Well, let's try to take a step back and approach this sort of stuff with a more scientific, less politically hysterical way. Models are simply mathematical fiction, useful in as much as they constrain our thinking and remove wordplay from it. They're ways of imposing some discipline on our thinking. When a paper pours over the data, makes the case for an identification strategy and its associated causality graph, and estimates some parameters, these are not Objective Truth. You get this, obviously, amazing. Ok, so, are they? Samples from a high-dimensionality probability distribution encoding the "real" parameters for the effects of immigration on any desired outcome.
So maybe try to consider this yet another data point. A paper estimating a certain effect size in a certain context shouldn't flip your entire mental model of a certain phenomenon, but it's also totally irrational to handwave away empirical results that don't match your intuition.
Ever since the Reagan/Thatcher revolution there haven't been too many pay rises for the working class. Everything that could be outsourced and offshored was outsourced and offshored. In Europe they have been continually expanding the EU so this process has been more 'moving East' than moving offshore.
Meanwhile, the rentier class has expanded on the back of cheap money and a whole new class of service jobs has arrived to suit the rentier class, for example car detailing, yoga instruction, property management, food delivery and dog walking.
The rentier class don't add value, they are parasites, plain and simple. They have got richer, for sure, but the price of this has been everyone else priced out of their own homes and communities. This rampant house price inflation is ridiculous, hence stagnant pay just doesn't go as far, even if manufactured goods are cheaper than they were before the Reagan/Thatcher revolution.
Hence my problem with the 'scientific' paper. It has nothing to do with immigrants, more to do with not believing people are better off.
Speaking personally, I only got into software development because my customer service job was outsourced to India. Yes I did get a boost to my salary, and yes I did have to reskill to achieve that when I could have happily bumbled along being nice to people on the phone all day doing customer service. However, that only got me back to the start, with a wage that, accounting for inflation, was less than what I was getting as a student during my 'year in industry'. Furthermore, I was still just sat at a desk with a screen, just typing different keystrokes.
I have always been welcoming to whomever arrives from wherever, however, I always feel bad for those that have had to move due to war, which our Western governments are invariably complicit in.
As a Latin American, I find it funnny it's basically impossible to tell if an American with this vocabulary and framing is like ultra MAGA or "communist".
> which our Western governments are invariably complicit in
You are not the center of the universe, my friend. People in the Global South have agency too. This sort of performative anti-imperialism goes around itself and becomes an Empire-centered account of world politics.
This is usually what's known in Econometrics as Identification. Any applied econ paper written in the last two or three decades has at least a short section discussing causality and making the case for its identification strategy.
Yes, they do. Just ctrl+F "identification" if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.
In fact, this is such a common practice that it's nigh impossible to publich an empirical paper without discussing identification and employing an identification strategy.
You can always tell people who are not familiar with modern Economics because of it too, they will bring "but correlation is no causation" up and feel pretty good with themselves. Then you mention the identification strategy, and they just stare at you blankly without getting what you mean by that. I've seen this happen so many times.
Baked in this plan is the idea that the revenue from tariffs will be much smaller than income tax revenues, and therefore that the federal government will also get smaller.
Right, but that implies that spending is controlled by revenues… when it’s clearly not. That just means higher deficits, threatening a default of US Bonds, which is a worst case scenario for American prosperity.
I'm confident the people pursuing this mad agenda don't know the first thing about US budget laws and think they can just cut spending DOGE-style forever.
Considering that the driver of all this is surrounded by yes-men and has spent his entire entitled life getting his way, I think their goal is to will it into being. And when it fails, blame the other party.
As a Latin American, I can't help but buy the American Exceptionalism thesis, and seeing you guys in this situation humanizes you so much. The US has such a strong bureaucracy and high bar for competence that you generally lack the immune system required for detecting con artists and social climbers - at least in politics. Ask a random Argentinian or Brazilian what politicians Trump reminds them of, and you'll get a seemingly endless lists of genuinely stupid, borderline sociopath populists. Follow up with a question on what are the consequences of having arbitrary, ever-changing tariffs on most goods for the purpose of industrialization, and you'll get a laugh, then a sad face.
Import-substitution is bad for econ 101 reasons that most people who have an axe to grind against Dems would've been absolutely capable of grasping only a few years ago. Now, it seems so many are willing to turn off a part of their brains for this short-sighted wishful thinking. "Well, the official narrative is that we're doing this to get manufacturing back, so let's wait and see" is something most people would immediately perceive as bs if a Dem was sitting in the Oval Office. Seeing a politician campaign on a stupid platform, and then getting surprised he actually shoots himself in the foot spending political capital pursuing is also very Latin American.
The good part is that the soon-to-be-coming recession the federal government just fabricated out of thin air is fully self-inflicted, and therefore somewhat easy to fix. The bad part is you have (at least) 4 more years of this lunacy, so it might take a while.
As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe, I had a completely identical reaction. We had so many similar populists and idiots in power, one cannot help but recognize the obvious pattern.
Many people in America seem to be convinced that their involvement in the democracy ended after voting in the elections, and cannot conceptualize how to deal with an adversarial government. The scale of the protests and pushback Trump administration has received is laughably small compared to the scale of America as a country. People are lacking a basic political immune system, or even a sense of self preservation.
And the most puzzling part is that the entire situation is 100% self-inflicted. It usually takes a major war or a sustained external campaign to inflict the kind of damage Trump administration has done to the country in such a short period of time.
There has been a sustained campaign of propaganda, stoking division and culture wars. There has also been a sustained class warfare and concentration of wealth at the very top as most people can't seem to get ahead. Both political parties sold out their constituents a long time ago and the supreme court has been stacked with several criminally corrupt and treacherous villains.
I'm definitely no economist but the current administration doesn't seem to listen to them anyway. To me, this is going to be an extremely high tax on lower and middle income people, as well as small businesses. Most of us buy Chinese products all the time or, at least, ones that have Chinese in the supply chain somewhere. I know there has been a trade imbalance and maybe tariffs is a tool that could have been used, but I learned in high school(maybe in collage too) that it's most effective when you present a united front with other allies. Unfortunately, we really don't have allies like we used to. The current admin has destroyed, or at least highly eroded trust and partnerships we had in the past. By attacking almost every country, we stand truly alone. There was an article about Vietnam recently which explained that because we have/are fighting with them too, they have great leverage to get what they want by leveraging the U.S. against China. To me, we've just given away all our leverage by not being trustworthy and attacking all other countries at once (figuratively, for now at least). I'm simply not hopeful for our future from a majority of citizens point of view. For our GDP per capita, we do absolutely horrible, in what seems like most international indexes, comparatively. The areas we do "well" are not good ones. Like number of our citizens incarcerated. I think we beat China, Russia, and most every country in that. From the perspective of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", I think we've failed. I don't know, exactly, but from what I've read our Cost/Benefit ratio on healthcare is one of the most dismal in the world. We don't rate well, in almost any category that is a positive for our populous, especially considering our GDP per capita.
Well, those Indians living in the US will have families of their own, and over time become part of the community you claim to be a part of. Very much like your ancestors did, except they likely didn't face the arbitrary constraints on immigration that Indians (and any other nationality) face today.
The same thing that happened in the UK will happen in America.
People in the UK who are against immigration are often talking about Poles who moved to the UK after the EU and not Indian families who have lived in those neighborhoods for generations.
The crazy thing is, it's not that long ago that Irish and Italian immigrants were not discriminated against. They didn't even consider Italian immigrants to be white.
This need to bend the argument back to the initial English colonization of America is stupid. These mediocre Indian IT drones are not putting everything they own in a boat and washing up here hoping to find a better life. They're the rich B students that could afford the process which become part of an idealized system that American corporations are now bending and exploiting to hire what are essentially indentured servants from a population of people who couldn't get the best jobs in their native country, so they settled on this backup plan.
And they DO have families of their own here (and bring over their in-laws), and a lot of them don't integrate well, for a variety of reasons. At least a third of my neighborhood is Indian. They glare at me on the sidewalk when I wave. And most of them remain inured in their caste system, and are difficult and unpleasant to work with.
Again, all the same arguments about developing our own chips domestically -- which I doubt many people have a problem with -- apply to developing our own, better education pipeline to fully develop domestic software engineers.
That being said, in the US you can and should absolutely should build more, and basically get rid of most zoning regulations. You'd have a hard time finding anything as touristic and dense as Barcelona in the US.
I argue AirBnB should be banned anywhere building cannot be done at a rate which ensures affordable housing can exist for locals. Whether that is due to construction labor shortages, density, zoning, whatever, it does not matter. AirBnB can exist where there is surplus housing capacity, but should be banned anywhere else.
Locals get votes, tourists and AirBnB do not. The harm of not being able to afford housing is far worse than harm incurred by not being able to book a vacation rental you prefer.
Hotels go through an approval process to be built, and are regulated (where as AirBnB exists to skirt lodging regulation). Hotels are not competing against residential housing, but AirBnB is.
Outside of downtown areas in the biggest cities in the US, it is very unlikely that a hotel is built in an area that people would want to build residential housing.
Normally hotels are built near either business or tourist areas. Very few people want their residences in the suburban office park areas. Tourist areas tend to be older areas that have strong restrictions on new development--hotels there have to go through long permitting processes.
Well look at a map of Barcelona. Hotels are in the middle of residential areas throughout the city. Not sure what the permitting process has to do with any of this. Hotels take up land. Land that could be used for residential housing. Permitting can be changed by law (same as banning AirBnbs).
No one is suggesting getting rid of industrial zoning. "getting rid of zoning" for the vast majority of people saying it means removing density restrictions and mixed use (business + residential) restrictions.
I lived a few miles away from the Texas City plant, growing up. A good, stiff, wind, and a penchant for rhinoviruses can solve a lot of chemical-plant-related issues.
Michael Levin [1] does brillant work on this "cellular language" space and the key point is that genetics is more like biological IaC, it only encodes proteins. Most of the actual control, anatomic and physiological homestasis happens at the higher level of bioelectricity - which works as a computational medium.
So maybe try to consider this yet another data point. A paper estimating a certain effect size in a certain context shouldn't flip your entire mental model of a certain phenomenon, but it's also totally irrational to handwave away empirical results that don't match your intuition.