The benefits of immigrant workers

As a recommendation this week, I really liked Noah Smith’s piece about the limits of relying on tourism as a way to learn about other countries but also the value of travel as a way to motivate questions that you might look into.

Another point I would make about this is that traveling to other places is a good way to discover facts about yourself. As he notes, visiting Shanghai “can trick you into thinking China is the richest country in the world, instead of a middle income country — China is just coming off of the greatest construction boom in world history, and everything in those Tier 1 cities is at the beginning of its capital depreciation cycle.” What I think is most interesting about this is the fact that people who visit Shanghai and see all the brand new buildings really do find it incredibly impressive. Now look back around at the United States, and note that every city has a lot of rules in place that are explicitly designed to discourage replacing the existing stock of buildings with newer ones.

The story of how those laws came to be is complex. But on some level, laws that prevent America from having a China-scale construction boom are in place because people think that’s what they want. The fact that nearly everyone who goes to Shanghai comes away impressed — so impressed that they develop an exaggerated sense of Shanghai’s prosperity — is telling us something about ourselves. Sometimes old things can be genuinely impressive and beautiful. But Americans should get real about the fact that the “historic” architecture of DC and San Francisco is not exactly Florence or the Barri Gòtic. We would like our country better with more renewal of the built environment.

Other recommended reading:

• Jessica Grose on organized religion.

• Dan Williams on misinformation.

• Bryan Caplan on Milton Friedman and immigration.

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A lot of good news this week, starting with a positive inflation report and a new record high for the stock market. We’re also seeing an accelerating crime drop thus far in 2024. TerraPower broke ground on the first advanced nuclear reactor in American history, Minnesota is accelerating construction of transmission lines, AI tools are detecting cancer and potentially discovering antibiotics, and Djibouti is moving forward with a plan to use genetically modified mosquitos to defeat malaria.

I also liked this comment from Alexis on Long Island governance:

I'm a native Long Islander. The state has had a bipartisan governance crisis that goes back decades. It's relatively recent that it came under unified control.

Taxes in New York are too high. But there's two things you need to know: One is that property taxes went out of control under Republican local government. Nassau County spent decades being ruled by a GOP machine (that largely still exists, despite being temporarily exiled under Tom Suozzi and then Laura Curran). You still need a GOP vouch to get a county job. The other is that suburbanites in particular have resisted every change that would lower taxes. They refuse to rationalize or consolidate local government. On Long Island, you have the county, the city or town, and in many cases the incorporated village, and then special taxation districts on top, some of which primarily exist to provide patronage jobs. There are 127 school districts for Nassau and Suffolk counties, population 2.6M (compare to ONE school district for Fairfax County, VA, population 1.13M.) It's proven impossible to consolidate even the ones that are literally one-room schoolhouses. For much of the Island, district mergers would mean economic and racial integration, which are taboo. Villages' prime purpose is to control zoning, i.e. keep out poor people. Town boards resist pro-growth strategies, meaning no desperately needed apartments or higher density housing (because apartment tenants will “overload the schools”). Transit is a nonstarter and yet people complain about the traffic.

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The winning question is from Josh H: Why was Nancy Pelosi the only high profile Dem to admit we needed the migrant farm workers? Why is nobody selling immigration as a boon to our economy especially in a fairly high inflation pressure environment? Come on Dems sell immigration! Sell the benefits.

I think the proximate thing to understand about Nancy Pelosi in this regard is that she is, literally, an old person and thus in touch with an older way of talking about this issue.

If you think about old-time California politics from 30 years ago, when immigration was a hot button issue in the state, you had on the one hand a restrictionist coalition that worried immigrants were burdening public services, driving up the cost of housing, and causing crime. A lot of restrictionists also just didn’t like cultural change (Michael Douglas in “Falling Down”) or were straight-up racists (Edward Furlong in “American History X”). But in addition to cranks and racists, anti-immigrant sentiment had some alignment with progressive causes like environmental conservation and generalized degrowth. On the opposite side of the ledger, you had urban cosmopolitan liberals like Nancy Pelosi, but also inland farm interests. Kevin McCarthy was a little squishy on immigration earlier in his career, and his former boss and predecessor Bill Thomas was even more so.

Pelosi, because she is old, remembers a time when the politics of immigration were dicey in California — the state enacted harsh restrictionist measures in 1994 — but it was also a time when the issue was less polarized. Thirty years ago, a San Francisco liberal like Pelosi couldn’t carry the day on her own, she needed an alliance with farm owners and other business interests. So she knows how to talk about immigration in the ways that pro-immigration Republicans talk about immigration.

You used to hear more people talk like this.