The American Compass recently published a series of pieces about the economic successes of the Trump administration and whither national conservatism after his defeat by Joe Biden. Several commentators criticized the pieces for arguing that restrictive immigration policies were responsible for wage and employment growth during the Trump administration. Oren Cass, the executive director of American Compass, responded to that criticism with a piece arguing that lower immigration did result in higher wages and lower unemployment.
Cass wrote that those critics “fascinate me, in the same way an old-timey ‘cabinet of curiosities’ might capture the attention,” and responded with an essay that contemptuously dismisses social science on how immigration affects the labor market in favor of anecdotes from news stories. This blog post is a response to one of Cass’s points that fascinates me. He wrote:
The empirical case for the ‘nothing to see here’ approach to immigration economics is paper thin; one can typically guess where the hyperlinks will point before moving the cursor to them. Academics debate endlessly whether a sudden and massive influx of Cuban refugees in Miami in 1980 did or did not depress local wages, as if this deeply unnatural ‘natural experiment’ answers for all times and places the question of how a national economy’s labor market might be affected by the rate at which a given class of workers flows into it.
It is fascinating when someone so casually dismisses a vast body of knowledge. This blogpost will explain some basics about labor economics, dive into the immigration literature, and hopefully explain why Cass and others who ignore economic research do so at their own peril.
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