The New York Times Has a very long piece about the issue of immigration. Here is my version of a TLDR:
Denmark has shown that an enlightened progressive government can retain its welfare state by taking on a freely restrictive policy on immigration. So it is now OK for American liberals to switch to a position from opposition to large -scale immigration.
The establishment of the Democratic Party was already leaning in this direction because of the recent presidential elections, but the NYT story offers a kind of official sanction for progressives to adjust their views on immigration.
To be clear, I agree with those who suggest that the increase in immigrations without papers in 2021-24 was a problem for the Democrats in the recent elections. Indeed, the Biden administration seemed to acknowledge this fact, but too late to change the perception of the voters. Nevertheless, I was disappointed by the NYT story, which presented a somewhat distorted view of the broader immigration problem.
Consider the following explanation:
Many studies find a modest negative effect on wages for people who already live in a country and usually fall on employees with a low income. A report from 2017 Due to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, intended as an extensive analysis of the economic effects of immigration, a tab list contains rigorous academic studies that estimate the effects of immigration on native wages; 18 of the 22 results are negative.
Most readers probably don’t bother to investigate the report cited by The Times. Here is being abstract:
The economic and tax consequences of immigration believes that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of indigenous employees is generally very small, and that all negative effects are most likely to be found for earlier immigrants or native drop-outs in high school. Immigrants of the first generation are more expensive for governments than the indigenous indigenous generation, but the second generation is among the strongest tax and economic contributors in the US, this report concludes that immigration has a general positive effect on long -term economic growth growth in the US
I will not say that the NYT description was incorrect, but it was certainly a bit misleading.
Or consider the following item from the Times story:
The United States experienced during the Biden administration The fastest rapid immigration on recordAt a pace of arrival that even those of the peak years of Ellis Island surpassed. More than eight million people entered the country, around 60 percent without legal permission. In total, around 16 percent of American residents were born abroad today, with the previous high of 14.8 percent in 1890.
Given their earlier claim that immigration mainly lowers the wages of those at the bottom, you may have expected that the times will provide some data about the effect of the unprecedented wave of immigration. I think I know why they didn’t do that. It appears that this increase in immigration was associated Unusually large wage profits Under the lowest paid employees. It is clear that the author of the story tried to choose data that supported their argument and hide data that suggests that immigration does not hurt Real wages.
The story also mentions the fact that immigrants to countries such as Denmark and Sweden tend to take more crime than the indigenous born population. But they do not mention that immigrants are to the US much less likely Crimes then commit indigenous Americans. Indeed, in places such as New York City, the crime percentage often decreases considerably when a wave of immigrants replaced the indigenous born population. I live in Orange County, which combines a particularly high immigrant population with a particularly low crime. I wonder why the NYT suggested that America should learn from what happened in Denmark, but not mentioned that the immigrant crime problem in Scandinavia does not apply to the US?