I cannot for the life of me understand why Americans have such a problem with other people coming here to seek a better life. Half this country has been tricked into seeing hardworking immigrants as a threat to their safety and livelihood — but by all metrics, immigrants are a net positive to society.
I also take issue with the idea that this extreme exclusionary mindset is somehow new to America. A lot of people frame what’s happening as if it’s the first time this country has gone through this. There is a long and storied tradition of otherizing, deporting, and imprisoning. Going back to our very foundation — America was born out of a process of expelling Native people from their lands. Then there’s the Great Migration period and the intense reaction to it, the Palmer raids, FDR’s internment camps, Eisenhower’s deportations, McCarthy era “anti-communism”, mass incarceration as a reaction to the Civil Rights Act, Islamophobia, and now this aggressively right wing anti-immigration sentiment.
The people of America, unfortunately, are prone to drastically evil actions when they are tricked by opportunistic political actors into believing their way of life is somehow under attack. This cycle has been going on for a long time.
> I cannot for the life of me understand why Americans have such a problem with other people coming here to seek a better life. Half this country has been tricked into seeing hardworking immigrants as a threat to their safety and livelihood — but by all metrics, immigrants are a net positive to society.
I have no issue with legal immigration. Far from it, I’m in favor of attracting the best, brightest, and most hard working.
But knowing people overseas that want to come to the USA but are respectful enough to want to do it legally, I take issue with anyone that enters the country illegally. They’re cheating the system and showing immediate disdain for our system of laws. The second order effects of funneling money to smugglers and coyotes are bad as well.
Every country has a right to decide who can visit or immigrate. That’s the right of any sovereign state.
If the people of America want more immigration then have them petition their representatives to change the laws to all for it.
"Of course, 'It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen.' See Lyttle v. United States, 867 F.Supp.2d 1256 (M.D. Ga. 2012) (citing Tuan Anh Nguyen v. Immigration & Naturalization Serv., 533 U.S. 53, 67 (2001) (affirming that a citizen has the 'absolute right to enter [the United States] borders'); Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618, 629 (1969) ('This Court long ago recognized that the nature of our Federal Union and our constitutional concepts of personal liberty unite to require that all citizens be free to travel throughout the length and breadth of our land uninhibited by statutes, rules, or regulations which unreasonably burden or restrict this movement.')" [1].
To the extent someone is unequivocally cheating, it's ICE.
If you read the complete sentence you’d realize I’m referring to cheating against every other potential immigrant to come to the USA.
> To the extent someone is unequivocally cheating, it's ICE.
So what exactly is ICE supposed to do if they are deporting the illegal alien mother and child is a citizen? Forget the possibility of a deported father. Say a single mother with no legal status is being deported.
Does she not get the option to take her child with her?
If she didn’t take the child the same people would be likely be screaming about ICE separating families.
> you’d realize I’m referring to cheating against every other potential immigrant to come to the USA
I know. I'm pointing out that the mother's illegal immigration is outweighed by ICE's illegal detention, deportation and wilful abrogation of legal and constitutional rights of a U.S. citizen.
> what exactly is ICE supposed to do if they are deporting the illegal alien mother and child is a citizen?
Follow the law. In this case, that would involve transfering the child to her designated custodian [1].
> If she didn’t take the child the same people would be likely be screaming about ICE separating families
In a debate between the concrete reality of US children being kicked out of the country and hypothetical potential non-citizens not being able to become a citizen, I will side with the child every time. I don't think that's a radical position.
Here's an interesting question: are undocumented immigrants actually stopping non-citizens from becoming citizens? These two things are actually quite independent, yes? You're building a very similar argument to "piracy is bad because it takes money out of the hands of the RIAA."
> Here's an interesting question: are undocumented immigrants actually stopping non-citizens from becoming citizens? These two things are actually quite independent, yes? You're building a very similar argument to "piracy is bad because it takes money out of the hands of the RIAA."
So in your analogy the RIAA are the huddled masses yearning to breathe free that respect immigration laws?
Of course. But they’re supposed to arrive at ports of entry and follow the process.
While it has no legal significance, that poem is written on base of the Statue of Liberty next to the immigration center at Ellis Island. It’s a pretty wild take to think that it’s means that people should cut down barbed wire fences and sneak into the country under the cover of darkness.
While we were tracking humans coming into America via ship back to the 1820s, the formal data collection approximating the modern system didn't even begin until 1891, seven years after the Statue was gifted to the US.
The "wild take" (which is, honestly, quite mundane) is the barbed wire fences don't even need to be up. We got along for a century and change soft-handling immigration (even longer, if you don't consider the border to be "strictly enfroced" until Operation Wetback in the 1950s). America has been strongest when it didn't care where you came from unless you gave it a reason to care.
Who is actually benefitting from a highly-militarized and exclusive southern border?
What we're doing right now isn't working, isn't sustainable, and ignores several realities of how we interact with our neighboring nations (and, indeed, is a new problem... The current tight-border regime isn't even half a century old).
At what point do we decide that if the laws are broken that often, perhaps it's because they're bad laws that are too incompatible with reality to be practically enforced successfully? We could pass a law that requires you to hover three inches off the ground; do we blame you if you don't start levitating?
> What we're doing right now isn't working, isn't sustainable, and ignores several realities of how we interact with our neighboring nations (and, indeed, is a new problem... The current tight-border regime isn't even half a century old).
The problem with this argument is it’s downstream from a self fulfilling prophesy derived from the previous administration’s refusal to enforce the law. Illegal border crossings are down 99% over the past year. If that type of seriousness had been applied previously we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today.
We didn’t do the ounce of prevention so now we have to administer the bitter medicine that is the cure.
The medicine is not worth the cure. While illegal border crossings are down, it's because all border crossings are down... People have become legitimately fearful outside this country that visiting this country, even as our guests legally, could result in a long stay in detention with no due process. The damage this administration is doing to America's international reputation Is by no means worth lower border crossing numbers. It's the equivalent of keeping rowdy teenagers off your property by waving a shotgun at them... It works, but now your neighbors know you is the crazy shotgun toting guy at the edge of town and they avoid you.
Pax Americana is built on a web of trust that includes the notion that America is a welcoming nation. I think it's going to take economists some time to calculate the full magnitude of the damage that closing up the borders will do to America's ability to realize all of its interests. Where are we going to get the next generation of innovators and creators of scientific breakthroughs when people stop showing up at our universities because we are capriciously kicking them out? How are the communities who were bothered or scared of undocumented immigrants going to fair when tourists stop showing up?
> father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes
It seems odd that he would give provisional custody to "family friend" then?
Then this doesn't add up then
> Respondent Harper later sent an email further evincing her refusal to release V.M.L. to her custodian, see Exh. 2, and stating that she would instead require V.M.L.’s father to turn himself in for detention and deportation,
So they wanted to deport the US citizen father?
It's possible that I am looking at a different court case perhaps.
I'm surprised you single out Americans who on the whole still a lot more welcoming than a lot more countries in Europe and Asia. The last few months have torn that reputation apart of course, and there is loud group who would happily shut the borders, but there are a lot of citizens who are happy with legal immigration, sympatric to illegal immigration, and still embrace the melting pot.
My conversations with H-1B visa holders is that whatever aggravations they may have in the US, they can still get into the US. Other countries just don't have that pathway
> The people of America, unfortunately, are prone to drastically evil actions when they are tricked by opportunistic political actors into believing their way of life is somehow under attack.
All people are like this. When the economic prospects for you look bleak, it's very aggravating to see someone you believe is an outsider is succeeding. We see microcosms of this in the bay area where people blame tech workers for driving the cost of living up and making it hard for regular people. In reality, housing policy has done that, but people get mad seeing new outsiders enjoying the life that has become harder and harder for them to afford.
>Half this country has been tricked into seeing hardworking immigrants as a threat to their safety and livelihood — but by all metrics, immigrants are a net positive to society.
We should highlight there is a difference between legal and illegal immigration when it comes to the net impact on society:
"Illegal immigrants are a net fiscal drain, meaning they receive more in government services than
they pay in taxes ... Like their less-educated and low-income U.S.-born counterparts, the tax payments of
illegal immigrants do not come close to covering the cost they create."[0]
Illegal immigration also drives up housing costs and depresses wages for lower wage earners.[1]
Physics degree. Magna cum laude. Engineer. Homeowner. If you heard me speak you would never guess I was not American. I have been here 30 out of 32 years an I have no legal pathway to residency or citizenship.
I guess I should have helped poison our cities with black tar heroin via a shitty PHP website running in the tor network like Ulbritch, maybe then I could get a pardon from the orange moron.
It's many different things, but scale and time horizon is certainly one of them. The scale of immigration over just the last 30 years is truly unprecedented, and will have political impacts for the next 50. The share of the population that is foreign born is up to 15% (likely much higher, since it's difficult to actually count illegal immigrants), which is the first time since the mid 19th century it's reached that level. Qualitatively, seeing e.g. a childhood neighborhood turn into something that resembles a (very) foreign country is ... jarring. I'd also submit that your brief summary of American history is wrong, and is part of the problem. It very slyly changes the foundation of the nation from something heroic to something that we should be ashamed of, and that mass immigration is the only way to do penance for that sin. It's fine to advocate for people coming here to seek a better life, but it's wrong to describe America as a "nation of immigrants", when the reality is closer to a "nation of settlers" who built up a largely empty country. I also tend to roll my eyes when people invoke "Islamophobia", since the United States is a) not a Muslim country and therefor does not have to defer to Islamic interests, and b) that term is typically invoked in an attempt to bully someone into agreeing with a more extreme position since, well, you don't want to be Islamophobic now do you.
In study after study, immigrants actually raise the wages of citizen workers by taking the lower paying jobs while citizens can then be more productive. The idea they suppress wages is just another form of the ‘lump of labor’ fallacy.
You are really twisting things to make your argument sound plausible in the general case. More supply means less wages. Why focus on low paying jobs? Are you seriously suggesting that if we import every software engineer from India that wants to come here that my salary will increase? If so, that's very interesting why tech CEOs are lobbying so hard for this.
Your "more supply equals lower wages" argument is demolished by top economic research. A recent NBER study calculated that "immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less educated native workers" between 2000-2019.
The economy isn't zero-sum. As Milton Friedman noted, "most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." Immigrants create demand for housing, food, education, entertainment, and specialized services that natives often provide.
Historical evidence consistently disproves the fallacy: When women entered the workforce, it didn't cause massive job losses among men. When segregation was abolished, Black workers didn't cause mass unemployment among whites. The vast majority of Americans descend from immigrants who contributed to economic growth.
Research on H-1B visas shows that firms that get immigrant labor end up "hiring more tech workers and paying them more, because they become more efficient and sometimes scale up." In fact, studies show each H-1B worker creates approximately 1.83 jobs for native-born Americans.
The UK's Migration Advisory Committee, after reviewing studies from 2003-2018, concluded that "immigration had little or no impact on average employment or unemployment of existing workers" and "little impact on average wages."
The overwhelming consensus among economists is that immigration grows the economic pie rather than merely redistributing slices. That's why America's most immigrant-rich cities consistently have the highest wages, not the lowest.
PLEASE, I am begging you. Spend 15 minutes reading actual economic research before posting confidently incorrect Econ 101 oversimplifications. The "immigrants take our jobs" fallacy has been debunked by virtually every reputable economic study for the past 30 years. This isn't some fringe academic view. It's the overwhelming consensus of actual economists who study this for a living. Your intuition about "more workers = lower wages" seems logical but falls apart when tested against actual economic data. The real world is more complex than a supply-and-demand graph from an introductory textbook.
Nowhere in the economic research does it explain what you are so confidently stating, that wages are, somehow, the only thing in all of economics where positive supply shocks do not matter. The arguments that tend to be made are that, on a long enough time horizon, mean wages increase because overall economic output goes up, and mean economic output goes up because there is a higher supply of available labor.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding both the economic research and my argument. No one is claiming wages are "the only thing in economics where positive supply shocks don't matter."
The research shows that labor markets aren't simple supply-demand curves because of complementary productivity effects and gains from specialization, selection effects, and, of course, demand generated by the immigrants. If you have general labor size increase, in general equilibrium with a responsive central bank interest rates will lower to keep employment tight.
This isn't about "long enough time horizons" - studies find positive or neutral effects in the short and medium term too. The fundamental issue is that your model assumes a fixed economic pie that immigrants simply divide into smaller slices, when in reality immigrants help grow the pie overall.
Okay. Which other things don't see effects from positive supply shocks? You're just restating my premise about time horizons. The pie grows, with time, if a bunch of other things happen in the right order. Wages haven't grown in two decades in the UK, your original example. So, how are you defining short and medium term? Three decades?
man idk, maybe it was the long conservative rule after the crash? Maybe it was the long austerity? Maybe it was the huge mass of natives that voted to crash out of an agreement with a bloc that handles over 80% of their trade?
More seriously...
- for US: The newest NBER IV estimates put the wage effect of all 2000-19 US immigration at +2 % for non-college natives. Show me a UK study of similar vintage that finds anything near –2 %.
- for UK: UK real wages tracked productivity one-for-one after 2008; BoE and NIESR pin that on capital deepening, Brexit and austerity. Not on immigration, which the MAC finds moved wages by _at most_ –1% (aggregate, not yearly!) and the final report was ~0.1%, basically a null finding.
- We've already been through lump of labor, so I don't know why you've been banging on equilibrium.
And to finally address your time horizons: Short-run? Mariel-style shocks still show null effects. Medium-run? 2009-20 UK data flips positive. Long-run? Productivity wins. Pick your horizon. Immigration is at worst a rounding error next to TFP, which is positively associated with migration.
Happy to dive deeper, but at this point the burden of proof is on anyone claiming large negative wage effects. The best evidence, across multiple methods and countries, just isn’t there.
Got a link to that NBER study? It's not that I don't believe you or think you're making it up, but I would like to understand what instrumental variable they were using to make the claim that an increase of low skilled immigration makes wages for non-college educated natives go up.
I skimmed this and read a few sections closely. Most econometric papers spend too much time rambling on about stuff that most people who actually seek out and read these things already know. Anyway, +2.6% in wages for non-college educated natives, over 20 years, is not a ringing endorsement. I honestly doubt anyone would notice this, and over two decades that's just noise, frankly. If I'm understanding one of the central claims correctly, it's not that low skilled immigrants "took" jobs from natives, it's that natives ended up working more, and as a result their earning power increased. That's ... also not a ringing endorsement. Sure, you didn't get fired in favor of an immigrant, but you had to take a second shift to stay in the game. Wow what a benefit.
I'm also going to quibble a bit with how they constructed this Instrumental Variable. The way it's constructed, the higher the turnover (for lack of a better term) from native to foreign, the better the predictor it is (because in their theory, it's exogenous to wages at the local level). Does anyone really believe this? Immigrants respond to incentives just like anyone else. They're not choosing to immigrate to Sac City, Iowa, or any other low-COL/low-wage town, for a reason. It also doesn't answer my original question, which was central to my initial claim: why? The "why" is going to answer a lot of other layered questions about hostility to ever-increasing immigration. Are firms moving in that exploit low-wage immigrants, generating other adjacent economic activity? Probably! Not controlled for or referenced at all in this, and this paper is by no means a definitive conclusion that high low-skill immigration is good (even on a two decade timeline, which even typing that is just absurd).
The +2.6% is hourly pay, not extra hours; it’s the difference between flat wages and one more year of raises. Every credible quasi-experiment, from Denmark’s refugee lottery to U.S. enforcement crackdowns, confirms that more immigrants leave natives at least as well paid, often better off, because firms invest, prices fall and natives climb the job ladder. Shift-share IVs have been combed over by three separate methodological papers and pass; drop them and refugee lotteries STILL give you the same answer. UK stagnation is a productivity story (zoning, anyone?), not an immigration one. So unless you have a better identification strategy that overturns all of these results, the weight of the evidence says immigration grows the pie, and natives get a slice (if you can't believe any synergy than at least just bearing a smaller share of defense spending).
I'm also going to flip it around for a second. As I said with the Mariel boatlift study, where a 7% increase in the labor force yielded more or less no impacts on hyperlocal labor force, even considering (possible? I know little havana right now is mostly spanish but idk what it was back then) language and skills barriers. How do you explain that? That is the most short term of local supply shocks with basically no short term employment or wage impact. Thirty-five years of re-checks (Card 1990 → Borjas 2015 → Clemens-Hunt 2019 → Peri-Yasenov 2019 → Lewis et al.) still show more or less zero effect on native wages or jobs (once you fix compositional glitches in Borjas’s sample). If a shock that extreme can’t push wages down, the `more workers = lower pay` story is busted.
Yeah I got that part, maybe you're misreading. You seem to be interested in advertising that you've read all this stuff, which is great, a lot of people have. But you aren't really addressing the problem statement, so I'll state it clearly: no one gives a shit about a 2.6% hourly wage increase over 20 years. They don't care because immigration comes with a bunch of other externalities, that are very near term, that academics deliberately remove from their models. "Natives get a slice ... of 1.7-2.6% ... over the course of 20 years" is not a convincing argument, which is why most of the quantitative debate about immigration is largely academic. If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually. Insofar as you care about some sort of policy outcome here, you are going to have to figure out a different way to frame this.
I'm not familiar with zoning laws in the UK to comment, so, sure. Maybe a byzantine zoning bureaucracy is the problem there, that does ring distinctly "British" to me.
I haven't read the Mariel study, and honestly I don't really have any interest in it because the underlying story is that Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship. Again, there's qualitative aspects to this that economists - especially the econometricaly inclined - struggle with.
> Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship
Damn if only there was a way to study assimilation. Wait, there is, we have, and if you look a few replies up you'll see that its basically a complete success with sufficient NGO support that vastly boosts social participation.
> If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually.
This kind of thinking leads to Trump. Unironically. Handwaving about "if it were real I'd know of it" is what leads to terrible economic policy.
Well, if it were real people wouldn’t have voted for Trump. What you’ve presented is, like I keep saying, the most unconvincing tidbit of minor benefits. You seem totally uninterested in addressing the problem, that no one cares about this study and what it says because it’s such a tiny effect on the margins, utterly impossible to translate into daily life.
I’ll keep making whatever claims I want, and you can keep gatekeeping (or attempting to) as much as you like (now I really won’t read the Mariel study, nevermind that you are conditioning success on Uncle Sam handing over money to make it work). The force with which state something as plainly obvious only appears as such inside the spreadsheets, so enjoy them.
spite driven willful ignorance is something that I didn't expect to find when starting this conversation.
I'm mostly looking for you to retract your claim about how short-run supply shocks must obviously show up in wages and employment.
EDIT: also nowhere does it require fiscal outlays for assimilation, the single biggest thing is expedited provision of work permits, which is obviously fiscally positive.
Strawman. You're talking about wages and jobs in aggregate which wasn't my argument at all. Nothing you said addresses how my salary is affected in the industry the person is joining.
Sure, in total, other jobs may be created and growth is increased -- it's essentially a tautology.
I don't know why you think you're entitled to any particular job due to government policy, that seems like a really poor and inefficient way to run an economy.
The CIS is a joke of an organization and unsurprisingly their “research” is just the same vibe racism you can find on any right wing message board. Camarota previously claimed in a similarly ‘published’ paper that 2/3 of the jobs created under Obama went to illegal immigrants. Not remotely a serious person.
>The CIS is a joke of an organization and unsurprisingly their “research” is just the same vibe racism you can find on any right wing message board.
The research is well founded and not debunked. There are numerous other sources cited besides CIS. Dr. Camarota earned a PhD in public policy analysis and has testified before Congress 30 times on the economic, fiscal, and demographic impact of immigration. Your ad homnim isn't helping your case. Nothing they've stated is racist.
>Camarota previously claimed in a similarly ‘published’ paper that 2/3 of the jobs created under Obama went to illegal immigrants.
I also take issue with the idea that this extreme exclusionary mindset is somehow new to America. A lot of people frame what’s happening as if it’s the first time this country has gone through this. There is a long and storied tradition of otherizing, deporting, and imprisoning. Going back to our very foundation — America was born out of a process of expelling Native people from their lands. Then there’s the Great Migration period and the intense reaction to it, the Palmer raids, FDR’s internment camps, Eisenhower’s deportations, McCarthy era “anti-communism”, mass incarceration as a reaction to the Civil Rights Act, Islamophobia, and now this aggressively right wing anti-immigration sentiment.
The people of America, unfortunately, are prone to drastically evil actions when they are tricked by opportunistic political actors into believing their way of life is somehow under attack. This cycle has been going on for a long time.