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Brexit, Immigration, and the Experts
A lot of commentators seem to be singling out immigration as a root cause of the dissatisfaction that led the British people to vote to leave the European Union. Here’s Reihan Salam in Slate: Ever...
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A Rant on Peer Review
I have a few pet peeves. One of them is how “peer review” is perceived by far too many people as the gold standard certification of scientific authority. Any academic who’s been through the peer review...
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Promises, Promises
Many economists are so religiously wedded to their models that it takes an awful long time, and an awful lot of contrary evidence, to shake them from what they learned in graduate school. We are now in...
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Responsible Nationalism: A Quiz
Responsible nationalism: “The idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good. Closely related to this is...
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Final Version of Mariel Study
My Mariel paper has now gone through the peer review process and it’s officially forthcoming at the Industrial and Labor Relations Review (the same journal that published Card’s original Mariel paper a...
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Odds and Ends on Mariel
Warning: Very geeky post. Since I posted the final version of my Mariel paper earlier this week, I have heard from a number of people asking for all kinds of details about the paper. One of the nice...
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EJMR Is “Refreshing” ?!?@/!?
One consequence from my rant on peer review from a few weeks ago was that I heard from some esteemed colleagues who simply could not believe that I found Economics Job Market Rumors to be a refreshing...
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An Immigration Platform
I’ve begun to pay a bit more attention to what the different presidential candidates have been saying about immigration. And my research led to this section of a political platform that I found quite...
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The Economist on Mariel
The Economist just published a very nice writeup of my Mariel paper.The article captures the essence of the paper very nicely. Over 60 percent of the Marielitos were high school dropouts. It seems more...
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New Book Sighted in the Wild
Although the official publication date of We Wanted Workers is still some weeks away, the publisher told me on Thursday that the first two copies out of the bindery had just been delivered to their...
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Immigrants do jobs that…
…natives could have done. The demolition of the narrative that large numbers of immigrants can enter a labor market without having much of an effect on native employment opportunities continues apace....
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On Vetting Immigrants
Donald Trump gave a foreign policy speech yesterday where he outlined some of his key proposals to expand the “ideological” vetting of immigrants. Here is the oh-so-serious mainstream summary of the...
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On Vetting Immigrants, Deluxe Edition
Politico gave me the opportunity to elaborate and extend some of the arguments made in my previous post that considered Donald Trump’s proposal for “extreme” vetting of immigrants. Here is the Politico...
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The Politico 50
Politico publishes an annual list of the 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics,” and I made this year’s list at #17. And why did I get chosen? “For telling it like it...
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New Paper on Refugees
Joan Monras and I have been working on a paper that presents a comprehensive documentation of the labor market consequences of refugee supply shocks; the working paper version is here. We examine four...
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User’s Guide to the NAS Report, 5: The Bottom Line
Immigrants have both a labor market impact and a fiscal impact. Do the economic gains generated by working immigrants outweigh the fiscal burden that immigrants impose? The NAS report (probably wisely)...
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User’s Guide to NAS Report, 4: Long-Run Fiscal Impact
By looking only at expenditures and taxes during a given year, the calculation of the short-run fiscal impact ignores that some of those expenditures actually yield a return. The cost of sending the...
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User’s Guide to NAS Report, 3: Short-Run Fiscal Impact
The NAS panel calculated the short-run fiscal impact by comparing the cost of providing public services to immigrants with the taxes that those immigrants pay in a particular year. Both Chapter 8 and...
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User’s Guide to NAS Report, 2: Labor Market Impact
Chapter 5 of the report, entitled “Employment and Wage Impacts of Immigration,” weighs in at over 32,000 words (for context, that’s over half the length of my new book, We Wanted Workers). I am cynical...
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User’s Guide to the NAS Report, 1: Assimilation
It is well known that immigrants have an economic disadvantage when they first enter the United States. Many are not fluent in English; they are not familiar with how the US labor market works; and on...
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