I was hoping you would address how the pandemic is providing a real time experiment in labor markets which will skew the immigration policy debate.
Wages at the bottom end are rising fast - and not just here. The UK, Australia and Canada are all enjoying the same lift. Cause for celebration and a long-sought policy goal. But why?
Migration and closed borders may be part of the story. In Australia, many of the back-packers and study-visa students went home at the start of the pandemic. In the US, we read stories about 25,000 camp counsellors who used to come here each year but cannot now. Vacation destinations are seeing strong demand and no service workers. I am guessing a lot of undocumented left the US in 2020 and have not returned. Official temp work visas seem in short supply.
In the UK, the effects are complicated by Brexit but it is easy to write a narrative there too linking rising wages at the low end with closed borders.
Maybe too early to know what is going on. It could be that what is happening right now is going to change perceptions a lot.
They say there is no such thing as a free lunch, but I truly believe that immigration is a free lunch. In violent agreement on this one. We need to make some progress here, because there is undisputed upside.
Tokyo Ska playing the Olympics closing ceremony is concerning. What can we do to prevent the next Ska wave? How did the Hungarians stop Ska in it’s tracks?
The best thing that Biden can do about immigration, including asylum seekers, is to deprioritize it. Do what you can to kick it back to page A12. Shut the flows of people seeking asylum in ways that the law never intended, and do everything possible to reduce the television-friendly hordes at the border. Meanwhile, cut back on deportations of those long-established here by following a policy of benign neglect. Trim back the Trump actions, but don't seek to ratchet up eligibility too far. See if there's any legislation that can meet muster in the "Secret Congress" which means at best it will be modest.
Immigration policy is a loser for Democrats now, becoming the third rail that Social Security and Medicare were for the Republicans (and who may have finally learned that lesson). We have lots of incendiary issues that will be problematic enough to make progress on -- climate change, voting rights -- so there's no reason to fall on our swords over something that helps strengthen the country over the very long term *if* we can pass something but more likely hurts our ability to maintain power in the near and medium term.
I don't think you paid very close attention to the Effective Altruism types. They would absolutely not endorse immigration policies designed to harvest the best and brightest of other countries. But that's okay. They are wrong anyway. You might view this type of immigration as a zero sum game as in one country's game is another country's loss but that isn't true. It is predicated on the idea that whatever success they have in the US would have happened in whatever country they came from. This is known as bullshit. The biggest draw for many of these people is not freedom. It is funding in both the public and private sector. No country on earth compares to the US in terms of available funding. Americans might not believe that but it is true. The result of this is that people achieve that benefit America and the whole world that probably wouldn't happen anywhere else. Go with it.
For the last few hundred years America has gotten by immigration wise by what looks like to the rest of us as maintaining an attractive nuisance. It is not as if my country, Canada, has not acquired many many fine immigrants. Magna, one of the biggest auto parts companies in the world was created by an Austrian immigrant to Canada, Frank Stronach. His daughter Belinda had ambitions to become Prime Minister. But you have had the pic of the litter. So I won't mind so much if for political reasons America decides to become somewhat more restrictionist on immigration policy. It'll give us a chance to play a little catch up. All we'll need in Canada then is a hoard of generous millionaires and billionaires to fund all that research and innovation.
Yeah I do wonder, from an altruistic, humanitarian point of view, if suddenly importing a bunch of doctors from the least attractive countries around the world would be quite a selfish thing for the US to do. I'm guessing a Doctor working in Iraq meets a lot more unmet health demands than he / she would in the US.
It makes no sense to write about immigration without taking account of climate change. As increasing temperatures and extreme weather events make it hard and harder to live in more and more of the globe, people are going to move.
Couldn't have a discussion on a leftie website about immigration without someone bringing up climate change. Where I live (roughly 40% foreign born) no one I've ever met has mentioned changing climate as why they left home for the US.
A bad harvest isn't a sign of climate change, unless you think the Great Depression was caused by climate change. The NY Times is the worst source on the issue.
Probably you mean the drought that caused the Dust Bowel. Climate change will make such droughts and the subsequent migration more frequent. Same with destructive hurricanes. Crop pests will move into new areas. Some places will get just plain too hot to grow crops. If you don't like the NY Times, try the IPCC report.
> I talked this over with some leading Effective Altruism types and they convinced me that Denmark’s mix of generous foreign aid and stingy immigration is more beneficial to the world than the U.S. mix.
Matt, who did you hear this from? I'm pretty plugged into the EAsphere and I'm not familiar with this take.
Seconding this! If anything, my sense was that the Effective Altruists types are maybe more open to Open Borders than anyone outside of the gmu econ dept.
There are lots of arguments for foreign aid over open borders (political feasibility, brain drain, effectiveness of interventions, etc), but I would be very curious to see (1) a convincing case for aid over immigration from an EA framework and/or (2) examples of people in the EA world endorsing this.
The argument seems pretty clear. Immigration and aid are both great, but immigration is more politically toxic, so trading less immigration for more aid is a good deal at current margins.
Political feasibility calculations are difficult, and foreign aid is not exactly popular. When these things are actually done, free migration is far, far more effective at relieving poverty than foreign aid.
Foreign aid isn't popular but it's not like it's a major plank of any party platform. It's invisible to most people. There is no Fox News crew shooting video of dollars flowing into foreign government accounts.
I have run into this argument. It is considered bad among the EA advocates to harvest the best and brightest from other countries and deprive those other countries of a resource they need. But that's okay. They are completely wrong about this.
Ok, so on one hand, we have the Republican Small Business Owner class lamenting the lack of workers at their Hardees. Then... we have the same people complaining about immigration, that fairly obviously brings in workers for them in large numbers?
Well, which is it? This makes as much sense as a vegan complaining bacon doesn't have enough pork meat in it.
It's called cognitive dissonance. At the same time they don't like uppity workers who just quit to take better paying jobs and they don't like immigrants. That the presence of immigrants keeps workers from being uppity is a problem for them.
One thing which, I think, must be acknowledged in this debate is how the United States has changed since our previous waves of immigration.
First, the birth rate of native born Americans has dropped precipitously since 1900. While this (economically) increases the value of each immigrant: it also means that less immigration today will lead to greater demographic changes tomorrow than the massive waves of immigrants did in the early 20th century.
Second, the country is far less homogenous today than it was in 1900. I am pro-immigration, and I am (I suppose) cosmopolitain. But homogeneity has benefits, which many people ignore. It's easier to craft a national heritage, mythos, and unity in homogenous places than heterogeneous ones.
Neither of these problems are insurmountable, and neither of these problems should end the pro-immigration debate. However, they do represent real problems and concerns which must also be addressed. Many of the same people who support massive flows of immigrants are also the same people which deride the United States as hopelessly racist and irredeemable; they also giddily deride people who disagree with this narrative as bigoted in some fashion. This is a problem which must be solved to create a greater national consensus on immigration.
Right but people perceived the differences between white ethnicity—Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc.—much more keenly then. They were different constituencies with their own interests and that produced tensions of its own.
To hear Ben Franklin tell it, German immigrants were not white and "will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."
This is gut feeling talking here, but a big reason why Irish, Italians and Jews experienced discrimination was anti-Catholicism. Irish immigration is as old as the Republic itself. Italians faced similar discrimination as well.
Sometimes I drive around Queens, going through neighborhoods made up mostly of immigrants from dozens of countries, and I think, is this what people are afraid of? Because this is a great place to live and raise a family and work and visit! So, on some level I just genuinely don't get it.
I've often wondered why liberals in the US are so resistant to assimilationist pro-immigration arguments. At a basic level, I think we should be ok with the idea that people move to the US because it's different than the place that they came from, and in a lot of cases they likely want to live like an American. It's not like we pity American expats in Paris for eating fancy cheese and drinking a lot of wine; it would be really weird if they all were drinking Busch and eating Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese.
I was listening to a BBC podcast from the 90's the other day about multiculturalism in the US (dated but interesting), and the panelists talked a lot about how the immigration context in the US clearly worked better than it does in Europe explicitly because the US was actively assimilationist. They felt that the US was basically unique in the world because Americans historically thought of the US less as a defined ancestral homeland and more as "A machine for making Americans". That seems like a big strength to me...
What exactly would be not 'white'. Throwing your garbage in the street? Shooting your neighbors? Explain to us ignoramuses what are the virtues of being 'non-white'.
> “ Officially, the way this works is that you offer foreign aid to struggling regions in order to tackle the “root causes” of migration, and then that will lead to less emigration.”
This is a myth about migration. Foreign aid actually tends to INCREASE emigration, not decrease it.
I think this is largely spot on. I think the crux of the issue is that until Obama's second term immigration was not a polarized issue along partisan lines. Democrats had anti-immigration union leaders trying to protect their workers. Republicans had big-business interests trying to grow markets and add cheaper labor. For various reasons this shifted and now it's pretty clean that the GOP is just anti-immigration (relative to status quo) and Dems are pro-immigration.
Now that this is the case, the Dems have to be very clear about what kind of immigration they are for. During the primary campaign certain candidates came dangerously close to backing true open borders, decriminalizing all immigration, and declaring any restrictions presumptively racist. Regardless of your moral views of this it is certainly not a winning political position, and Democratic leaders should call it out and decry it. Democratic leaders need to be crystal clear and disciplined in messaging about what they want for 1) legal skilled immigration, 2) legal unskilled immigration, 3) illegal immigration enforcement (both existing and future immigrants), and 4) asylum seekers. Otherwise it is too easy to paint any accommodation towards any of these groups as part of a secret plan for open borders (I could draw a worrisome analogy as to how the NRA paints any move towards modest gun control as a step towards full confiscation of arms and repeal of the 2nd amendment).
I think progressives tend to get really caught up in the moral case for asylum seekers, and tend to basically ignore the idea of any political constraints on issue.
On such a salient issue, voters can't just be handwaved away.
Interesting. I find that Matt tends to really get caught up in the political constraints, and basically ignores the moral case. His writing would improve if he thought more about how to fix the shitty opinions of the American public, rather than accepting them as immobile constraints.
Opinions are downhill of material conditions. When going to war improves your economy,[1] warfare seems like a net positive.[2] When the reverse is true, warfare seems like a bad idea.[3] When the public gets their medical care from an immigrant, has their taxes filed by another immigrant, and still finds it easy to get a job because we live in a red-hot economy, anti-immigration opinions will appear as shitty and ill-thought out as they are. But we need to get to that circumstance through the existing political system, which means starting with what politics makes possible instead. That is to say: MattY *is* fixing "the shitty opinions of the American public, rather than accepting them as immobile constraints."
tl;dr: Marx was right about historical materialism.
Matt's whole Weberian ethic-of-responsibility schtick is that we need to think more rigorously about how to effect positive change within the political system that we actually have, instead of endless and ultimately fruitless symbolic warfare, so if you're looking for a political program that starts with "Step 1: make people less shitty" then I think you're subscribed to the wrong substack.
A recurring theme of Matt's writing is that it's very difficult for political leaders to change public opinion on salient issues like this one. If there were one weird trick to doing that, an awful lot of left-wing politicians in Europe would have liked to have known about it.
If you have ideas on changing public opinion on this issue, knock yourself out, and I'd be thrilled to see if happen. I just don't want my policy ideas to be contingent on it.
"But if we could improve the skill mix without decreasing the number of immigrants, I’m optimistic the politics will improve and we could move from there to push for more immigration."
Similar to how he has said before that if Blue states want to argue for their policies being better, they need to show it in how they govern... if you want to argue for more immigration, show people immigration working in a way they can believe in.
I'm a big believer in free trade, and free trade definitely made America (and the world) more wealthy. But it disproportionately negatively affected some people, and unlike technological progress (which can do exactly the same thing - broadly benefit everyone except for a few unlucky people), it's easy to be against it.
Doing a better job with convincing people that:
1) We'll enforce immigration laws
2) Immigration is great for America (because everyone sees that we're letting in the ones that are (hopefully) _greatest_ for America) - and we can increase immigration.
Sometimes the only way to change people's opinions is to show them that something is working for them.
(I'm very biased towards open borders - but we're not making progress that way the way we're going now - if we need to emphasize legal immigration to make people believe in immigration again... so be it)
The pandemic has slashed the number of H1B and J1 workers and wages are soaring. Now you might say that’s actually stimulus and monetary policy. OK maybe you’re right. But it sure seems like a sudden reduction in immigration has been a boon to workers.
I'm skeptical that's true, at least for H1B visas. Often, the alternative is just for companies to hire the same people, but have them work from India or wherever.
I was hoping you would address how the pandemic is providing a real time experiment in labor markets which will skew the immigration policy debate.
Wages at the bottom end are rising fast - and not just here. The UK, Australia and Canada are all enjoying the same lift. Cause for celebration and a long-sought policy goal. But why?
Migration and closed borders may be part of the story. In Australia, many of the back-packers and study-visa students went home at the start of the pandemic. In the US, we read stories about 25,000 camp counsellors who used to come here each year but cannot now. Vacation destinations are seeing strong demand and no service workers. I am guessing a lot of undocumented left the US in 2020 and have not returned. Official temp work visas seem in short supply.
In the UK, the effects are complicated by Brexit but it is easy to write a narrative there too linking rising wages at the low end with closed borders.
Maybe too early to know what is going on. It could be that what is happening right now is going to change perceptions a lot.
They say there is no such thing as a free lunch, but I truly believe that immigration is a free lunch. In violent agreement on this one. We need to make some progress here, because there is undisputed upside.
Thoughts on whether we should crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants?
Tokyo Ska playing the Olympics closing ceremony is concerning. What can we do to prevent the next Ska wave? How did the Hungarians stop Ska in it’s tracks?
The world's resources and ability to sustain 8 billion people is virtually depleted, but Matt thinks we need more...
I'm not sure how immigration is related to the global population, unless you think he's advocating immigration of *that* sort of aliens...
The best thing that Biden can do about immigration, including asylum seekers, is to deprioritize it. Do what you can to kick it back to page A12. Shut the flows of people seeking asylum in ways that the law never intended, and do everything possible to reduce the television-friendly hordes at the border. Meanwhile, cut back on deportations of those long-established here by following a policy of benign neglect. Trim back the Trump actions, but don't seek to ratchet up eligibility too far. See if there's any legislation that can meet muster in the "Secret Congress" which means at best it will be modest.
Immigration policy is a loser for Democrats now, becoming the third rail that Social Security and Medicare were for the Republicans (and who may have finally learned that lesson). We have lots of incendiary issues that will be problematic enough to make progress on -- climate change, voting rights -- so there's no reason to fall on our swords over something that helps strengthen the country over the very long term *if* we can pass something but more likely hurts our ability to maintain power in the near and medium term.
I don't think you paid very close attention to the Effective Altruism types. They would absolutely not endorse immigration policies designed to harvest the best and brightest of other countries. But that's okay. They are wrong anyway. You might view this type of immigration as a zero sum game as in one country's game is another country's loss but that isn't true. It is predicated on the idea that whatever success they have in the US would have happened in whatever country they came from. This is known as bullshit. The biggest draw for many of these people is not freedom. It is funding in both the public and private sector. No country on earth compares to the US in terms of available funding. Americans might not believe that but it is true. The result of this is that people achieve that benefit America and the whole world that probably wouldn't happen anywhere else. Go with it.
For the last few hundred years America has gotten by immigration wise by what looks like to the rest of us as maintaining an attractive nuisance. It is not as if my country, Canada, has not acquired many many fine immigrants. Magna, one of the biggest auto parts companies in the world was created by an Austrian immigrant to Canada, Frank Stronach. His daughter Belinda had ambitions to become Prime Minister. But you have had the pic of the litter. So I won't mind so much if for political reasons America decides to become somewhat more restrictionist on immigration policy. It'll give us a chance to play a little catch up. All we'll need in Canada then is a hoard of generous millionaires and billionaires to fund all that research and innovation.
Yeah I do wonder, from an altruistic, humanitarian point of view, if suddenly importing a bunch of doctors from the least attractive countries around the world would be quite a selfish thing for the US to do. I'm guessing a Doctor working in Iraq meets a lot more unmet health demands than he / she would in the US.
It makes no sense to write about immigration without taking account of climate change. As increasing temperatures and extreme weather events make it hard and harder to live in more and more of the globe, people are going to move.
Couldn't have a discussion on a leftie website about immigration without someone bringing up climate change. Where I live (roughly 40% foreign born) no one I've ever met has mentioned changing climate as why they left home for the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/world/americas/migration-honduras-central-america.html
A bad harvest isn't a sign of climate change, unless you think the Great Depression was caused by climate change. The NY Times is the worst source on the issue.
Probably you mean the drought that caused the Dust Bowel. Climate change will make such droughts and the subsequent migration more frequent. Same with destructive hurricanes. Crop pests will move into new areas. Some places will get just plain too hot to grow crops. If you don't like the NY Times, try the IPCC report.
> I talked this over with some leading Effective Altruism types and they convinced me that Denmark’s mix of generous foreign aid and stingy immigration is more beneficial to the world than the U.S. mix.
Matt, who did you hear this from? I'm pretty plugged into the EAsphere and I'm not familiar with this take.
This was the line in the post that most intrigued me as well.
Seconding this! If anything, my sense was that the Effective Altruists types are maybe more open to Open Borders than anyone outside of the gmu econ dept.
There are lots of arguments for foreign aid over open borders (political feasibility, brain drain, effectiveness of interventions, etc), but I would be very curious to see (1) a convincing case for aid over immigration from an EA framework and/or (2) examples of people in the EA world endorsing this.
The argument seems pretty clear. Immigration and aid are both great, but immigration is more politically toxic, so trading less immigration for more aid is a good deal at current margins.
Political feasibility calculations are difficult, and foreign aid is not exactly popular. When these things are actually done, free migration is far, far more effective at relieving poverty than foreign aid.
Foreign aid isn't popular but it's not like it's a major plank of any party platform. It's invisible to most people. There is no Fox News crew shooting video of dollars flowing into foreign government accounts.
I have run into this argument. It is considered bad among the EA advocates to harvest the best and brightest from other countries and deprive those other countries of a resource they need. But that's okay. They are completely wrong about this.
I *am* an EA advocate, so saying "EA advocates believe X" doesn't really answer my question. I was hoping for an actual source.
Try Vox. That is if you don't know what you believe.
Ok, so on one hand, we have the Republican Small Business Owner class lamenting the lack of workers at their Hardees. Then... we have the same people complaining about immigration, that fairly obviously brings in workers for them in large numbers?
Well, which is it? This makes as much sense as a vegan complaining bacon doesn't have enough pork meat in it.
It's called cognitive dissonance. At the same time they don't like uppity workers who just quit to take better paying jobs and they don't like immigrants. That the presence of immigrants keeps workers from being uppity is a problem for them.
One thing which, I think, must be acknowledged in this debate is how the United States has changed since our previous waves of immigration.
First, the birth rate of native born Americans has dropped precipitously since 1900. While this (economically) increases the value of each immigrant: it also means that less immigration today will lead to greater demographic changes tomorrow than the massive waves of immigrants did in the early 20th century.
Second, the country is far less homogenous today than it was in 1900. I am pro-immigration, and I am (I suppose) cosmopolitain. But homogeneity has benefits, which many people ignore. It's easier to craft a national heritage, mythos, and unity in homogenous places than heterogeneous ones.
Neither of these problems are insurmountable, and neither of these problems should end the pro-immigration debate. However, they do represent real problems and concerns which must also be addressed. Many of the same people who support massive flows of immigrants are also the same people which deride the United States as hopelessly racist and irredeemable; they also giddily deride people who disagree with this narrative as bigoted in some fashion. This is a problem which must be solved to create a greater national consensus on immigration.
In 1900 0.2% of the US was Asian/Pacific Islander. In 2010 it was 4.8%
In 1900 0.4% of the US was Mexican/Latin American. In 2010 its was 16.3%
In 1900 11.6% of the US was African American. In 2010 it was 12.6%
In 1900 0.4% of the US was Native American. In 2010 it was 0.9%
Overall that's an increase in the non-white population from 12.6% in 1900 to 34.6% today, or a near tripling. That's quite large.
Right but people perceived the differences between white ethnicity—Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc.—much more keenly then. They were different constituencies with their own interests and that produced tensions of its own.
To hear Ben Franklin tell it, German immigrants were not white and "will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."
I'm literally looking at our Census data
Yes, but you're arguing into the "tHe iRiSh wERen'T wHiTe, derp derp" abyss.
This is gut feeling talking here, but a big reason why Irish, Italians and Jews experienced discrimination was anti-Catholicism. Irish immigration is as old as the Republic itself. Italians faced similar discrimination as well.
Jewish people obviously experienced Anti-Semitism, not Anti-Catholicism
Sometimes I drive around Queens, going through neighborhoods made up mostly of immigrants from dozens of countries, and I think, is this what people are afraid of? Because this is a great place to live and raise a family and work and visit! So, on some level I just genuinely don't get it.
The American Dream lives in Jackson Heights.
I've often wondered why liberals in the US are so resistant to assimilationist pro-immigration arguments. At a basic level, I think we should be ok with the idea that people move to the US because it's different than the place that they came from, and in a lot of cases they likely want to live like an American. It's not like we pity American expats in Paris for eating fancy cheese and drinking a lot of wine; it would be really weird if they all were drinking Busch and eating Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese.
I was listening to a BBC podcast from the 90's the other day about multiculturalism in the US (dated but interesting), and the panelists talked a lot about how the immigration context in the US clearly worked better than it does in Europe explicitly because the US was actively assimilationist. They felt that the US was basically unique in the world because Americans historically thought of the US less as a defined ancestral homeland and more as "A machine for making Americans". That seems like a big strength to me...
What exactly would be not 'white'. Throwing your garbage in the street? Shooting your neighbors? Explain to us ignoramuses what are the virtues of being 'non-white'.
> “ Officially, the way this works is that you offer foreign aid to struggling regions in order to tackle the “root causes” of migration, and then that will lead to less emigration.”
This is a myth about migration. Foreign aid actually tends to INCREASE emigration, not decrease it.
See https://heindehaas.blogspot.com/2020/02/why-development-will-not-stop-migration.html?m=1, a blog from professor at University of Amsterdam who is expert on migration. Author of this migration textbook, http://www.age-of-migration.com/endorsements
I think that's why MY says "officially".
Unofficially, you're bribing the regions in question to take more steps to restrict migrant flows.
I think this is largely spot on. I think the crux of the issue is that until Obama's second term immigration was not a polarized issue along partisan lines. Democrats had anti-immigration union leaders trying to protect their workers. Republicans had big-business interests trying to grow markets and add cheaper labor. For various reasons this shifted and now it's pretty clean that the GOP is just anti-immigration (relative to status quo) and Dems are pro-immigration.
Now that this is the case, the Dems have to be very clear about what kind of immigration they are for. During the primary campaign certain candidates came dangerously close to backing true open borders, decriminalizing all immigration, and declaring any restrictions presumptively racist. Regardless of your moral views of this it is certainly not a winning political position, and Democratic leaders should call it out and decry it. Democratic leaders need to be crystal clear and disciplined in messaging about what they want for 1) legal skilled immigration, 2) legal unskilled immigration, 3) illegal immigration enforcement (both existing and future immigrants), and 4) asylum seekers. Otherwise it is too easy to paint any accommodation towards any of these groups as part of a secret plan for open borders (I could draw a worrisome analogy as to how the NRA paints any move towards modest gun control as a step towards full confiscation of arms and repeal of the 2nd amendment).
This was a really good post.
I think progressives tend to get really caught up in the moral case for asylum seekers, and tend to basically ignore the idea of any political constraints on issue.
On such a salient issue, voters can't just be handwaved away.
Interesting. I find that Matt tends to really get caught up in the political constraints, and basically ignores the moral case. His writing would improve if he thought more about how to fix the shitty opinions of the American public, rather than accepting them as immobile constraints.
Opinions are downhill of material conditions. When going to war improves your economy,[1] warfare seems like a net positive.[2] When the reverse is true, warfare seems like a bad idea.[3] When the public gets their medical care from an immigrant, has their taxes filed by another immigrant, and still finds it easy to get a job because we live in a red-hot economy, anti-immigration opinions will appear as shitty and ill-thought out as they are. But we need to get to that circumstance through the existing political system, which means starting with what politics makes possible instead. That is to say: MattY *is* fixing "the shitty opinions of the American public, rather than accepting them as immobile constraints."
tl;dr: Marx was right about historical materialism.
[1]: https://scholars-stage.org/notes-on-the-dynamics-of-human-civilization-the-growth-revolution-part-i/
[2]: https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-bertran-de-born-martial-values-in-the-12th-century-occitan-nobility/
[3]: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/does-america-really-lose-all-its
How do you decide what's a shitty opinion?
Matt's whole Weberian ethic-of-responsibility schtick is that we need to think more rigorously about how to effect positive change within the political system that we actually have, instead of endless and ultimately fruitless symbolic warfare, so if you're looking for a political program that starts with "Step 1: make people less shitty" then I think you're subscribed to the wrong substack.
To be fair, this is why I've cancelled my subscription
A recurring theme of Matt's writing is that it's very difficult for political leaders to change public opinion on salient issues like this one. If there were one weird trick to doing that, an awful lot of left-wing politicians in Europe would have liked to have known about it.
If you have ideas on changing public opinion on this issue, knock yourself out, and I'd be thrilled to see if happen. I just don't want my policy ideas to be contingent on it.
Matt says:
"But if we could improve the skill mix without decreasing the number of immigrants, I’m optimistic the politics will improve and we could move from there to push for more immigration."
Similar to how he has said before that if Blue states want to argue for their policies being better, they need to show it in how they govern... if you want to argue for more immigration, show people immigration working in a way they can believe in.
I'm a big believer in free trade, and free trade definitely made America (and the world) more wealthy. But it disproportionately negatively affected some people, and unlike technological progress (which can do exactly the same thing - broadly benefit everyone except for a few unlucky people), it's easy to be against it.
Doing a better job with convincing people that:
1) We'll enforce immigration laws
2) Immigration is great for America (because everyone sees that we're letting in the ones that are (hopefully) _greatest_ for America) - and we can increase immigration.
Sometimes the only way to change people's opinions is to show them that something is working for them.
(I'm very biased towards open borders - but we're not making progress that way the way we're going now - if we need to emphasize legal immigration to make people believe in immigration again... so be it)
Some people write ideals. Others write what they think is possible. Both are good. MY is the latter.
The pandemic has slashed the number of H1B and J1 workers and wages are soaring. Now you might say that’s actually stimulus and monetary policy. OK maybe you’re right. But it sure seems like a sudden reduction in immigration has been a boon to workers.
I'm skeptical that's true, at least for H1B visas. Often, the alternative is just for companies to hire the same people, but have them work from India or wherever.
The time difference and the amount of management and oversight required dramatically increase the burden of a remote team.