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Victor Ganata
Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant - NYT Mag - 2015 Mar 29 http://www.nytimes.com/2015...
"The chief logical mistake we make is something called the Lump of Labor Fallacy: the erroneous notion that there is only so much work to be done and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else. It’s an understandable assumption. After all, with other types of market transactions, when the supply goes up, the price falls. If there were suddenly a whole lot more oranges, we’d expect the price of oranges to fall or the number of oranges that went uneaten to surge." - Victor Ganata
"But immigrants aren’t oranges. It might seem intuitive that when there is an increase in the supply of workers, the ones who were here already will make less money or lose their jobs. Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor, though; they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones." - Victor Ganata
"That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population, which means they increase the size of the economy. Logically, if immigrants were 'stealing' jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens." - Victor Ganata
"Logically, if immigrants were “stealing” jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens." That line says it all to me. - DB, Lil LB's Dad
Yep. - Victor Ganata
"The single greatest bit of evidence disproving the Lump of Labor idea comes from research about the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration in 1980 that brought more than 125,000 Cubans to the United States. According to David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, roughly 45,000 of them were of working age and moved to Miami; in four months, the city’s labor supply increased by 7 percent." - Victor Ganata
"Card found that for people already working in Miami, this sudden influx had no measurable impact on wages or employment." - Victor Ganata
"Before, standard economic models held that immigrants cause long-term benefits, but at the cost of short-term pain in the form of lower wages and greater unemployment for natives. But most economists now believe that Card’s findings were correct: Immigrants bring long-term benefits at no measurable short-term cost." - Victor Ganata
"The leading scholar on this today is Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, who has shown that immigrants tend to complement — rather than compete against — the existing work force." - Victor Ganata
"Take a construction site: Typically, Peri has found, immigrants with limited education perform many support tasks (moving heavy things, pouring cement, sweeping, painting), while citizens with more education focus on skilled work like carpentry, plumbing and electrical installation, as well as customer relations." - Victor Ganata
"The skilled native is able to focus on the most valuable tasks, while the immigrants help bring the price down for the overall project (it costs a lot to pay a highly trained carpenter to sweep up a work site)." - Victor Ganata
"Peri argues, with strong evidence, that there are more native-born skilled craftspeople working today, not fewer, because of all those undocumented construction workers." - Victor Ganata
"A similar dynamic is at play on Wall Street. Many technical-support tasks are dominated by recent immigrants, while sales, marketing, advising and trading, which require cultural and linguistic fluency, are typically the domain of the native-born. (Whether Wall Street’s technical wizards have, on balance, helped or hurt the economy is a question for another day.)" <— LOL - Victor Ganata
"Growth has acquired a bad reputation of late among some, especially on the left, who associate the term with environmental destruction and rising inequality. But growth through immigration is growth with remarkably little downside." - Victor Ganata
"Environmentally, immigration tends to be less damaging than other forms of growth, because it doesn’t add to the number of people on earth and often shifts people to more environmentally friendly jurisdictions." - Victor Ganata