The Truth About Immigration and Wages

It's Election Day, and in place of any exit-poll astrology, we're going to talk about something that's been a driving force in the campaign. Immigration. Specifically, the research about the relationship between immigration and wages. A common line bandied about in politics is that immigration reduces the wages of native born Americans. It's most commonly been pushed by restrictionists on the right, like JD Vance and Donald Trump. And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country. And by the way, that'll be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day's work. Decades of record immigration. We've reproduced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African American and Latino workers. We are going. However, I've noticed a growing openness to the idea that immigration hurts American workers, not just from longtime restrictionists, but also from Democrats and liberals who are scarred by their loss in 2016 and fretting over the possibility of losing the 2024 election. It's sometimes a lot of smoke is just a smoke bomb. This is Good On Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I'm your host, Jerusalem Dumsys. I'm a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And today I've asked my colleague, Rojay Karm at a come on the show. We're going to talk about a recent deep dive he did into the academic sliterature on the relationship between immigration and wages. The common thinking goes, "If you increase the supply of labor, then you'll reduce the price of that labor. If immigrants simply weren't allowed in, then companies will be forced to pay American workers high wages." It seems so obvious. So why does study after study find this to be so wrong? So Rojay, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. So this is what is episode where I'm actually having trouble deciding which narrative is the conventional narrative. You've been steeped in the economic literature for far too long. Exactly. There's the conventionalism in academic circles, right? That immigrants do not reduce native born wages. But that's not, I think, the average person's perception of this, especially if they're listening to politicians who, both sides of the aisle, will be making these arguments. So I want to walk through the evidence together here because Rojay, you recently wrote a piece and you've been a big chunk of time this year diving into the research space and really trying to figure out what's going on. Like, where is the evidence actually leading us? The first thing I will say is I do think there's a little bit of a sort of man on the street common sense view that goes something a little bit like, well, given that there is a fixed pool of jobs in a country. If you add a bunch of foreign-born workers, they're going to take those jobs from natives and if you just apply Econ 101, right, as the supply of a good goes up like labor, then the price of that good, IE wages, falls. So I think there is a sort of a little bit of a, okay, intuitive sense that more immigrants would mean lower wages and lower employment prospects. And I think this was actually the sort of conventional view on both sides of the aisle for much of the 20th century in much of the economics profession for much of the 20th century until this study came along and sort of shattered the consensus. And so what happened was in 1980, Fidel Castro lifted Cuba's ban on immigration. And that caused about 125,000 Cuban to migrate from Mariel Bay in Cuba to Miami, Florida. And about half of them settled there, which represented a 7 to 8% increase in the Miami workforce, which is 25 times the amount that the workforce expands due to immigration in the US every year. So this is a huge change, like incredibly large change. And years later, what the economist David Card, who will go on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in empirical economics, what he realizes is that this created a perfect version of what economists call like a natural experiment. Because of this big one-time influx of immigrants to Miami, you could compare the trajectory of native-born wages in Miami to a variety of other cities that prior to the boat lift had had similar employment and demographic trends, these include like Atlanta, Los Angeles, et cetera. And I think the view was, if there's any place you're going to see the negative effect of immigration on wages, it's going to be with this sort of unprecedented large random shock. And that's why the finding that Card comes to is so surprising, because he finds that the boat lift had virtually no effect on the wages of native-born workers, including those without a college degree. If you look at a chart of the wages of workers in Miami, compared to most of these other cities in the US at the time, there's almost no difference. You can't even tell the boat lift happened. And I think what that points to and the big overarching explanation that I think the common sense wisdom got wrong is that immigrants aren't just workers. Immigrants are also consumers. They buy lots of things like health care and groceries and housing. And so at the same time that they are competing with Americans for jobs, they're also creating more demand for those jobs. They're creating more employment opportunities. And when you increase the demand for labor that pushes wages up, even if you increase the supply of labor that pushes wages down, we can talk about some ways in which this was later challenged and complicated, but I think that's the big missing piece of the common sense take. Yeah, I think there's a level to it. You have to really draw out how this works in the real world, because people come and they're like, okay, now there's more people who want to eat in McDonald's. You have to hire more people on shift to like service that demand. There are more people demanding taxicaps. There are more people who now need immigration lawyer services. So that means you need more legal assistance. That means you need no paralleegals. That means you need more genitors cleaning the buildings and because they're expanding into new office space. There's a level to which that this sort of positive flow is like not intuitive to people because it's so downstream of the initial event, which is people are here looking for jobs as the immediate first thing, like kind of like see happening. Exactly. It's funny because when we think about this in a slightly different context, it's very intuitive. So, for example, you don't see Republican politicians going to high school or college graduations and like yelling at graduates or complaining that all of these graduates are about to undermine the wages or employment prospects of adults in labor force. And that's because we understand what it comes to Native-born people. Like wait, population growth doesn't necessarily mean less for everyone. And so I think when you take this to a slightly different context, it's like, oh, wait, this actually does make a lot of sense. Well, I think there's one thing that I really want to draw out here because if you're an individual person who's, let's say you are a high school graduate, you are working in kind of the types of service sector jobs that are usually competing with immigrants, maybe on net what you're saying makes sense for the entire labor market. But doesn't it change when you look downstream with the people who are the most likely to be competing with new immigrants for jobs? This is exactly the right question. And this is when I mentioned the complications earlier, this is where they come in. There is an argument that has been sort of come up in response to the card paper and it's response to a lot of the natural experiments on this. And I should say also, in addition to the Merrill-Boltless study, there were similar experiments in the subsequent years. And his real and France in Denmark that all came to very similar results. But then there was sort of a backlash set of critiques, which was just this. Okay, on average wages might not be affected. But what about the least skilled, the least educated workers? And particularly, what about those without a high school degree who work in the professions that are most likely to be competing with these new immigrants, most of whom, if we're talking about at least undocumented immigrants, are less skilled themselves. And this was the critique made and has been long made by a Harvard economist George Borjoss. And in 2015, he went back to the card study and he looked specifically at this group of high school dropouts. And he found, or at least at the time it seemed like he found, that actually there was a sizeable negative effect on this smaller group. And again, this was the explanation. Okay, maybe on average it works out. But the supply and demand effects of immigrants are asymmetric. Immigrants who are unskilled to come into a country, they compete only with a certain subset of the least skilled workers, but they're spending their money probably. So they might get a job as a lettuce picker or construction worker, but they're spending their money on a lot more than just housing and lettuce. And so on net, they end up hurting these list skilled workers more. So it's like an inequality story too. Like all of us get the benefits, especially those of us in high skilled jobs that aren't really experiencing this competition, but they're not concentrated for the lowest. And this is the most I feel like pointing critique is yes, this makes higher skilled workers better off, but it hurts the least of us. And what is really interesting though is that sort of borehosses debunking of card has since been debunked. Oh my gosh. It hurts. It's all the fun. of an academic debate, it has all the titillating content we want. So if you look at what Borjas did, what's interesting is he didn't just look at high school dropouts, he also excluded from his sample women, non-prime age workers, and most confusingly Hispanics, which is just sort of absurd, and sort of his justification was that these exclusions left only the workers that were most directly competing with the Mary Elite dose. But it left a total sample of just 17 workers per year. I find this fact so insane. Like it's one of those things where I'm just like, I don't understand what the point of extremely rigorous journal processes for econ journals are if they're like allowing something like this, like go by unnoticed, unflugged. And I think the reason is because it's like at that point it's really hard to tell the difference between like an actual empirical finding and just statistical noise. Yeah, I mean 17 people. It's 17 people. It's this extremely specific and hard to justify group. And then what's interesting is there's a couple follow-up studies, one of which finds that the fact that Borjas found was because of a change in the way that the census counted black workers. Oh yeah. So that was a really interesting, and if you just sort of take the way that they were measuring it before, like the entire effect goes away. And then, but I'm even with those 17, 17. Even with those 17. Wow. Okay. But I think the broader critique is wait, like this is ridiculous. Let's just actually do what the critique says, which is let's just look at all workers who don't have a high school degree. And when you actually look at that, cards original findings hold up. Actually workers that lack even a high school degree didn't have their wages negatively affected. And in the subsequent years after this debate, there have been other natural experiment studies that have found the same thing. One that I really think was done quite well was on Puerto Rican immigrants after Hurricane Maria, who came to Orlando. It found the same effect. It actually found to your point that while wages for construction workers, specifically actually did become depressed a little bit, that was offset by a boost in the wages for leisure and hospitality workers. And so actually one wrinkle to this story is that maybe some sectors might experience a little bit of this, but on net, it won't affect the entire school group. The entire school group ends up pretty well off. And I think this for me was a very counterintuitive finding. And when I asked economists about it, the leading sort of explanation is what was described to me as specialization plus scale. So on paper, it looks like, and the assumption as long bin immigrants without a high school degree are perfect substitutes for native workers without a high school degree. But it turns out that that's actually not true. And I think the restaurant industry is a good example of this. So take fry cooks, a bunch of new immigrants come in and they take jobs as fry cooks working in restaurants. That might depress the wages of local born fry cooks. But what also happens is because the cost of labor has gone down for fry cooks and because now there's all this more demand for restaurant services, you get restaurants expanding, you get more restaurants opening up. And what happens when restaurants open up, they don't just have to hire more fry cooks, they hire more waiters and waitresses and bartenders and chefs. And it turns out that a lot of new immigrants can't fill those roles because they don't have the English skills or the tacit cultural knowledge to do so. And so actually, if you are a native born worker and you just stayed a fry cook, you might have seen your wages depressed, but you're actually far more likely to have gotten a job in one of these professions that there's now more common that actually pays more because immigrants had. So you get promoted. Yeah. Exactly. I think the other group of people that people often point to as being harmed by this are actually recent immigrants. So it may be the case that there's not a substitution effect between native born workers and foreign born workers. But if you are like the first person off the marial boat and then the thousandth person is coming up, you guys are probably competing. I always find this a bit of a weird argument because the people usually talking about this or immigration restriction is. So like, are they taking the position of like the most recent immigrants or all the other immigrants? Yeah. So what's going on there? So that is a really good point. And I should say just because these studies don't find much of an effect on native born wages of natives of all skill levels does not mean that immigration has no cost at all. And I think this is actually one of the most important, most consistent findings is we do see a pretty sizable effect on the wages of other immigrants in large part because they don't have the substitution effect. Another cost is inequality, right? A lot of these studies find that even though a lot of lower skill native workers are not affected, immigration ends up boosting the wages of higher skilled workers and part because immigrants are also demanding the services of let's say architects or computer programmers, et cetera. And so it's not a huge change in inequality, but it does slightly exacerbate inequality. And then I would say the third one is what I talked about earlier, which is if you look sector by sector, it's very possible that a construction worker or a worker in a specific sector where a lot of immigrants come in might experience some wage losses. Like that is very possible. You can see even if the aggregate effect on an entire skill group is not negative, you can see concentrated losses. But this is just true of all effects, right? Like the average effect is positive, like 50% of people are below the average. I mean, I think the thing that I'm getting out here is and I one of the things I really liked about your approach to this that you were you were very, very careful to try and be as fair as possible to both sides of this debate. And what I'm hearing is that like there's so much reaching you have to do to really find serious costs to the immigration. Even when you do, it's like slightly, I say I attribute inequality, maybe there are certain industries where you have some impacts, but those people are also benefiting from the growth and they're also benefiting from substitution effect, et cetera. And it's not to just like poo poo all that, but I think it's like really interesting to talk about why, why there's such an intense desire to find this effect. And you know, I don't know if you have a thought on like why this narrative is so important to people because there are other reasons that people could say they're in time of immigration, but there's a real desire to make it about wages. There's a real desire to make it about economics. Yeah. I will say I want to definitely talk about these different reasons. And I'll be very interested in your theory too. And I have my own. I will say one good faith reason for this concern. One that I think will be brought up a lot is well, what about when we look at history. And so it is true. And like lots of folks, including David Lee and Hart, you know, liberal columnists at the New York Times has pointed out that during this mid century, quote, unquote golden age period, 1940s, 50s and 60s, you saw really high wage growth for the working class. You saw a really big reduction of inequality, really fast rise in living standards, and also very low immigration. And then from the 1980s on, you see much higher levels of immigration. And you see wage stagnation from meaning worker. You see an exacerbation of inequality. And so I think one sort of thing is like, well, if we look at history, like maybe these experiments aren't capturing everything. They're only looking at one city at a time. And when we look at the broad sweep of American history, it really does look like this is happening. And I think that is a critique that's important to take seriously. But at the same time, one of the golden rules of social science is correlation does not equal causation, right? There were a lot of things happening starting in the 1970s and 80s that like also affected workers, also affected inequality, everything from technological change to globalization to the weakening of labor unions and concentration of corporations. And I think a lot of those other things were going on. And I think two data points are really instructive here. One, I actually think it's funny. Like I actually think you're being super generous to this already. Which I think is like your MO here. I mean, I think it's important to be intellectually generous at the front part. But I wouldn't be very clear here. This is not looking at the broad super American history. This is looking at the 40s and 50s and 60s and going, huh, this extremely transformative time in American history. Yeah. Where there's tons of growth happening because of the World War II is ending, also the World War II production in general. Lots of stuff happens, of course, following that anti-growth stuff that we've talked about in this podcast in the past. And I think it's like kind of weird. And I think the question I was even asking you earlier about like, there's such an intense desire to make this true. And when you look back at the foreign board and share the population in the United States over actually our long term, you know, in 2023, 14.3% of Americans are foreign-born. And that's in line and lower than the large parts of the 19th century. So like what you see in American history when looking at the foreign-borns of the population is you see like roughly like 14.8% even throughout the 1800s, you see a massive dip start happened during the Great Depression. Normal people kind of stopped immigrating when that happens. And then you don't really see a catch-up happening until very recently. And so there's a level to hear where I'm like, if Lee and Harden others want to make this critique, they need to be explained the entirety of the 1800s in American economic history. And I think there's like a desire like not to really wage into that debate because they're just pointing at like a simple correlation and going, well, I'm sure that's explained. And I actually don't find this like even a minimally persuasive. I know. I think you're totally right. And like I'd also, you don't even have to go back to the 1800s. You can just go back, I don't know, the past four years where we've had a huge massive surge of undocumented immigration. And at the same time, we've had wages at the very bottom of the income distribution rise at their fastest pace. since the 1940s, a huge reduction in wage inequality. And so it's very, even if you're gonna make the correlation, I'm gonna say, wait, the last couple of years sort of disproved this, and even over this time period that Leonardo others are talking about, what you have is the places that receive the most immigrants are the places that have the least wage stagnation. - Yes, yes. - It's Texas, it's Florida, it's the Acella Corridor, and so I think you're right. I think I really wanted to put that out there because I think it is a very common argument, but it's not when I find remotely persuasive. - I mean, there's one other thing that I think other folks point to a lot, and I'm gonna ask you to explain it because you're explaining all these studies for me so nicely. But the National Academy of Sciences has a study called the Economic and Physical Consequences of Immigration. I feel like this is a calling card for a lot of folks who are pro-immigration restriction. What does it say and what's important about that study? - So this was a large report that looked at, or at least purported to look at, a bunch of different studies. It claimed to be a sort of meta-analysis of a lot of the immigration literature and tried to come to a conclusion on sort of what it all says. And the big conclusion that they came to was, when we look on average, wages are not affected, especially when we look in the long term, but there was a disagreement within the panelist over specifically high school dropouts. And there is a chart that often is linked to, or is often brought up by immigration restrictionist. It is table five dash two. - Oh my gosh, you know, it's second word is. - And it shows a lot of negative numbers. And the thing that I will often remind people, is like that chart is basically talking about high school dropouts. Okay, put that aside. There are a lot of studies on there that seem to show negative effects. One of them is the Borjost study that we talked about earlier. And George Borjost was actually one of the panelists on this report, which may indicate, or may give you a hint of why it turned out the way it did. But when you actually go through and look at these studies, most of them are not the kind of high quality, natural experiment study we're talking about. A lot of them just focus on black men, Hispanic men, like very particular subgroups. And then also a whole bunch of these studies are in a category of what they're called skilled cell studies. And these studies are different, right? They're not looking at like a specific causal link created by a natural experiment. What they're saying is we're gonna just look at seeing tire group of unscilled workers in the United States. We're gonna look at immigration flows. And then we're gonna make a bunch of assumptions. And a bunch of assumptions about the substitutability of native born and foreign born workers, about how fast capital adjusts. And based on those assumptions, we're gonna make big claims. And so there was this famous other Borjost paper in the early 2000s that made the claim that, when you do one of these studies, it shows really intense negative effects. And so this report that is often used, I know this is so wonky, is just like-- - We like wonky here. - Yes, but I think it is just a case study in that listing a bunch of studies with varying qualities, looking at varying different groups, is just like not the most accurate way to do things. And then yeah, I could go on, there are lots of other problems with it, but I just think that that is one of the ones that frustrates me the most. And frustrates a lot of the economists who I spoke to for this piece. - But I mean, I asked you question earlier, and now I'm just gonna give you the answer that I have to. - Yeah. - Which is this question about why it's so persistent people desire it. One of my theories for this is that there's a real desire to say and wash anti-immigrant sentiment. When large parts of the population hold opinions, and particularly when they are different than the kinds of people who are in media or are in elite spaces, right? Like most people who work in media are living in cosmopolitan cities, or have gone to college, have often maybe interactive with people who are from foreign-born countries, repeatedly throughout their lives, because they're like living like New York, or Chicago, or LA, or something like that. And as a result, like are not really in touch with some of the more common anti-immigration sentiments, and as a result, they feel kind of uncomfortable being like, well, they're all racist and xenophobes. So they don't wanna sound like that. And so in order to look at this sentiment in the country and go like, well, I don't wanna call them a bunch of people who hate immigrants, I need to find some more material explanation for their opposition to it. And I think it's like weird here, because I actually think it's important to take very seriously what people are saying. There are people who have serious cultural concerns where people coming into the country, and some of those things I find not reasonable, and some of them I find, I don't find really any of them reasonable, but I find I understand why someone feel that way without having it to be a bad person. Like do I wish that people didn't have those attitudes? Sure, but I think that they're not lying when they tell you the things that are actually concerning them. And you actually write something really nicely on this in your piece, and I'll let you say it, but can you just talk us a little bit about what surveys of public opinion actually find in regards to people's opposition to immigration? Well, first of all, I think that analysis is really spot on. I think St. Washington is a good, we're descriptor the one that I have, I had as often a veneer of respectability. And I think there is a lot of this deep discomfort with non-materialist explanations, in part also because, especially if you're thinking about, let's say, center left folks, if you're part of a political party that you think needs to respond to people's views on immigration, it's much easier to say, well, look, we already believe in raising worker wages, and so all of a sudden, if immigration gets looped into the set of values that we already believe, we're then comfortable to give into people's instincts here, where if it feels like pandering to darker forces, I think that makes liberals especially less comfortable with doing it. And I think to your point though, it's like if we don't acknowledge those darker forces, it's not always great. And I think what you're getting at too is in this piece, so consistently what you find in sort of surveys of public opinion is that it's not primarily material explanations, that explain things. It's things, a lot of them are about cultural difference, about violations of social norms, about crime, about national identity. And I think one of the most revealing things here is that the demographic that is most opposed immigration are older folks living in rural areas, many of whom are retired. And the people who tend to be most supportive immigration are the people who are living in the big cities where there are working age people living in big cities where immigrants are more common. So if you thought like, okay, this is a product of the people who immigrants are directly competing with are the most anti-immigrant, you would think, oh, this would show up where the immigrants are and it doesn't. And so I think that really speaks to it. I think the other thing that really speaks to it is like, have you just listened to the Republican party? Like Donald Trump and JD Vance will occasionally mention wages, especially like when it's Stephen Miller talking to the New York Times, when it's JD Vance in a vice presidential debate or talking to a New York Times interviewer, that's when they will bring up this wages argument. When they're speaking to an audience that they know is like very center or left, they will like bring up this wages argument. But if you listen to the guy at the top of the ticket, right? It is, these folks are poisoning the blood of our country. It is portraying immigrants as a sort of psychopathic hoard of murderers. - Yeah. - It's spreading conspiracy theories about pet eating immigrants. Like, it's very hard to take seriously that like, this is actually the main concern. When the leader of the party who is anti-immigration is like so openly pointing to very different set of issues. - After the break, why less immigration would mean a poor quality of life in America? - I think one of the things that like, I also find reasonable for why people struggle is the E-Com 101 Exploration you give, right at the beginning, is intuitive. And it shows up in like many different parts of like our E-Com reporting is this question of like, thinking outside of partial equilibrium, right? If you were to just say, I'm looking at just the impact of immigrants on wages, holding equal all other effects on the population on the economy, then you would see negative downward pressure on wages. But economists don't do that. Like, our lives aren't lived in partial equilibrium. We live in general equilibrium. We live in, there are multiple different markets for working together at all times. And you have to look at not just what's happening with the effect on the labor markets, what's happening in the effect on the housing market, the consumption of random household goods. And so I think that that's really difficult to do in normal conversation. And also I think, I mean, what I think is really funny is that like now there's this big, like you kind of shout out the foreshadow, there's like a big push to blame immigrants for the housing market. And it's like, oh, the only time immigrants are consumers of anything. So they're consuming housing. Otherwise, they're just competing with you for wages. They're not buying anything else. But what I wanted to ask though, is about this other argument that people also make, which is, okay, maybe you're right, that in the world that we live in, given that immigration is always happening, companies can rely on there to be some level of immigration. They're used to a high level of immigration happening. You don't see these negative effects on wages. But in a world where you were to just like, really, really tamp down, really, really stop immigration from coming in, companies would have to reshape how they're doing, their hiring practices. The entire American economy would change if it was relying on foreign labor. And so this idea that there are these, quote, jobs Americans won't do isn't true. They would do them at a price. If they would do them, if the wages were better, if the working conditions were better, and that we should strive for this sort of like, higher quality jobs. And companies that can't do that, well, they should just not do that anymore. They should just like, literally stop relying on foreign labor. And so I think that like, how you respond to that, I think is really important because, you know, I do think a lot of people are starting like fix it on that argument. - Yeah, yeah. This has actually been one of the largest justifications for what Donald Trump has called the largest deportation effort in American history that he wants to enact when he's in office. Any of his advisors are talking about this, they talk about this is going to force employers to hire workers at higher wages, to give them better jobs, and that's a big reason why we should do it. So I think it's a really important one to address. And what's nice is we actually have some really good empirical studies on this. You don't just have to guess as to what would happen and assume as what would happen. My favorite of these studies, although there are a few, looked at the Secure Communities Program, which was a DHS program that deported about 500,000 immigrants between 2008 and 2014, so during the Obama administration. And the way that this happened was it happened sort of semi-randomly across communities, such that it created a sort of natural experiment where you could look at how it affected communities where it had happened and how it affected not yet affected communities. And the findings were shocking even to me, because I would think, okay, like maybe, when you get rid of a lot of these workers, like there's just going to be more jobs available, but what the authors find. - It's a shock, it's like, yeah. - It's such a big immediate shock. The authors find is that for every 100 immigrant and workers who are deported, there are actually nine fewer jobs for natives. And this just isn't temporary job. This is like permanently, there are fewer jobs for natives and the community, unemployment goes up and wages slightly fall. And I think this kind of finding is repeated across different examples through American history. There's another great study of the H2B program, which allocates low skilled workers to companies, and also finds that when companies aren't allocated to those workers, they don't hire a bunch of natives. They actually just produce less. And so what happens when immigrants are ripped away from these communities is all the sort of interconnected web of employment and workers whose jobs have had it on each other all gets torn up, right? Businesses close, businesses have to stop producing as much. There are just less childcare services, there are less meals served, there are just less houses built. Either for reasons of employers actually can't have a viable business with higher labor costs, whether it's because natives don't always want to do these jobs, or whether it's just because for the reasons we talked about earlier, there's just a lot of benefits from the specialization of labor that occur when immigrants are in a place. One way I think about this is sort of the opposite of the story that we were talking about earlier. When we talked about immigrants coming in and creating the specialization plus scale, that just happens in reverse. Instead of businesses expanding, and therefore being able to hire more natives because they're expanding, businesses are shrinking, they're shutting down, they're closing, and when that happens, native born workers get caught in the crossfire. When there's less demand for your services as a restaurant and your costs are higher, and so you have to close down, you're not just getting rid of your immigrant workers, you're getting rid of all the native born workers who are working there too. And so I think that's what these studies are finding is you just can't neatly remove immigrants from communities without having huge backfireing effects on the native born. - Yeah, I mean, I think it's even useful to play it out in the best case scenario. I think the best case scenario for the folks who are making this argument is that, okay, there's this short term harm, but then you just need sort of to let the economy sort of play out and develop new businesses to figure out new business models that work. And in the best case scenario, you're talking about a poorer country. Like you're talking about a country where your output, your growth is literally less, and that sounds very abstract, but we're talking about less stuff. You have less money, you can buy fewer things, you can buy a worse quality of life, your housing is probably worse, even the basic stuff where you're talking about, can you afford childcare? Fewer people can do that. A lot of things are worse when the output declines, when it's harder for businesses to try new things, when there's difficulty with dynamism in the economy, where you can't certain a bunch of different kinds of businesses quickly see what works and have that kind of churn. And so I think it's like even difficult conceptualize, when people are making this argument, they're saying we should take on the costs of being a poor country for the sake of national homogeneity of where you were born. And so I think that that's like the trade-off we're talking about here. It's not like that America would cease to exist, right? There are a lot of countries who follow, there's a sort of principles we're talking about here, where they are really strict on who gets to come in, and they're just poorer than America. Like that's, and I think that that's the really clear trade-off that I think often this restriction is, won't make boldly, you know? - And first of all, even the best case scenario you're talking about is one that has actually like, no empirical evidence, it's all theoretical. So that's the first point. The second is that this gets back to I think your point about general versus partial equilibrium too, because when we're even just looking at these wage or employment studies, they're holding a lot constant. And everything they're holding constant also changes in an actual scenario where you deport millions of immigrants. So there is another great study from the economist Ben Jones and a few others looking at immigrants and entrepreneurship. And they looked at basically every single business that opened up between 2005 and 2010 and looked at basically the country of origin of the person who started that business. And they found that immigrants are 80% more likely to start new businesses than native born individuals. And when they actually did the math, they found that immigrants by entrepreneurship alone are creating far more jobs than they take. One response to that would be, okay, well maybe this is high-skilled immigrants, like maybe this is the sort of Google founder kind of fact, but actually they found that there was no difference in the rate of entrepreneurship between individuals from OCED countries and from non-OCED countries that in reality, just like, and if you just think about this for a second, think about the people who end up coming here, the amounts of risks they have to take, the perseverance that it takes to actually get to the US, it wouldn't be surprising that these people are more intrepid and more entrepreneurial. - Just huge selection. That's like if you can make it through the dairy and gap. Like what does it say about you? - Exactly, exactly. And so that's one effect that is completely lost in a lot of these studies. One of my favorite studies of this is one that was done in Denmark, because in Denmark, what is interesting, unlike in the US where you have to just look at a specific city, Denmark has data on individuals for the entire country, it's a pretty small country. And so researchers can actually track what happens to every single individual worker when new immigrants come in. And that gives you a sort of accuracy that you don't necessarily get with the natural experiments studies in the US, at least at a country-wide basis. And what they found is that native born, even less skilled native born workers end up responding to immigration by entering higher paying occupations, by moving to higher opportunity cities, and by actually getting better education, such that they actually had higher wages as a result of it. And so I could go on, you could talk about the amount of women who are able to be in the workforce because of immigrants providing childcare. Like you can list this out. And there are all these ways in which even these studies are missing the sort of beneficial effect that immigrants are having, that like you would be taking away if you just suddenly got rid of all these people. In addition to this like atrocious humanitarian effects, yeah. - I find that the day is like, I'm like, I want to like some sort of like, pull on their privacy concerns. 'Cause it's like, I don't know. - I just like, do you guys like not care? I mean, like I think it's great. I would be pro this everywhere, but I'm just like surprised that countries are able to do this. - Yeah, I'm like, whoa. - They're like a revolt in America. - I know, I know. Even if the data's anonymized, I'm like the fact that like, the data the researchers got was anonymized. But the data the government has is anonymized. - We don't even let the government share data like that. Like I always can't just like send like, treasury department like all the data they have when people's tax returns. - But you know what, you know what, great, the Danish for doing it. - Yeah, good for that. - We can learn more about immigration. - So true. - Through them. - But so I think the thing that's interesting is like, you know, we've made a bunch of arguments here about why this is actually really positive for the economy. Regardless of that, there's been a backlash. We're seeing that right now. I mean, this is airing on election day. And so we're, I'm sure in the future, just keeps saying nervous like, if anyone's going on. - Apologies, anyone who was listening to this, looking for a soothing distraction. - Yeah, no, absolutely not. But this has been probably the most important issue of this election. Maybe inflation is another one, but the two most important issues. I didn't episode earlier this year with John Bern Murdock, where we talked about the sense that Americans are very xenophobic and this narrative that, you know, they hate immigration, they hate immigrants. That's just like a fact of the world. And that, you know, all immigration is basically a plot by elites to shove down our throats. And, you know, of course, we explored how a lot of that narrative is really overblown and underestimates just how strong pro-immigrant sentiment is in America, particularly relative to other countries. And, you know, I still stand by that analysis, but there has been a shift in public opinion in, you know, even the past year, you've seen polls come out that have really indicated that there's been a backlash effect to the high levels of immigration that are, you know, kind of returning us to the 1800s averages. And so first, can you talk us through that backlash? What are the numbers there? What are we seeing? - Totally. The thing that first drew my attention to this was, as you were saying, the way that this has impacted the election, is that you've just seen such a hard right turn in the rhetoric from candidates on both sides. And I remember. Remember listening to Trump in 2024, making 2016 Trump sound like JFK. Yeah. Just like how crazy he was. And then looking at the Democratic side, where the message went from in 2020, Joe Biden promising to restore moral dignity to our asylum system. And then in 2024, a Kamala Harris argument, like saying that actually no, she is the one that will fortify the border, not Trump. Do not come. Do not come. Do not come. And you're underlying this is quite possibly the most dramatic shift in public opinion that I've ever seen. So going back to the 1960s, Gallup asks Americans every year this question, do you think immigration should be increased, kept the same or decreased? In 2020, only 28% of Americans said that immigration should be decreased. Yeah. Actually, more Americans that it should be increased by 2024, just four years later, the percentage of those who wanted to decrease had nearly doubled to 55%. The first time that there had been a majority of Americans who wanted immigration decreased since the early 2000s. And just to put this shift in context, I think what Americans think about big public opinion shifts, they think of gay marriage. And I think of the increasing support for gay marriage, support for gay marriage, according to Gallup, increased about 20 points over the course of around a decade, maybe eight or nine years. This shift we're talking about was nearly 30 points in four years. That makes gay marriage look gradual and small by comparison. And this immigration shift is most concentrated among Republicans, but it's also Democrats, it's also independence. And it's especially been sharp in the past year. Yeah. This is one of those things where I think it's really important for people who, like myself, are in favor of high levels of immigration. First of all, to accept that at some level, if you get that, you will have some negative effects. But I think also to like really narrow in on to people specific concerns. So I didn't article earlier this year, it's called something fishy about the migrant crisis. And basically I was just like, okay, there are high levels of immigration in a lot of places in this country. But not every place in this country is experiencing backlash, right? Like you're hearing these stories in New York and Chicago about people sleeping on the floors of police stations in Chicago. In New York, I had like an affordable housing lawyer tell me like, you know, she's a very liberal person telling me that she was kind of concerned because there were migrants in the street in Midtown Manhattan, who were just like lying on the ground. And there's a lot to which I'm like, you know, if these people who are like talking to me are like some of the most liberal people on immigration are expressing kind of like, well, we can't handle this. Like we obviously can't handle this. Like it indicates like a very specific problem, right? Like people, like these New Yorkers, Chicagoans, they're not like afraid of immigrants or foreign-born people. Like the, like there's huge levels of foreign-born share in like New York and Chicago. And the number of people that were entering, we're talking about, you know, that were, are, are, are, are coming in and demanding services from local government. We're a very small fraction of this. So I was trying to understand like what was going on there. And I really came down to, there are specific concerns people have. People don't want to see local tax dollars being spent on newcomers to their city. If they feel like they need things that the city's not actually taking care of. They don't want to see their schools being used as shelters instead of being used in order to service, you know, their kids. And there's just kind of general sense that like now there are people sleeping on the streets. Like there's no more for them to be housed. Like it's actually reducing my quality of life a bit. Clearly it's a sense of it being overwhelmed. But then when I looked in like places like Miami and Los Angeles and in Texas and in Houston, Miami and Houston in particular, I was like, there are way more immigrants who have come through a Houston like in Texas, then have come through a Chicago. So why are we seeing such a backlash? And I came to like two reasons. One is that many of the immigrants were not able to get work permits. The other thing that's really important here is like is the Greg Abbott busing program. Because like most people they come into the country and you know what happens. Like they have networks that they're following. Like they either they have population. The people that they're able to get help from or they're even people who are kind of recruiting them as they're kind of coming over like, oh, we need work. We need people to come do this. Because there's a level to which like there's a natural flow to where they end up. And Greg Abbott has I think maybe the most effective political stunt in American history. Like I genuinely think like reshape the entire conversation on immigration by doing this. And then he says, okay, I'm going to bust people effectively breaking these kind of like natural kind of shifts to democratic cities. And when people kind of show up randomly, there's like of course like this massive transaction costs that's enacted. And you know, Texas is a border state and I think it's like at some level, I kind of like understand they're like, oh, we need to like, well, everyone should have to experience what it's like to have all this kind of flow of people coming in. But Texas is boomed as a result of this too. So anyway, I think the real thing that's important here is that people who are in favor of immigration have to address these specific concerns. You have to make sure there is like actually a clear or really process by which people are being resettled. If there's not, I mean, that's going to lead to backlash even from people who are in favor of immigration. And the most frustrating part of my reporting is learning the Biden administration had basically abdicated their responsibility to try and help with the resettlement process of people across the country because they were afraid of being blamed. And to me, I'm like, well, you were still blamed. So I'm not sure it worked out for you. But anyway, that's yeah. No, no, I think everything you're describing here, I think falls under the banner of what has been called either sort of colloquially chaos theory or more academically the locus of control theory of immigration, which is that populations tend to be able to handle high amounts of immigration if they think the process is orderly and fair. And they become much more likely to oppose immigration when they see the process chaotic and unfair. And disorderly, you know, you have a great example of that piece of the UK post Brexit having very high levels of immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment decreasing. Something you see in the US is that even as you have these massive shifts in the amount of immigrants people want led in, when you ask questions like, do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society or do you support a path to citizenship for non-documented immigrants? And even should it be easier to immigrate to the US, people's views actually haven't changed nearly as much and they remain more pro immigrant than they have. They were in 2016, which speaks the fact that what people are upset about here, it's like they're not suddenly xenophobic. They don't suddenly hate immigrants. A lot of what's happening is that they're responding to like the chaos of the process. Yeah. I think my favorite part of that piece that you wrote was this point that you made about how there's a way of looking at Greg Abbott's busing program as working in the sense, like, look, didn't this prove his point? Like he said that liberal city should have to handle this and he proved that they couldn't. But the process by which he did it was engineered to achieve that outcome. Right? You point out on that piece that there are three million foreign-born people in New York city in a city of eight million and they've been bust a couple tens of thousands. Yeah. And it has led Eric Adams to say like New York is falling apart. That does not mean that like New York can't handle that amount of immigrants. Like the specific process by which this happened was engineered to achieve an outcome of chaos. Yeah. And that's what people are responding to. Well, let's leave it on an optimistic note. Always our last question. What is something that you originally thought was good on paper, but didn't pan out in real life? Oh. So this is quite a pivot from what we were talking about earlier. So last year I got engaged to my girlfriend. That was not the thing that was seem to go. Good God. That would be bad. But the way I did it was we were, I was our five year anniversary in Rome, very romantic. I knew I wanted to propose in front of the pandewan, which was my partner's favorite like building in Rome. She's an architect. She's an architect, yes. But I knew I didn't want to do it when there were a bunch of crowds around. So I were like, how can I figure out a way to get us there like early in the morning? Oh my God. And so I decided and a decision that looked very good on paper to book a Vatican tour for like 9 a.m. Okay. And so I was like, oh, I'll propose and then we'll go on this tour of the Vatican and it will be like really cool and it'll be like, we'll see the cysteine chapel. Sounded great. Look good on paper. It turns out that immediately after you have one of the most emotionally riveting experiences of your life, you don't want to go into. The last thing you want to do is go on a three hour tour of the Vatican. We have to wait until the last 15 minutes to see the cysteine chapel. I'm like, we're just like, we're just like so badly. We just wanted to get out of there and be with each other. We were just in such a great mood only to have like the biggest buzzkill in the world. Be so funny, Roger. No, the story. Wait, I can't wait. So you went on the tour. We went on the tour. I wish so badly. I would have said, let's just forget the tour. But I was like, we were in such good spirits after we're like, we're going to be so great. Like actually looking back, I'm like, was that even good on paper? I don't think so. I was actually with you. I was like, okay, yeah. Then you had like a fun tour. I like it. I like a nice walking tour architecture tour. Probably great when you're like confined to the Vatican and just looking at like our guide was she was great. Yeah. But she was just like explaining every little thing and we're just like, we don't want to be in public with a million people. We just want to be with each other. This is very strange. I think this is my favorite good on paper. Who is this? I thought I put a lot of thought in this one. Like that. This one was bad. This is not my bad. It's a funny story now. Yeah. I look back on it very fondly. Amazing. So yes, that's my good on paper story. Thank you so much, Roger. Thanks for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure being here. Good on paper is produced by Janay West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact checked by Anna Alvarado, and engineered by Eric Alvang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smersiak. Claudine Abade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio on Drevaldez as our managing editor. And hey, if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. I'm Drew Slam Demsys, and we'll see you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]