The New York Times has a very long piece on the issue of immigration. Here’s my version of a TLDR:
Denmark has shown that an enlightened progressive government can preserve its welfare state by adopting fairly restrictive policies on immigration. Thus it’s now OK for American liberals to switch to a position of opposition to large scale immigration.
The Democratic Party establishment was already leaning in this direction due to the recent presidential election, but the NYT story provides a sort official sanction for progressives to adjust their views on immigration.
To be clear, I agree with those who suggest that the surge in undocumented immigrations during 2021-24 was a problem for the Democrats in the recent election. Indeed, the Biden administration seemed to recognize this fact, but too late to alter voter perceptions. Nonetheless, I was disappointed by the NYT story, which presented a somewhat distorted view of the broader immigration issue.
Consider the following statement:
Many studies find a modestly negative effect on wages for people who already live in a country, falling mostly on low-income workers. A 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, intended as a comprehensive analysis of the economic effects of immigration, contains a table listing rigorous academic studies that estimate immigration’s effects on native wages; 18 of the 22 results are negative.
Most readers probably don’t bother following up by examining the report cited by the Times. Here is its abstract:
The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S.
I won’t say the NYT description was false, but it was certainly a bit misleading.
Or consider the following item from the Times story:
During the Biden administration, the United States experienced its most rapid immigration on record, with a pace of entry that surpassed even that of the peak years of Ellis Island. More than eight million people entered the country, about 60 percent without legal permission. In all, about 16 percent of U.S. residents today were born abroad, exceeding the previous high of 14.8 percent in 1890.
Given their previous claim that immigration especially lowers the wages of those at the bottom, you might have expected the Times to provide some data about the effect of the unprecedented wave of immigration. I think I know why they did not do so. It turns out that this surge in immigration was associated with unusually large wage gains among the lowest paid workers. It is clear that the author of the story was trying to cherry pick data that supported their argument, and hide data that suggested immigration doesn’t hurt real wages.
The story also mentions the fact that immigrants to countries such as Denmark and Sweden tend to engage in more crime than the native born population. But they fail to mention that immigrants to the US are far less likely to commit crimes than are native-born Americans. Indeed, in places like New York City the crime rate often decreases sharply when a wave of immigrants supplant the native born population. I live in Orange County, which combines an especially high immigrant population with an especially low crime rate. I wonder why the NYT suggested that America needed to learn from what happened in Denmark, but failed to mention that the immigrant crime problem in Scandinavia does not apply to the US?
