important fact that people don’t talk about enough: McK & IMF: #immigrants (living not where born) account for 3.4% of world pop but produce 9.4% of world output/$6.7tn https://t.co/tcFELcPYid — Linda Yueh (@lindayueh) December 1, 2016 That is a huge gap. Immigrants’ economic output is almost three times their weight as a proportion of the population, a difference that adds up to $3 trillion annually. Why would this be the case? Well, immigrants are typically pretty...

It can be illustrated first by a quotation from Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things they Don’t Tell you about Capitalism:“Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics.”...

I have discussed this before. I explicitly argued that this was one the GOP myths about taxes, and I lumped it together with the notion that poor people don't pay taxes (Myth #3: 50% don't pay taxes, including immigrants).  Now a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) seems to confirm this view.The report claims that undocumented immigrants living in the United States collectively pay an estimated $11.6 billion dollars each year in state and local taxes. And if...

In-depth analysis on Credit Writedowns Pro. You are here: Political Economy » Britain, Brexit, and sovereignty By Marc Chandler originally posted at Marc’s blog, Marc to Market As the European Union grew, the unanimity in decision-making increasingly gave way to qualified majority voting.  This development took away an important weapon the UK deployed to pursue its national interest.  It use often to frustrate the collectivist decision-making in Brussels and...

A short op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, suggests that David Card's famous work (subscription required) on the effects of Cuban immigrants on real wages in Miami was probably correct, meaning immigration does NOT depress wages or lead to higher unemployment. Peri and Yasenov's actual paper is available here (subscription is also required, I'm afraid).I do have problems with the mainstream interpretation that real wages and employment are determined in the labor market for...