Although, I am not familiar with the demands of most industries for skilled workers, as a physician, I am well aware with the situation in medicine. We are currently outsourcing 50% of our physician supply to persons not trained in American Medical schools of which about a third are foreign born graduates of foreign medical schools, a third US citizens attending foreign medical students, and the last third are graduates of Osteopathic medical schools.
I feel that in such a wealthy country with an excellent college and university system and wonderful medical schools, why are we not training enough US citizen physicians at home.
For the 40K yearly available medical residency positions, we are only graduating 20K medical school graduates.
Currently you need high MCAT scores and in the range of a 3.5 GPA to get into medical schools and there are plenty of applicants, but only 40-50% get in. Many of those US citizens not qualifying then take an end run of going to a much less competitive and often very expensive foreign school or an Osteopathic school. Osteopathy was once a field of medicine similar to Chiropractic with an emphasis on spinal manipulation and alternative medicine but has now largely morphed into the mainstream and is made up primarily of US citizens who just failed to get into medical schools, but want to be doctors, and accounts for 20% of residency spots.
In terms of American citizens, why do we only have enough slots that people need to take the end runs to get in. If there is a reason that doctors should be very smart people with high scores why are we accepting less smart people into our residencies. Foreign medical schools are of varying quality, some excellent, some fly by night. Osteopathic schools are fine but why this alternative educational system based on an archaic form of medicine that really is just now teaching mainstream medicine to less completive students.
But most importantly to the discussion why should some 15% of doctor spots go to foreign born physicians who often come from countries much more in need of physicians than the US thus contributing to the brain drain from those needier countries, and frankly, many with the primary motivation that the income is so much higher. I would not deny all positions because some of the brightest minds come from overseas, particularly in research, but Americans are not incapable of supplying their own physicians which might entail going down to a 3.3 gpa instead of a 3.5 to fill the extra 20K spots. We should graduate as many physicians from US medical schools as there are residency positions. We are not a needy country that can't educate our own doctors and these are the most lucrative prestigious jobs that should be filled by US citizens.
As a grandchild of immigrants I am not anti immigrant and actually favor higher migration, but we will help the world more is by taking poorer people who will rise in the ranks like my grandparents who were garment workers than the wealthy graduates of foreign college who can make a good living and help their own countries.
Here’s an idea: stop charging American teenagers a hundred thousand dollars plus to get a an undergraduate degree in the STEM disciplines? My son is studying engineering in a field that is both desperate for engineers and critical to national security. Without the help his father and I provide (which takes significant funds away from investing in our small business) his debt load from loans, currently at 9% per annum, would be crushing.
In the coming Age of AI enhanced STEM, I think overuse of immigration would cause a real glut of STEM people. I'm still for immigration, but the reality on the ground has changed.
While I applaud Matt for giving the rare, fair appraisal of Manchin's influence, I still see a major lingering misconception.
Manchin has been painted as the anti-progressive. Essentially, a moderate Republican that made it so the Democrats didn't *really* have a Senate majority. I think this reflects a standard progressive bias in media. Progressives can no do wrong, and are only ever beset by the less progressive.
Over here in the real world, we know that at least one of Manchin's big gripes with BBB was that it included a seriously regressive tax cut, the SALT cap increase. Yes, you read that right, Manchin was fighting to make proposed legislation *more* progressive, and this was rarely ever reported, or adequately reflected upon.
Unfortunately, the media doesn't like to criticize the "progressive" Dems emphasis on redistributing towards their upper middle class and above constituents. So Manchin is just not progressive, even when he is, in fact, being much more progressive.
If there’s no a mechanical impact—e.g., the CBO scoring on immigration prevents it from being advanced through a special legislative process—I don’t think this proposal matters much. It’s an interesting wrinkle in our metrics but what keeps us from enacting high-skill immigration is broader debate about immigration itself.
The tricky thing about dynamic scoring is that you can end up with model that predicts virtually anything, depending on what assumptions you decide to feel into it. The same is true for really any statistical model that tries to predict hard-to-predict stuff, whether it's population growth, the effect of mask rules on COVID spread, or the effect of some EPA rule on carbon emissions.
In theory, the people doing these models should be dispassionately looking at the data and drawing the honest, best conclusions they can, but often it doesn't work out that way, especially on politically charged topics where lots of powerful people have strong incentives to make the model come out a certain way, in order to enhance an ideological objective.
The fact that there exists no way to make so-called "nonpartisan" institutions really nonpartisan, as long as they are run by humans, makes it really difficult to draw conclusions that everybody on both sides of the aisle can trust.
"it’s an open secret that proposals to increase the number of high-skilled immigrants are currently tabulated by the U.S. government as being a net cost to the U.S. economy rather than a net benefit. . . The [CBO and JCT] tabulated that it would cost the federal government $3.1 billion over 10 years."
Those are two different things: the cost to the government is *not* the cost to the economy.
OK, and #2:
"Moreover, dynamic scoring can evolve as additional economic research emerges."
In other words, this will be a moving target, to be interpreted by each actor as they see fit, and in the meantime we will get numbers parading as metaphysical certainty which will typically be just educated guesses.
Here's the problem: this is arguing for the CBO and the JCT to tell us what policies are good for the US as a whole. But I don't *want* these organizations to do that. I simply want them to tell us, in the simplest terms, what will happen to spending and revenues. It's then up to Congress (and the people) to decide if this policy is good for the nation as a whole
Every time we depart from the KISS model, and add more assumptions, parameters and whatnot to these analyses, we increase the range of uncertainty and reduce the level of confidence. But those approximate answers will have the sheen of science and certainty even when they're anything but. It's fine to be uncertain as to future outcomes, but it's not okay to pretend that's not the case.
Sometimes you just make bets. Had it been subject to CBO investigation, I sure would have hated it had ARPA's packet-switching communication system had a cost-benefit analysis done on it. Would it have concluded that this bit of R&D would eventually return untold trillions of dollars to the US and global economy? Nope. Might that have killed it in the crib? You bet it might have.
As an economist who builds models, any attempt at qualifying impact of things like immigration and R&D is so impricise that if you present the error bands you get laughed out of the room. You're better off saying there is unquantified upside benefit in addition to the static score or you can provide a demonstrative example of the upside: if we assume x and y positive impact, the resulting revenue is z.
Just to harp on the Census again, the rightists really wanted double dynamic counting: exclude immigrants in cities but count them during fruit picking season in the rural counties.
Is it actually true that a score of $3.1B over ten years was a real cause in the STEM-visa proposal not being included in either of the reconciliation packages the Dems did in 2021-22? Because that seems like a really small number given the size of each of the packages. And I thought the issue with any immigration proposal the Dems proposed was that the Senate Parliamentarian struck them?
I suspect the reason the STEM-visa proposal has not become law is because it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster, and there are not 60 votes for it. Many Democrats want to hold the STEM-visa provision as a chip they can give to Republicans in "comprehensive immigration reform" negotiations. Many Republicans do not want "comprehensive immigration reform" if that includes any concessions on illegal immigrants in the country--and an increasing number do not want any immigration provisions that increase the number of immigrants, as the STEM-visa proposal presumably would.
I think the reality is that CBO scores are a political and not an economic tool. That Congress is able to game them to generate a politically acceptable score is proof enough which is then used to make dubious claims to the public to sell the legislation. I don’t see how dynamic scoring will change that fundamental problem, except to make it even easier to game.
And it’s not like the CBO has good skill when it comes to forecasting. Which isn’t a criticism of the CBO but an acknowledgment the economic forecasting is very difficult. Even in hindsight, it is very difficult to parse the effect of one piece of legislation to determine its actual effect on the economy.
(Rolling eyes) I would simply accurately forecast how legislation will affect a $22 trillion economy over a multiyear span, perfectly accounting for all unintended consequences, with the foresight of a modern Nostradamus. Surprised no one's thought of this before.
Actually, scratch that. I would instead take my skills of predicting the future and apply it to the stock market instead, where I will easily make quadrillions of dollars perfectly modeling how extremely complex systems will function over a long time span
The lack of dynamic scoring isn't why we don't have more high-skilled immigrants, and allowing dynamic scoring won't suddenly get Congress to allow more high-skilled immigrants in. This isn't one neat trick.
Democrats and Republicans are both completely bought in on the "demographics is destiny" idea. Democrats want mass amnesty and open borders because they believe such policies will deliver unto them eternal, unchecked political power. Republicans also believe that amnesty and open bordders will deliver unto Democrats eternal, unchecked political power, and thus have turned against almost all immigration in general. Neither party has reason to trust the other on immigration, because they can't trust the motivations of the other.
Slow Boring's essay about immigration raises an interesting question - at least in my mind.
I wonder how much unconscious bias there is in the minds of legislators towards people who are not of European ancestory. We desperately need qualified immigrants. Certin people in Congress are opposed to any immigration not coming from Europe - that is white Christain people.
Examples of tis bias - the problems of Hispanic immigrants from South America, Afgan immigrants have been waiting for almost two years for entry permits, and the difficulties faced by many from South East Asia.
This bias need not be spoken, but merely understood between some people. The politics of racial hatred is hurting our country and must be brought to an end.
Historically the country has been just as opposed to large scale immigration from Europe as well. Look at the push back that was applied to waves of German immigrants, then Irish or Italian. Not saying there isn't some racial bias, but its more about the size of the wave then where its from.
> Afgan immigrants have been waiting for almost two years for entry permits
Just to be fair, this and some other issues aren't problems created by Congress, right? It's the executive branch not doing it's job expeditiously. I don't think it's hatred driving that, just the all-too-common lack of state capacity (passport renewals is another similar issue).
Good points in principal, but how important is it? Is Biden pressing up against the legal limits of issuing green cards to foreign graduates? Is the lack of dynamic scoring the reason we do not have a merit-based immigration system. Would the NSF budget be larger with dynamic scoring? And, although it would be wonderful if CBO would rub Congress's nose in how much the deficits of a tax cut (or unfunded IRA) would slow growth, that WOULD be partisan.
One possible unintended consequence of increasing immigration: a further increase in housing demand, exacerbating an already problematic lack of supply and prohibitive prices, especially in centers where high tech industries dominate and such shortages are, in many cases, most acute. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the authors’ premise, but that cost has to be considered as well, as well as its impact on current residents.
Although, I am not familiar with the demands of most industries for skilled workers, as a physician, I am well aware with the situation in medicine. We are currently outsourcing 50% of our physician supply to persons not trained in American Medical schools of which about a third are foreign born graduates of foreign medical schools, a third US citizens attending foreign medical students, and the last third are graduates of Osteopathic medical schools.
I feel that in such a wealthy country with an excellent college and university system and wonderful medical schools, why are we not training enough US citizen physicians at home.
For the 40K yearly available medical residency positions, we are only graduating 20K medical school graduates.
Currently you need high MCAT scores and in the range of a 3.5 GPA to get into medical schools and there are plenty of applicants, but only 40-50% get in. Many of those US citizens not qualifying then take an end run of going to a much less competitive and often very expensive foreign school or an Osteopathic school. Osteopathy was once a field of medicine similar to Chiropractic with an emphasis on spinal manipulation and alternative medicine but has now largely morphed into the mainstream and is made up primarily of US citizens who just failed to get into medical schools, but want to be doctors, and accounts for 20% of residency spots.
In terms of American citizens, why do we only have enough slots that people need to take the end runs to get in. If there is a reason that doctors should be very smart people with high scores why are we accepting less smart people into our residencies. Foreign medical schools are of varying quality, some excellent, some fly by night. Osteopathic schools are fine but why this alternative educational system based on an archaic form of medicine that really is just now teaching mainstream medicine to less completive students.
But most importantly to the discussion why should some 15% of doctor spots go to foreign born physicians who often come from countries much more in need of physicians than the US thus contributing to the brain drain from those needier countries, and frankly, many with the primary motivation that the income is so much higher. I would not deny all positions because some of the brightest minds come from overseas, particularly in research, but Americans are not incapable of supplying their own physicians which might entail going down to a 3.3 gpa instead of a 3.5 to fill the extra 20K spots. We should graduate as many physicians from US medical schools as there are residency positions. We are not a needy country that can't educate our own doctors and these are the most lucrative prestigious jobs that should be filled by US citizens.
As a grandchild of immigrants I am not anti immigrant and actually favor higher migration, but we will help the world more is by taking poorer people who will rise in the ranks like my grandparents who were garment workers than the wealthy graduates of foreign college who can make a good living and help their own countries.
Here’s an idea: stop charging American teenagers a hundred thousand dollars plus to get a an undergraduate degree in the STEM disciplines? My son is studying engineering in a field that is both desperate for engineers and critical to national security. Without the help his father and I provide (which takes significant funds away from investing in our small business) his debt load from loans, currently at 9% per annum, would be crushing.
In the coming Age of AI enhanced STEM, I think overuse of immigration would cause a real glut of STEM people. I'm still for immigration, but the reality on the ground has changed.
While I applaud Matt for giving the rare, fair appraisal of Manchin's influence, I still see a major lingering misconception.
Manchin has been painted as the anti-progressive. Essentially, a moderate Republican that made it so the Democrats didn't *really* have a Senate majority. I think this reflects a standard progressive bias in media. Progressives can no do wrong, and are only ever beset by the less progressive.
Over here in the real world, we know that at least one of Manchin's big gripes with BBB was that it included a seriously regressive tax cut, the SALT cap increase. Yes, you read that right, Manchin was fighting to make proposed legislation *more* progressive, and this was rarely ever reported, or adequately reflected upon.
Unfortunately, the media doesn't like to criticize the "progressive" Dems emphasis on redistributing towards their upper middle class and above constituents. So Manchin is just not progressive, even when he is, in fact, being much more progressive.
Sorry- meant to comment on the Manchin post. =/
If there’s no a mechanical impact—e.g., the CBO scoring on immigration prevents it from being advanced through a special legislative process—I don’t think this proposal matters much. It’s an interesting wrinkle in our metrics but what keeps us from enacting high-skill immigration is broader debate about immigration itself.
The tricky thing about dynamic scoring is that you can end up with model that predicts virtually anything, depending on what assumptions you decide to feel into it. The same is true for really any statistical model that tries to predict hard-to-predict stuff, whether it's population growth, the effect of mask rules on COVID spread, or the effect of some EPA rule on carbon emissions.
In theory, the people doing these models should be dispassionately looking at the data and drawing the honest, best conclusions they can, but often it doesn't work out that way, especially on politically charged topics where lots of powerful people have strong incentives to make the model come out a certain way, in order to enhance an ideological objective.
The fact that there exists no way to make so-called "nonpartisan" institutions really nonpartisan, as long as they are run by humans, makes it really difficult to draw conclusions that everybody on both sides of the aisle can trust.
Nope, I'm not buying this argument.
Two quotes jumped out at me:
"it’s an open secret that proposals to increase the number of high-skilled immigrants are currently tabulated by the U.S. government as being a net cost to the U.S. economy rather than a net benefit. . . The [CBO and JCT] tabulated that it would cost the federal government $3.1 billion over 10 years."
Those are two different things: the cost to the government is *not* the cost to the economy.
OK, and #2:
"Moreover, dynamic scoring can evolve as additional economic research emerges."
In other words, this will be a moving target, to be interpreted by each actor as they see fit, and in the meantime we will get numbers parading as metaphysical certainty which will typically be just educated guesses.
Here's the problem: this is arguing for the CBO and the JCT to tell us what policies are good for the US as a whole. But I don't *want* these organizations to do that. I simply want them to tell us, in the simplest terms, what will happen to spending and revenues. It's then up to Congress (and the people) to decide if this policy is good for the nation as a whole
Every time we depart from the KISS model, and add more assumptions, parameters and whatnot to these analyses, we increase the range of uncertainty and reduce the level of confidence. But those approximate answers will have the sheen of science and certainty even when they're anything but. It's fine to be uncertain as to future outcomes, but it's not okay to pretend that's not the case.
Sometimes you just make bets. Had it been subject to CBO investigation, I sure would have hated it had ARPA's packet-switching communication system had a cost-benefit analysis done on it. Would it have concluded that this bit of R&D would eventually return untold trillions of dollars to the US and global economy? Nope. Might that have killed it in the crib? You bet it might have.
As an economist who builds models, any attempt at qualifying impact of things like immigration and R&D is so impricise that if you present the error bands you get laughed out of the room. You're better off saying there is unquantified upside benefit in addition to the static score or you can provide a demonstrative example of the upside: if we assume x and y positive impact, the resulting revenue is z.
Just to harp on the Census again, the rightists really wanted double dynamic counting: exclude immigrants in cities but count them during fruit picking season in the rural counties.
Is it actually true that a score of $3.1B over ten years was a real cause in the STEM-visa proposal not being included in either of the reconciliation packages the Dems did in 2021-22? Because that seems like a really small number given the size of each of the packages. And I thought the issue with any immigration proposal the Dems proposed was that the Senate Parliamentarian struck them?
I suspect the reason the STEM-visa proposal has not become law is because it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster, and there are not 60 votes for it. Many Democrats want to hold the STEM-visa provision as a chip they can give to Republicans in "comprehensive immigration reform" negotiations. Many Republicans do not want "comprehensive immigration reform" if that includes any concessions on illegal immigrants in the country--and an increasing number do not want any immigration provisions that increase the number of immigrants, as the STEM-visa proposal presumably would.
I think the reality is that CBO scores are a political and not an economic tool. That Congress is able to game them to generate a politically acceptable score is proof enough which is then used to make dubious claims to the public to sell the legislation. I don’t see how dynamic scoring will change that fundamental problem, except to make it even easier to game.
And it’s not like the CBO has good skill when it comes to forecasting. Which isn’t a criticism of the CBO but an acknowledgment the economic forecasting is very difficult. Even in hindsight, it is very difficult to parse the effect of one piece of legislation to determine its actual effect on the economy.
(Rolling eyes) I would simply accurately forecast how legislation will affect a $22 trillion economy over a multiyear span, perfectly accounting for all unintended consequences, with the foresight of a modern Nostradamus. Surprised no one's thought of this before.
Actually, scratch that. I would instead take my skills of predicting the future and apply it to the stock market instead, where I will easily make quadrillions of dollars perfectly modeling how extremely complex systems will function over a long time span
The question isn’t whether we can forecast perfectly. The question is whether we can forecast more accurately than by just assuming nothing changes.
The lack of dynamic scoring isn't why we don't have more high-skilled immigrants, and allowing dynamic scoring won't suddenly get Congress to allow more high-skilled immigrants in. This isn't one neat trick.
Democrats and Republicans are both completely bought in on the "demographics is destiny" idea. Democrats want mass amnesty and open borders because they believe such policies will deliver unto them eternal, unchecked political power. Republicans also believe that amnesty and open bordders will deliver unto Democrats eternal, unchecked political power, and thus have turned against almost all immigration in general. Neither party has reason to trust the other on immigration, because they can't trust the motivations of the other.
Slow Boring's essay about immigration raises an interesting question - at least in my mind.
I wonder how much unconscious bias there is in the minds of legislators towards people who are not of European ancestory. We desperately need qualified immigrants. Certin people in Congress are opposed to any immigration not coming from Europe - that is white Christain people.
Examples of tis bias - the problems of Hispanic immigrants from South America, Afgan immigrants have been waiting for almost two years for entry permits, and the difficulties faced by many from South East Asia.
This bias need not be spoken, but merely understood between some people. The politics of racial hatred is hurting our country and must be brought to an end.
Historically the country has been just as opposed to large scale immigration from Europe as well. Look at the push back that was applied to waves of German immigrants, then Irish or Italian. Not saying there isn't some racial bias, but its more about the size of the wave then where its from.
> Afgan immigrants have been waiting for almost two years for entry permits
Just to be fair, this and some other issues aren't problems created by Congress, right? It's the executive branch not doing it's job expeditiously. I don't think it's hatred driving that, just the all-too-common lack of state capacity (passport renewals is another similar issue).
Good points in principal, but how important is it? Is Biden pressing up against the legal limits of issuing green cards to foreign graduates? Is the lack of dynamic scoring the reason we do not have a merit-based immigration system. Would the NSF budget be larger with dynamic scoring? And, although it would be wonderful if CBO would rub Congress's nose in how much the deficits of a tax cut (or unfunded IRA) would slow growth, that WOULD be partisan.
One possible unintended consequence of increasing immigration: a further increase in housing demand, exacerbating an already problematic lack of supply and prohibitive prices, especially in centers where high tech industries dominate and such shortages are, in many cases, most acute. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the authors’ premise, but that cost has to be considered as well, as well as its impact on current residents.