“Calling the children “natives” doesn’t change the fact that they are an expense that only arose because their parents were allowed into the country in the first place”
Bingo. A couple of decades or so ago, I saw the CA stat’s for immigrants wrt to their current wages as low level manual laborers and the estimated expense of just two of their children attending public school in CA, K-12. Two children attending public school for 12 years was projected at that time to cost $300k and that was not including inflation projections. The typical (low) household income was well below any conceivable tax rate able to recoup such a taxpayer footed expense across even a lifetime of menial wage household income.
The knock on (beneficial) effects of such immigration is little more than wishful thinking. As “Realist” has succinctly noted, cost in $$$ pales to cost in IQ dilution of the nation. Those costs will live on forever and be subtly hidden.
Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania like to see themselves as "scientists" in opposition to the irrational yahoos on the other side. A true scientist, however, first tests a new proposal on a small sample of consenting participants. The requirement of "consent" is critical. If there is no consent, the experiment cannot go ahead.
If the results are promising, a true scientist will then try to replicate the results with a larger sample. If the results are still good, the proposal is tentatively accepted — although it is still subject to review and criticism. In fact, criticism is always encouraged.
This approach has little in common with what people like Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania are advocating. Where is the consent? Where is the preliminary testing on a small scale? And where is the freedom to criticize?
Additionally, the left wouldn't want low-skilled immigrants to remain as a permanent underclass forever. If low-skilled immigrants are imported for the purpose of doing all the low-skilled jobs that supposedly no one else wants to do, leftists would start complaining within a generation or two that the country needs to have better policies to raise the social mobility of the recent low-skilled immigrants and their descendants.
It's mostly unfeasible to expect high social mobility from low IQ immigrants to begin with. But even if it were successful, it would imply that the country would have to import an endless stream of low-skilled immigrants every generation to refill the vacant low-skilled occupations, which isn't sustainable.
"Indeed, national IQ is positively correlated with almost everything good and negatively correlated with almost everything bad. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the single best predictor of economic growth and also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic development."
Great article! This theme needs to be talked about more with receipts instead of leaving it to academics with pseudoscientific models. And it's terrible to always frame everything in terms of GDP, jobs and productivity.
In my experience, as an ex-expat living in my "home" country, the underappreciated externalities in the social sphere, which are hard to model and measure (data probably doesn't even exist), are boosting racism and intolerance as ordinary people feel unheard and people in Ivory towers don't live in the same shared spaces with recently arrived migrants.
Three small and innocuous examples come to mind: I've noticed the amount of trash on the streets in certain neighborhoods is indicative of the presence of migration (and it starts with litter and goes all the way up to washing machines/furniture, as well as dumping construction waste in wildlife adjacent spaces). I've also noticed there's also very little participation in community organizations and events (more from South American backgrounds, virtually nil from Middle East and African backgrounds). And lastly, the takeover and inappropriate use of green social spaces, rendering them unusable to locals (for instance: BBQs and parties in inappropriate places ruining them for everyone else).
And all of this saddens me as I've lived in a dozen countries across three continents, so I know the migrants who partake in the activities mentioned above don't represent what we'd describe as the middle class or higher socioeconomic strata from those cultures/societies.
Exactly. Even an “incompetent” gardener can do a lot of damage to the plantings. Here one sees—and is warned—that improper pruning, feeding, and weeding destroys/damages one’s landscaping. We see it all the time in the neighborhood as there are much “day” laborers recruited for these type jobs.
One talks about the building “trades” still being in the domain of the native population. Well, not here—or anywhere in the Southwest. YouTube videos galore showing new construction done by incompetents in all the trades, and no, city-county code inspectors do not catch such.
Some general contractors putting up such “junk” have even refused potential buyers the right to inspect finished home construction *before* purchase—rather they claim all “defects” will be handled under their warranty. Fat chance.
Immigration slows the drive to automate housing, 3d homes, prefab, modular designs etc. Ironically the world needs this and the west alone can develop it.
This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction. Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity. The pro-immigration argument is that the firm's owners should be the ones to decide whether the janitor will improve the firm's productivity, not some bureaucrat with no skin in the game like Mr. Whitfeld. (Anti-discrimination law complicates this, but it would be better to fight that directly rather than argue for closed borders.)
Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
Whitfeld asserts that:
"And this is assuming that the "freeing up" of native workers is actually a good thing in the long run. Native workers displaced by immigrants who go apply for a higher-skilled job will be less skilled than the people who are currently working in that job—which is of course bad from the standpoint of the job's productivity."
This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century. Whitfeld strawmans the pro-immigration side, attempting to put concessions in his opponents' mouths:
"Once you start getting into all the other issues like individual versus household level accounting, the cost of housing in cities, negative effects on wages, conflating GDP growth with economic gains to natives and country-of-origin effects, the typical mainstream economist will retreat to their last stand: abstract economic models, long-run "what-ifs", and elegant equations where immigration magically boosts national prosperity through indirect channels."
"The argument for mass immigration goes something like this: even if immigrants raise the cost of housing, compete with native workers and strain the welfare system, they still make the economy more "dynamic". Specifically, they free up high-skilled natives to focus on more complex work, boosting economic growth through specialization of labor."
I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing." What he's doing here is projecting his zero-sum beliefs onto his opponents. Immigration supporters would respond that while immigrants raise the demand for housing, they also raise the supply of housing by building more housing. I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
> This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction.
You're literally defeating your own point here. East Asian countries have much higher immigration restrictions than the United States do, even if every third worlder *wanted* to move to Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, they cannot. Secondly, the United States is not really "low IQ". Its NIQ is about 97.68, white Americans actually have a comparable NIQ to Northeast Asians. The average is weighed down by nonwhites, but nonetheless, America's IQ is not lower than most other Western nations. In fact, white Americans are some of the most intelligent white population in the entire world:
No one claims sensible policies don't matter. It's true that white Americans historically and in contemporary times have always had a more economically libertarian attitude, and with a culture that prioritizes liberty and individualism, is also a good foundation for potential innovators and geniuses. But this is because the white sample in the United States is exceptional, so let's not kid ourselves and think that when the richest country in the entire world opened up to the globe beginning in 1965 that the reason why everyone wanted to move there is thanks to the great efforts of some Mexican in Arizona.
> Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
This is genuinely embarrassing. Yes, people move away from blue to red states, no one denies that bad policy is also bad for the economy. Yes, people enjoy the better housing, better tax laws, and fewer regulations in red states, and when they do move, what kinds of neighborhoods do you think they end up in? You think the first destination is a majority-Hispanic or majority-black county? Let's not kid ourselves here, we all know what "white flight" is. In fact, white flight itself as a phenomenon is hard for pro-immigration advocates to reconcile with their narratives. Here is this beneficial complementary labor coming in to supposedly enrich white people's standards of living, and yet they run away from it. Paradoxical truly. Of course, once you consider the fact that the immigration debate is being distorted by the way immigration reduces internal mobility and the cost of that, then actually this makes perfect sense:
Ironically enough, you have made yet another excellent argument against immigration. One of the greatest virtues of the federalist system of the United States was that it provided a sort of self-correcting mechanism when it came to policymaking. After all, people can simply leave a state that has implemented poor policies in favor of a state with better policies. Due to self-selection, internal migration of existing residents will come from those who are more politically aligned with the new areas they move into (as well as some minor effect of ideological conversion). Over time, the electorate would shift to give more weight and power to the party responsible for pushing the good policies, and the other party would have to adopt better positions if it wishes to remain politically viable. Immigrants eliminate this self-correction mechanism, making it feasible for a party who pushes bad policies to remain in power because they can choose to either maintain the population of states with bad policy or move into a good state and then wreck it politically. A bad state doesn't need to compete with a good state, it just needs to remain better than the shithole the migrants come from, and it would maintain Democratic power over the electorate, while in the absence of immigration, internal migration would actually result in more policies that libertarians support.
> Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
It quite literally does, unless you believe that variation within countries don't exist. A hypothetical where you have a country comprised of 300 million high IQ and 300 million low IQ individuals would mean a country of 600 million people where the average IQ is intermediate. The real world analogy to this would be any second world country with a large population.
Since smart fractions are less predictive than average NIQ for differences in economic well-being between countries, it would imply that a country with 1) very high IQ inequality, and 2) a large residual smart fraction is not more important or better than simply a country with a high average IQ.
> Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity.
Ironically enough, this demonstrates you don't even know what economists mean when I said that. In pro-immigration circles, when immigrants crowd out a native worker, the native is "freed up" to go apply for a better and more complex job. The problem with this is that immigrants typically crowd out a comparable worker (i.e., mostly low-skilled workers), so that worker who then goes to apply for a "high-skilled" occupation has lower skill than the current workers in that occupation. If you actually understood what I meant (which you evidently did not), the analogy would be more like this: a police department hires a new officer who is incompetent at the job. He loses the evidence often, commonly fails to catch and arrest the suspect, is too gullible and tricked by smooth-talkers, etc., which frequently ropes other officers into his cases in the process. Or, a cleaning department hires a new janitor who doesn't do a very thorough job. During the mopping process, he pushes the gunk onto the edges of the walls, which results in the department having to call a wall repair service more frequently.
Your example, meanwhile, of a company delegating very specific roles to everyone, also works in a country with zero immigrants.
> Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
If you agree that the American South would have been better off economically if they accepted industrialization like the North had early on and ditched slavery, then you agree that slavery did in fact reduce their productivity. Differences between countries do not necessarily have to be explained by the same causes as differences within countries. Enslaved blacks saw rapid socioeconomic convergence with their Northern counterparts once slavery was abolished. Despite this, enslaved blacks also had better standards of living than many European countries at the time, but you would obviously be dishonest to propose from the rapid catch-up of Southern blacks to Northern blacks that having slavery is no worse than not having slavery for their prospects.
> This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century.
Confident assertions! Firstly, no, a 95 IQ Japanese can make it worse for every other 105 Japanese person working the same job as long as he's worse at the job, which he almost certainly is, because everyone will suddenly have to accommodate his little screw-ups and flaws. Secondly, you seem to not even understand what "lump of labor" even means. The so-called "lump of labor fallacy" refers to incorrectly attempting to assess economic effects from a view that the total number of jobs in an economy is fixed, it actually has nothing to do with the "positive crowd-out" I'm referring to. In fact, "positive crowd-out" is perfectly compatible with flexible number of jobs. We can imagine in a hypothetical where a new job opening occurs for a higher-skilled job because the migrant picking tomatoes "freed" up a native to do something else with his life, so this native doesn't take the job of any other native, versus one where the native does replace another native. In both scenarios, the inefficiencies I described earlier in my reply would still exist. Thirdly, handwaving something by calling it a fallacy when you don't even understand the concept, beyond obviously not being a good look on your part, is also mildly intellectually dishonest. In reality, the "lump of labor" fallacy is not so much a fallacy as it is a circumstantial caveat. Yes, the economy is not permanently fixed, but many factors can make the adjustment process slower or the effect of displacement worse. To quote from the piece where I had covered this briefly:
"We know that immigrant settlement patterns aren’t random but based on the local opportunities available (Kim & Sakamoto, 2013), meaning that these sorts of shocks to natives are occurring in relatively nice locations with high opportunity. Unsurprisingly then, in not just the United States but across countries with high levels of immigration, we can see that citizens are moving from areas of high productivity to areas of low productivity.
{Insert Figure 28 from the paper}
Note: GVA per worker = “gross value added per worker”. Notice that in various countries, the GVA per worker is negatively correlated with the internal mobility rate, implying that in these countries, citizens move towards relatively less productive areas. From Stansbury et al. (2023).
With this, we now have a potential mechanism for the displacement effect to persist, and in fact, there’s evidence that it does. Kim & Sakamoto had also analyzed the long-term effects of immigration on native wages in both two-digit and one-digit occupations from 1994 to 2006. The results from the occupation-level approach are presented on the right side, and we can see that the negative effect remained.
{Insert Table 4 from the paper}
An excellent study which specifically looks at the effect of immigrants on native wages and accounts for the internal mobility of natives is Price et al. (2023). The authors explored what happened to native “movers” and “stayers” when immigrants moved in. After controlling for natives that were displaced as well as selective in-migration, the stayers did not see an income gain. Young workers were tracked for thirty years and were found to have suffered a persistent income loss that had not recovered, and among the ones that were displaced, their losses were twice as large as non-movers.2
{Insert Figure 5 from the paper}
And remember, in the modern context, natives are forced into areas that are worse than what they started off with in terms of opportunities, so we have no reason to expect that things got any better for them. Displacement aside, another interesting consideration is that of monopsonies and their ability to use immigrants to reduce the bargaining power of native workers, resulting in much slower wage adjustments than is traditionally assumed. Indeed, the Amior & Manning study considered this possibility, finding that “Based on our estimates, the expansion of native mark-downs (in response to migration) dominates the aggregate gains in marginal products. As a result, the average native wage declines, even in a “long run” setting with elastic capital. Though aggregate native income grows (due to the transfer of migrants’ rents), more than 100% of these gains go to profits, as the increased mark-downs redistribute income from workers to firms” (p. 39).
So while the pie might not be literally fixed, it certainly seems that it’s possible for the adjustment process to be slow enough to cause long-term pain for the natives affected."
"The "fixed pie" is the more correct worldview for many companies that dominate today.
Most specific companies and their founders don't matter that much to people not invested in them specifically. The economic activity they preside over was inevitable and it's only a zero-sum question of who captures the market. The model of being a top business today has been to capture some conduit of economic activity, rather than being a manufacturer of widgets.
This is most true in the case of social media companies, which exist to maximize engagement and sell ads. The rise of a new media platform just re-routes a limited pool of attention to a new fiefdom. If any one founder of the site-that-would-be-twitter didn't exist, it's not like the economic activity represented by twitter ceases to exist from that timeline. But the people in charge do matter to the rules that are in place and what content gets promoted, so handing control of your media to foreigners loses native editorial control while creating no new value.
The same is true of much of the tech world that exists as extensions of physical services. Something like Uber was inevitable as soon as the smartphone proliferated. Ride-sharing systems with electronic reputation management was imagined by writers as early as the 1970s. The smartphone made this politically unstoppable, and it was only a question of which company would scramble fastest to grab the market, by the most legally questionable means.
If you add a hundred new genius "founders" to America, there's not going to be a hundred Ubers or Twitters because the market was only ever going to support a particular concentration of firms, a certain amount of user engagement, a certain amount of consumer spending to collect fees on. As an American it's more important that the set of institutions enabled by present technology end up being controlled by people who share your values."
> I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing."
Firstly, very amusing proposition that I have to name someone who has every bit of ideological motivation to deny this, apparently a restrictionist argument is only acceptable if a xenophile agrees with it but not the other way around, seems mildly unfair. But secondly, I accept your challenge. Behold, Alex Nowrasteh from the Cato Institute in his piece "JD Vance Is Correct: Immigration Increases Housing Prices, and That’s Okay": https://www.cato.org/blog/jd-vance-correct-immigration-increases-housing-prices-thats-ok
Obviously, Nowrasteh spends a long portion of the article explaining why in his magical world, raising housing prices is actually not a problem. We can of course get into the empirical debate about whether or not an immigrant's effect on the prices is greater or less than their effect on demand for housing, that's a perfectly fine discussion to be had on its own, but since your only challenge here was asking me to "name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing"", I believe I have done a satisfactory job.
> I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Evidently, you are much better at describing yourself than you are at describing me.
> Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
Ah, nice job raising the bar for being a valid authority figure on anything, now we're straight up invoking genetic fallacies. White liberals who insist that immigration is absolutely wonderful and an unquestionable good live in areas that are so white that one would need binoculars to find a Mexican roaming around and pay a premium to send their kids to private schools that have close to zero migrant students. There is a clear discrepancy between what people claim and how they actually behave. Not surprising that they're the same group of people who accuse white conservatives of being racists and then avoid diverse areas as much as them while also engaging in white flight even *more* than them.
I don't have time to respond to all of these, but I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas. And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act. It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention. Liberty is the solution.
> I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas.
Do you just like being wrong? Whites flee from Hispanics too. First paper:
"Using geo-linked data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the decennial census, we compare probabilities of neighborhood out-migration for Anglos, blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans by varying ethno-racial neighborhood compositions. Analyses for Latinos are disaggregated by nativity status. **The results indicate that Anglos have a higher likelihood of moving when they have many minority neighbors and there is little difference whether minority neighbors are black or Latino**."
"We found that one-third of districts experienced rising enrollments of Latino children of at least 250 children between 2000 and 2015 (32 percent of the 4,293 districts). Among suburban districts meeting this growth threshold (n = 656), White enrollments grew in just 131 districts and fell in the remaining 525—evincing a contemporary version of White flight."
> And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act.
I am not sure what exactly telling me "blacks suck, and they sucked more once you can't disassociate from them completely" is supposed to prove. I do not recall disagreeing with this.
> It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention.
Evidently, this "free movement of people", whether it's in a situation where people can freely disassociate or the government tries to force integration, white people don't want to be around blacks (and Hispanics). When given the freedom the choose, or when attempted coercion by the government is tried, whites find ways to leave. So really, the lesson here is that there's no way to resolve the issue that blacks (and Hispanics) are not so good for the well-being of white people, there's only the extent to which damage control can be implemented (fleeing from them). I honestly am perplexed and wonder if you even tried to think out your response before sending it.
> Liberty is the solution.
Which was not remotely proven at all in this attempt at a response. Ironically, even more good arguments against immigration, because now we're really playing mental gymnastics.
"See, if you just have a low-skilled group complement the high-skilled group, everyone will be better off. No? Oh, okay fine, not *that* low-skilled, they can't be too different. I mean something intermediate, like Hispanics. Oh, whites respond poorly to Hispanics too? They would still pay a premium to not enjoy the benefits of labor specialization? What? If there were no foreigners here in the first place, no one would even have to think about how to deal with the issue of white flight? Well, umm... just let people move around you bigot!"
Your argument for how Hispanics don't create a Detroit or Baltimore is literally because their IQ disparity with whites is less dramatic so their shitholes are less shitty in comparison to blacks. You are implicitly recognizing here that perhaps so-called labor segmentation from large IQ/ability group inequality is not inherently worth it because your example relies on picking a group which has about half the average group difference in IQ as between blacks and whites, which should also reduce the amount of segmentation that occurs.
"Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time."
The claim that Massachusetts and Minnesota have the highest IQ scores has always lacked credibility. Someone of good repute should look into how this age-old claim is substantiated.
Why is this obviously bad? It sucks for those who's wages decline, but from the buyers perspective, competition among workers should put downward pressure on wages, and so lower the cost of goods / services.
I don't buy into the "artificially restrict labour available so as to inflate local wages" approach as being obviously net beneficial.
You’re referring to the “immigrant surplus”, which is what I meant at the start of this article when it comes to conflating GDP growth with gains to natives. Here’s the relevant part about this that I wrote in another piece:
“In economics, while immigrants depress the wages of competing workers, firms benefit from being able to employ labor at cheaper costs, and some consumers gain from cheaper goods and services. The net gain from subtracting the winners’ gains and the losers’ losses is referred to as the “immigrant surplus”. In practice, this surplus is extremely small, just 2.2% of the increase in GDP, while the rest of the benefit goes to the immigrants themselves as wages and benefits (Borjas, 2013). If it isn’t obvious already, this small surplus covers up a massive bottom-up wealth redistribution from workers to employers, though with some benefit to consumers. Now, of course, this model is sensitive to the assumptions employed. Amior & Manning (2024) focused on the way monopsonies influenced the market dynamics of migrant and native workers. Since monopsonies have significant market power to influence wages, employers do not feel as much pressure to adjust wages quickly based on supply and demand. Under this model, both the wage reduction and the immigrant surplus would become larger than under the assumption of perfect competition. Aside from these two studies, the famous and highly cited 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had estimated that the actual “benefit” of immigration to the native-born could be $54.2 billion a year. The authors don’t demonstrate how they got this number, but they provide all the information necessary to calculate it. In short, this “benefit” to the natives would come from reducing the wages of native workers who are in competition with immigrants by $439.4 billion annually, but the gain to businesses would be $548.1 billion, which would create a net “benefit” of $54.2 billion to natives. Whether or not most people would consider this a benefit, however, might be a slightly different story. Still, even this is probably overstating the ‘benefit’ of migrants, as it cannot account for the various indirect impacts that this large-scale bottom-up wealth redistribution has. For instance, natives whose prospects are hurt by migrants and leave their local area are also probably more likely to end up on welfare afterward, but the formula for calculating the immigrant surplus does not capture this, so in practice, the immigrant surplus is closer to $0 or even negative.”
In fact, assuming that the *only* effect of bottom-up redistribution is just more welfare use from native workers who were hurt and nothing else (this is an extremely charitable assumption but let’s grant it here), if every crowded-out native used a couple thousand dollars more of welfare each year, that entirely offsets the surplus. And again, this is assuming that increased welfare usage is the *only* side effect.
As a follow up, is it your belief that the potential downside suffered by natives is enough to outweigh the obvious benefit gained by the immigrants (i.e. their income being multiplied by 5 or 10x or 15x)?
For the record, I am not against helping people outside of my own country. But, I do believe immigration as a solution is misguided and will actually make the entire world worse off in the long run (poor countries currently also depend on the technological innovations of intelligent countries, keeping intelligent countries as prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world). It will probably be best for the sake of world peace to stabilize the situation of the third world. Read this to understand the implications of complete freedom of movement: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2025/02/end-stage-global-capitalism/
To be clear, I didn't think you would be against helping people outside of your own country.
The video seems somewhat orthogonal to the point I was making since it can both be true that (a) immigration to the US (since that was the example used) has a negligible impact on reducing world poverty and (b) the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example). What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations? Presumably these people won't end up in Moderna or SpaceX or whatever, since they won't surpass the credential barrier. Even if employers suck at identifying productive workers, some crude measures will probably avoid the potential downsides here. Is it something like "well, they increase corruption and overall damage the fabric of society sufficiently such that running the business and institutes that make technological progress becomes impossible"?
On Kirkegaard's piece:
"Most ethnics marry within their group, but not all of them, and all of them engage in some level of outbreeding. If we wait long enough (100s of years), there will be genetic panmixia. In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. "
This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating? How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
> the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
The gain to migrants can also only exist if the destination country is better than the one they come from (obviously). The problem is migrants make the destination country ever more like the host country, so the gains for future waves are eventually going to diminish and then there simply won't be any at all.
If you want to help them, it should not come at the expense of those already here. It’s not at all obvious why their well-being should take precedence over natives. It is possible to improve their quality of life in their own countries without destroying our own, and that’s what I support. People who claim to be highly compassionate are almost never the ones who lose anything for this supposed humanitarian kindness they preach; they just let poor Americans bear the brunt of the negative effects of migrants while they themselves live in some gated community which is basically a miniature version of a white ethnostate.
> As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
High IQ immigration has its own problems, mostly political, which eventually translates downstream into indirect costs (Aporia has published the relevant pieces on those by Arctotherium, you can search for it yourself). Possibly one can work out a way to make it work, but a first step towards doing that is recognizing that "Immigrasia" does not exist. There is no country where all the immigrants come from, immigrants are not a homogenous sample, so when we discuss immigration, the immediate question to ask should be "immigrants from where"?
> I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example).
The problem with the gulf states example is that the reason why the gulf states work is because they're despotic states with draconian laws where citizenship is almost impossible to get and foreign workers are basically cannon fodder. Sure, in such a system, you can argue that immigration *could* work, but the problem is everyone who pushes for open borders (mostly libertarians and leftists) want to get the benefit of open borders as with the gulf states without adopting the style of governance of gulf states because they like freedom or liberal democracy. Fundamentally, those are incompatible stances.
I can personally grant that if you implemented segregation or apartheid in the West, we can negotiate more low-skilled workers, but if you’re willing to accept this proposal to make open borders work, you are obviously in the slim slim minority of open border advocates.
> What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations?
Resources wasted. If the government could have spent a set amount each year on R&D research but had to siphon a portion of it away for social services to accommodate migrants, that's an example of reducing innovation. Any inefficiencies they are responsible for that diverts resources could have gone to innovation. But let's use a simpler example besides innovation to illustrate the same idea: nobody likes getting into accidents, both because it's expensive and presumably because you don't want to die. The likelihood of you getting into say a car accident is a function of three things: your ability to drive properly (positively correlated with IQ), the the ability of everyone around you to drive properly (also positively correlated with IQ), and how well the roads are maintained (government and private spending). Even if you had incredible driving skills (high IQ and practice), if everyone around you are awful drivers who should've had their licenses revoked (low IQ), and the roads are full of cracks and holes (the government siphoned some of the money for road maintenance to pay for social services), your risk of getting into an accident also increases. This is probably not a good thing.
However, negative externalities on innovation is not limited to low-skilled migrants. Foreign students are notorious for engaging in academic fraud, which is obviously not good for innovation if reviewers have to go through more trouble with retractions and investigations. There is another aspect to this, which is that our foreign students are largely from China and India, and surveys shows that nearly all of them share technological insight with their peers back in their home countries. If all you care about is global prosperity, this is not necessarily bad, but for people who would like the United States to maintain its competitive edge against China, this is of course very bad. So, migration is also a way for opponents to narrow the technological gap with the West.
> This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating?
Assortative mating exists but it is not perfect. It is actually astonishingly weak for many personality traits, meta-analytic literature puts it at around 0.3-0.4 between couples. Genius can be thought of as an interaction effect between extremely high IQ and the right personality, the fact that assortative mating is not strong with regards to personality screws with the likelihood of producing a genius. Miscegenation also blurs racial boundaries, so even if we had some whites who preferred dating whites over nonwhites, the blurring of racial boundaries will make it more acceptable for those whites to mate with "white-passing" clines that will eventually result in genomic extinction. It's also a simple fact of population biology that uniform mixing between originally differentiated populations results in some loss of the original genetic diversity.
> How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
I am not sure what examples you have in mind specifically. People in historical times were also far more implicitly prejudiced against other groups of people and any sort of "marrying out" was generally frowned upon.
Yes, this is a clear case wherein Economic Theory is a lot more ambiguous about a topic than the impression given by Economic Policy pundits
There's an important point regarding the Economic arguments for loosening immigration: "labor shortages" is a euphemism for "wages are too low"
In a free market, long term labor shortages shouldn't happen - wages should rise until more of the native population enters that workforce, and this proceeds until a new equilibrium with both more workers employed as well as higher wages are realized.
Instead of importing workers to fill a labor shortages, why not figure out the reasons for structurally depressed wages in the first place?
(the answer, of course, includes a lot of the parasitic regulatory functions of progressive policy, which is why this question is not explored)
“Calling the children “natives” doesn’t change the fact that they are an expense that only arose because their parents were allowed into the country in the first place”
Bingo. A couple of decades or so ago, I saw the CA stat’s for immigrants wrt to their current wages as low level manual laborers and the estimated expense of just two of their children attending public school in CA, K-12. Two children attending public school for 12 years was projected at that time to cost $300k and that was not including inflation projections. The typical (low) household income was well below any conceivable tax rate able to recoup such a taxpayer footed expense across even a lifetime of menial wage household income.
The knock on (beneficial) effects of such immigration is little more than wishful thinking. As “Realist” has succinctly noted, cost in $$$ pales to cost in IQ dilution of the nation. Those costs will live on forever and be subtly hidden.
Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania like to see themselves as "scientists" in opposition to the irrational yahoos on the other side. A true scientist, however, first tests a new proposal on a small sample of consenting participants. The requirement of "consent" is critical. If there is no consent, the experiment cannot go ahead.
If the results are promising, a true scientist will then try to replicate the results with a larger sample. If the results are still good, the proposal is tentatively accepted — although it is still subject to review and criticism. In fact, criticism is always encouraged.
This approach has little in common with what people like Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania are advocating. Where is the consent? Where is the preliminary testing on a small scale? And where is the freedom to criticize?
Excellent description of a scientist.
Additionally, the left wouldn't want low-skilled immigrants to remain as a permanent underclass forever. If low-skilled immigrants are imported for the purpose of doing all the low-skilled jobs that supposedly no one else wants to do, leftists would start complaining within a generation or two that the country needs to have better policies to raise the social mobility of the recent low-skilled immigrants and their descendants.
It's mostly unfeasible to expect high social mobility from low IQ immigrants to begin with. But even if it were successful, it would imply that the country would have to import an endless stream of low-skilled immigrants every generation to refill the vacant low-skilled occupations, which isn't sustainable.
"Indeed, national IQ is positively correlated with almost everything good and negatively correlated with almost everything bad. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the single best predictor of economic growth and also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic development."
This is a key point in the article.
Spot on.
Great article! This theme needs to be talked about more with receipts instead of leaving it to academics with pseudoscientific models. And it's terrible to always frame everything in terms of GDP, jobs and productivity.
In my experience, as an ex-expat living in my "home" country, the underappreciated externalities in the social sphere, which are hard to model and measure (data probably doesn't even exist), are boosting racism and intolerance as ordinary people feel unheard and people in Ivory towers don't live in the same shared spaces with recently arrived migrants.
Three small and innocuous examples come to mind: I've noticed the amount of trash on the streets in certain neighborhoods is indicative of the presence of migration (and it starts with litter and goes all the way up to washing machines/furniture, as well as dumping construction waste in wildlife adjacent spaces). I've also noticed there's also very little participation in community organizations and events (more from South American backgrounds, virtually nil from Middle East and African backgrounds). And lastly, the takeover and inappropriate use of green social spaces, rendering them unusable to locals (for instance: BBQs and parties in inappropriate places ruining them for everyone else).
And all of this saddens me as I've lived in a dozen countries across three continents, so I know the migrants who partake in the activities mentioned above don't represent what we'd describe as the middle class or higher socioeconomic strata from those cultures/societies.
The phrase I love is immigration is "Human Quantitative Rading".
How does someone end up thinking that *competent low-wage and manual labor* amounts to a national tragedy?
Exactly. Even an “incompetent” gardener can do a lot of damage to the plantings. Here one sees—and is warned—that improper pruning, feeding, and weeding destroys/damages one’s landscaping. We see it all the time in the neighborhood as there are much “day” laborers recruited for these type jobs.
One talks about the building “trades” still being in the domain of the native population. Well, not here—or anywhere in the Southwest. YouTube videos galore showing new construction done by incompetents in all the trades, and no, city-county code inspectors do not catch such.
Some general contractors putting up such “junk” have even refused potential buyers the right to inspect finished home construction *before* purchase—rather they claim all “defects” will be handled under their warranty. Fat chance.
Immigration slows the drive to automate housing, 3d homes, prefab, modular designs etc. Ironically the world needs this and the west alone can develop it.
This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction. Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity. The pro-immigration argument is that the firm's owners should be the ones to decide whether the janitor will improve the firm's productivity, not some bureaucrat with no skin in the game like Mr. Whitfeld. (Anti-discrimination law complicates this, but it would be better to fight that directly rather than argue for closed borders.)
Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
Whitfeld asserts that:
"And this is assuming that the "freeing up" of native workers is actually a good thing in the long run. Native workers displaced by immigrants who go apply for a higher-skilled job will be less skilled than the people who are currently working in that job—which is of course bad from the standpoint of the job's productivity."
This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century. Whitfeld strawmans the pro-immigration side, attempting to put concessions in his opponents' mouths:
"Once you start getting into all the other issues like individual versus household level accounting, the cost of housing in cities, negative effects on wages, conflating GDP growth with economic gains to natives and country-of-origin effects, the typical mainstream economist will retreat to their last stand: abstract economic models, long-run "what-ifs", and elegant equations where immigration magically boosts national prosperity through indirect channels."
"The argument for mass immigration goes something like this: even if immigrants raise the cost of housing, compete with native workers and strain the welfare system, they still make the economy more "dynamic". Specifically, they free up high-skilled natives to focus on more complex work, boosting economic growth through specialization of labor."
I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing." What he's doing here is projecting his zero-sum beliefs onto his opponents. Immigration supporters would respond that while immigrants raise the demand for housing, they also raise the supply of housing by building more housing. I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
> This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction.
You're literally defeating your own point here. East Asian countries have much higher immigration restrictions than the United States do, even if every third worlder *wanted* to move to Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, they cannot. Secondly, the United States is not really "low IQ". Its NIQ is about 97.68, white Americans actually have a comparable NIQ to Northeast Asians. The average is weighed down by nonwhites, but nonetheless, America's IQ is not lower than most other Western nations. In fact, white Americans are some of the most intelligent white population in the entire world:
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732244687929360434
No one claims sensible policies don't matter. It's true that white Americans historically and in contemporary times have always had a more economically libertarian attitude, and with a culture that prioritizes liberty and individualism, is also a good foundation for potential innovators and geniuses. But this is because the white sample in the United States is exceptional, so let's not kid ourselves and think that when the richest country in the entire world opened up to the globe beginning in 1965 that the reason why everyone wanted to move there is thanks to the great efforts of some Mexican in Arizona.
> Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
This is genuinely embarrassing. Yes, people move away from blue to red states, no one denies that bad policy is also bad for the economy. Yes, people enjoy the better housing, better tax laws, and fewer regulations in red states, and when they do move, what kinds of neighborhoods do you think they end up in? You think the first destination is a majority-Hispanic or majority-black county? Let's not kid ourselves here, we all know what "white flight" is. In fact, white flight itself as a phenomenon is hard for pro-immigration advocates to reconcile with their narratives. Here is this beneficial complementary labor coming in to supposedly enrich white people's standards of living, and yet they run away from it. Paradoxical truly. Of course, once you consider the fact that the immigration debate is being distorted by the way immigration reduces internal mobility and the cost of that, then actually this makes perfect sense:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/fleeing-opportunity
Ironically enough, you have made yet another excellent argument against immigration. One of the greatest virtues of the federalist system of the United States was that it provided a sort of self-correcting mechanism when it came to policymaking. After all, people can simply leave a state that has implemented poor policies in favor of a state with better policies. Due to self-selection, internal migration of existing residents will come from those who are more politically aligned with the new areas they move into (as well as some minor effect of ideological conversion). Over time, the electorate would shift to give more weight and power to the party responsible for pushing the good policies, and the other party would have to adopt better positions if it wishes to remain politically viable. Immigrants eliminate this self-correction mechanism, making it feasible for a party who pushes bad policies to remain in power because they can choose to either maintain the population of states with bad policy or move into a good state and then wreck it politically. A bad state doesn't need to compete with a good state, it just needs to remain better than the shithole the migrants come from, and it would maintain Democratic power over the electorate, while in the absence of immigration, internal migration would actually result in more policies that libertarians support.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/wrecking-the-laboratories-of-democracy
> Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
It quite literally does, unless you believe that variation within countries don't exist. A hypothetical where you have a country comprised of 300 million high IQ and 300 million low IQ individuals would mean a country of 600 million people where the average IQ is intermediate. The real world analogy to this would be any second world country with a large population.
Since smart fractions are less predictive than average NIQ for differences in economic well-being between countries, it would imply that a country with 1) very high IQ inequality, and 2) a large residual smart fraction is not more important or better than simply a country with a high average IQ.
https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/the-case-for-border-control
> Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity.
Ironically enough, this demonstrates you don't even know what economists mean when I said that. In pro-immigration circles, when immigrants crowd out a native worker, the native is "freed up" to go apply for a better and more complex job. The problem with this is that immigrants typically crowd out a comparable worker (i.e., mostly low-skilled workers), so that worker who then goes to apply for a "high-skilled" occupation has lower skill than the current workers in that occupation. If you actually understood what I meant (which you evidently did not), the analogy would be more like this: a police department hires a new officer who is incompetent at the job. He loses the evidence often, commonly fails to catch and arrest the suspect, is too gullible and tricked by smooth-talkers, etc., which frequently ropes other officers into his cases in the process. Or, a cleaning department hires a new janitor who doesn't do a very thorough job. During the mopping process, he pushes the gunk onto the edges of the walls, which results in the department having to call a wall repair service more frequently.
Your example, meanwhile, of a company delegating very specific roles to everyone, also works in a country with zero immigrants.
> Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
If you agree that the American South would have been better off economically if they accepted industrialization like the North had early on and ditched slavery, then you agree that slavery did in fact reduce their productivity. Differences between countries do not necessarily have to be explained by the same causes as differences within countries. Enslaved blacks saw rapid socioeconomic convergence with their Northern counterparts once slavery was abolished. Despite this, enslaved blacks also had better standards of living than many European countries at the time, but you would obviously be dishonest to propose from the rapid catch-up of Southern blacks to Northern blacks that having slavery is no worse than not having slavery for their prospects.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/black-economic-progress-after-slavery
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YxCHqUbc3DbUU0T2oT92i-42gCIAPzUR/view
Part 2 of the reply:
> This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century.
Confident assertions! Firstly, no, a 95 IQ Japanese can make it worse for every other 105 Japanese person working the same job as long as he's worse at the job, which he almost certainly is, because everyone will suddenly have to accommodate his little screw-ups and flaws. Secondly, you seem to not even understand what "lump of labor" even means. The so-called "lump of labor fallacy" refers to incorrectly attempting to assess economic effects from a view that the total number of jobs in an economy is fixed, it actually has nothing to do with the "positive crowd-out" I'm referring to. In fact, "positive crowd-out" is perfectly compatible with flexible number of jobs. We can imagine in a hypothetical where a new job opening occurs for a higher-skilled job because the migrant picking tomatoes "freed" up a native to do something else with his life, so this native doesn't take the job of any other native, versus one where the native does replace another native. In both scenarios, the inefficiencies I described earlier in my reply would still exist. Thirdly, handwaving something by calling it a fallacy when you don't even understand the concept, beyond obviously not being a good look on your part, is also mildly intellectually dishonest. In reality, the "lump of labor" fallacy is not so much a fallacy as it is a circumstantial caveat. Yes, the economy is not permanently fixed, but many factors can make the adjustment process slower or the effect of displacement worse. To quote from the piece where I had covered this briefly:
"We know that immigrant settlement patterns aren’t random but based on the local opportunities available (Kim & Sakamoto, 2013), meaning that these sorts of shocks to natives are occurring in relatively nice locations with high opportunity. Unsurprisingly then, in not just the United States but across countries with high levels of immigration, we can see that citizens are moving from areas of high productivity to areas of low productivity.
{Insert Figure 28 from the paper}
Note: GVA per worker = “gross value added per worker”. Notice that in various countries, the GVA per worker is negatively correlated with the internal mobility rate, implying that in these countries, citizens move towards relatively less productive areas. From Stansbury et al. (2023).
With this, we now have a potential mechanism for the displacement effect to persist, and in fact, there’s evidence that it does. Kim & Sakamoto had also analyzed the long-term effects of immigration on native wages in both two-digit and one-digit occupations from 1994 to 2006. The results from the occupation-level approach are presented on the right side, and we can see that the negative effect remained.
{Insert Table 4 from the paper}
An excellent study which specifically looks at the effect of immigrants on native wages and accounts for the internal mobility of natives is Price et al. (2023). The authors explored what happened to native “movers” and “stayers” when immigrants moved in. After controlling for natives that were displaced as well as selective in-migration, the stayers did not see an income gain. Young workers were tracked for thirty years and were found to have suffered a persistent income loss that had not recovered, and among the ones that were displaced, their losses were twice as large as non-movers.2
{Insert Figure 5 from the paper}
And remember, in the modern context, natives are forced into areas that are worse than what they started off with in terms of opportunities, so we have no reason to expect that things got any better for them. Displacement aside, another interesting consideration is that of monopsonies and their ability to use immigrants to reduce the bargaining power of native workers, resulting in much slower wage adjustments than is traditionally assumed. Indeed, the Amior & Manning study considered this possibility, finding that “Based on our estimates, the expansion of native mark-downs (in response to migration) dominates the aggregate gains in marginal products. As a result, the average native wage declines, even in a “long run” setting with elastic capital. Though aggregate native income grows (due to the transfer of migrants’ rents), more than 100% of these gains go to profits, as the increased mark-downs redistribute income from workers to firms” (p. 39).
So while the pie might not be literally fixed, it certainly seems that it’s possible for the adjustment process to be slow enough to cause long-term pain for the natives affected."
https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/the-price-of-racial-diversity
And to quote the X/Twitter user @AnechoicMedia_:
"The "fixed pie" is the more correct worldview for many companies that dominate today.
Most specific companies and their founders don't matter that much to people not invested in them specifically. The economic activity they preside over was inevitable and it's only a zero-sum question of who captures the market. The model of being a top business today has been to capture some conduit of economic activity, rather than being a manufacturer of widgets.
This is most true in the case of social media companies, which exist to maximize engagement and sell ads. The rise of a new media platform just re-routes a limited pool of attention to a new fiefdom. If any one founder of the site-that-would-be-twitter didn't exist, it's not like the economic activity represented by twitter ceases to exist from that timeline. But the people in charge do matter to the rules that are in place and what content gets promoted, so handing control of your media to foreigners loses native editorial control while creating no new value.
The same is true of much of the tech world that exists as extensions of physical services. Something like Uber was inevitable as soon as the smartphone proliferated. Ride-sharing systems with electronic reputation management was imagined by writers as early as the 1970s. The smartphone made this politically unstoppable, and it was only a question of which company would scramble fastest to grab the market, by the most legally questionable means.
If you add a hundred new genius "founders" to America, there's not going to be a hundred Ubers or Twitters because the market was only ever going to support a particular concentration of firms, a certain amount of user engagement, a certain amount of consumer spending to collect fees on. As an American it's more important that the set of institutions enabled by present technology end up being controlled by people who share your values."
https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1873310906416824660
> I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing."
Firstly, very amusing proposition that I have to name someone who has every bit of ideological motivation to deny this, apparently a restrictionist argument is only acceptable if a xenophile agrees with it but not the other way around, seems mildly unfair. But secondly, I accept your challenge. Behold, Alex Nowrasteh from the Cato Institute in his piece "JD Vance Is Correct: Immigration Increases Housing Prices, and That’s Okay": https://www.cato.org/blog/jd-vance-correct-immigration-increases-housing-prices-thats-ok
Obviously, Nowrasteh spends a long portion of the article explaining why in his magical world, raising housing prices is actually not a problem. We can of course get into the empirical debate about whether or not an immigrant's effect on the prices is greater or less than their effect on demand for housing, that's a perfectly fine discussion to be had on its own, but since your only challenge here was asking me to "name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing"", I believe I have done a satisfactory job.
> I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Evidently, you are much better at describing yourself than you are at describing me.
> Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
Ah, nice job raising the bar for being a valid authority figure on anything, now we're straight up invoking genetic fallacies. White liberals who insist that immigration is absolutely wonderful and an unquestionable good live in areas that are so white that one would need binoculars to find a Mexican roaming around and pay a premium to send their kids to private schools that have close to zero migrant students. There is a clear discrepancy between what people claim and how they actually behave. Not surprising that they're the same group of people who accuse white conservatives of being racists and then avoid diverse areas as much as them while also engaging in white flight even *more* than them.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/white-progressives-more-likely-to-flee-diverse-neighborhoods
I don't have time to respond to all of these, but I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas. And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act. It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention. Liberty is the solution.
> I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas.
Do you just like being wrong? Whites flee from Hispanics too. First paper:
"Using geo-linked data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the decennial census, we compare probabilities of neighborhood out-migration for Anglos, blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans by varying ethno-racial neighborhood compositions. Analyses for Latinos are disaggregated by nativity status. **The results indicate that Anglos have a higher likelihood of moving when they have many minority neighbors and there is little difference whether minority neighbors are black or Latino**."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-008-9101-x
Second paper:
"We found that one-third of districts experienced rising enrollments of Latino children of at least 250 children between 2000 and 2015 (32 percent of the 4,293 districts). Among suburban districts meeting this growth threshold (n = 656), White enrollments grew in just 131 districts and fell in the remaining 525—evincing a contemporary version of White flight."
https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/9/2/104
> And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act.
I am not sure what exactly telling me "blacks suck, and they sucked more once you can't disassociate from them completely" is supposed to prove. I do not recall disagreeing with this.
> It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention.
Evidently, this "free movement of people", whether it's in a situation where people can freely disassociate or the government tries to force integration, white people don't want to be around blacks (and Hispanics). When given the freedom the choose, or when attempted coercion by the government is tried, whites find ways to leave. So really, the lesson here is that there's no way to resolve the issue that blacks (and Hispanics) are not so good for the well-being of white people, there's only the extent to which damage control can be implemented (fleeing from them). I honestly am perplexed and wonder if you even tried to think out your response before sending it.
> Liberty is the solution.
Which was not remotely proven at all in this attempt at a response. Ironically, even more good arguments against immigration, because now we're really playing mental gymnastics.
"See, if you just have a low-skilled group complement the high-skilled group, everyone will be better off. No? Oh, okay fine, not *that* low-skilled, they can't be too different. I mean something intermediate, like Hispanics. Oh, whites respond poorly to Hispanics too? They would still pay a premium to not enjoy the benefits of labor specialization? What? If there were no foreigners here in the first place, no one would even have to think about how to deal with the issue of white flight? Well, umm... just let people move around you bigot!"
Your argument for how Hispanics don't create a Detroit or Baltimore is literally because their IQ disparity with whites is less dramatic so their shitholes are less shitty in comparison to blacks. You are implicitly recognizing here that perhaps so-called labor segmentation from large IQ/ability group inequality is not inherently worth it because your example relies on picking a group which has about half the average group difference in IQ as between blacks and whites, which should also reduce the amount of segmentation that occurs.
"Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time."
The claim that Massachusetts and Minnesota have the highest IQ scores has always lacked credibility. Someone of good repute should look into how this age-old claim is substantiated.
Bryan Chaplan's open borders for Israel essay lets go!
"compete with native workers"
Why is this obviously bad? It sucks for those who's wages decline, but from the buyers perspective, competition among workers should put downward pressure on wages, and so lower the cost of goods / services.
I don't buy into the "artificially restrict labour available so as to inflate local wages" approach as being obviously net beneficial.
You’re referring to the “immigrant surplus”, which is what I meant at the start of this article when it comes to conflating GDP growth with gains to natives. Here’s the relevant part about this that I wrote in another piece:
“In economics, while immigrants depress the wages of competing workers, firms benefit from being able to employ labor at cheaper costs, and some consumers gain from cheaper goods and services. The net gain from subtracting the winners’ gains and the losers’ losses is referred to as the “immigrant surplus”. In practice, this surplus is extremely small, just 2.2% of the increase in GDP, while the rest of the benefit goes to the immigrants themselves as wages and benefits (Borjas, 2013). If it isn’t obvious already, this small surplus covers up a massive bottom-up wealth redistribution from workers to employers, though with some benefit to consumers. Now, of course, this model is sensitive to the assumptions employed. Amior & Manning (2024) focused on the way monopsonies influenced the market dynamics of migrant and native workers. Since monopsonies have significant market power to influence wages, employers do not feel as much pressure to adjust wages quickly based on supply and demand. Under this model, both the wage reduction and the immigrant surplus would become larger than under the assumption of perfect competition. Aside from these two studies, the famous and highly cited 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had estimated that the actual “benefit” of immigration to the native-born could be $54.2 billion a year. The authors don’t demonstrate how they got this number, but they provide all the information necessary to calculate it. In short, this “benefit” to the natives would come from reducing the wages of native workers who are in competition with immigrants by $439.4 billion annually, but the gain to businesses would be $548.1 billion, which would create a net “benefit” of $54.2 billion to natives. Whether or not most people would consider this a benefit, however, might be a slightly different story. Still, even this is probably overstating the ‘benefit’ of migrants, as it cannot account for the various indirect impacts that this large-scale bottom-up wealth redistribution has. For instance, natives whose prospects are hurt by migrants and leave their local area are also probably more likely to end up on welfare afterward, but the formula for calculating the immigrant surplus does not capture this, so in practice, the immigrant surplus is closer to $0 or even negative.”
In fact, assuming that the *only* effect of bottom-up redistribution is just more welfare use from native workers who were hurt and nothing else (this is an extremely charitable assumption but let’s grant it here), if every crowded-out native used a couple thousand dollars more of welfare each year, that entirely offsets the surplus. And again, this is assuming that increased welfare usage is the *only* side effect.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing the excerpt.
As a follow up, is it your belief that the potential downside suffered by natives is enough to outweigh the obvious benefit gained by the immigrants (i.e. their income being multiplied by 5 or 10x or 15x)?
https://youtu.be/LPjzfGChGlE?feature=shared
For the record, I am not against helping people outside of my own country. But, I do believe immigration as a solution is misguided and will actually make the entire world worse off in the long run (poor countries currently also depend on the technological innovations of intelligent countries, keeping intelligent countries as prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world). It will probably be best for the sake of world peace to stabilize the situation of the third world. Read this to understand the implications of complete freedom of movement: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2025/02/end-stage-global-capitalism/
To be clear, I didn't think you would be against helping people outside of your own country.
The video seems somewhat orthogonal to the point I was making since it can both be true that (a) immigration to the US (since that was the example used) has a negligible impact on reducing world poverty and (b) the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example). What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations? Presumably these people won't end up in Moderna or SpaceX or whatever, since they won't surpass the credential barrier. Even if employers suck at identifying productive workers, some crude measures will probably avoid the potential downsides here. Is it something like "well, they increase corruption and overall damage the fabric of society sufficiently such that running the business and institutes that make technological progress becomes impossible"?
On Kirkegaard's piece:
"Most ethnics marry within their group, but not all of them, and all of them engage in some level of outbreeding. If we wait long enough (100s of years), there will be genetic panmixia. In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. "
This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating? How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
> the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
The gain to migrants can also only exist if the destination country is better than the one they come from (obviously). The problem is migrants make the destination country ever more like the host country, so the gains for future waves are eventually going to diminish and then there simply won't be any at all.
If you want to help them, it should not come at the expense of those already here. It’s not at all obvious why their well-being should take precedence over natives. It is possible to improve their quality of life in their own countries without destroying our own, and that’s what I support. People who claim to be highly compassionate are almost never the ones who lose anything for this supposed humanitarian kindness they preach; they just let poor Americans bear the brunt of the negative effects of migrants while they themselves live in some gated community which is basically a miniature version of a white ethnostate.
> As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
High IQ immigration has its own problems, mostly political, which eventually translates downstream into indirect costs (Aporia has published the relevant pieces on those by Arctotherium, you can search for it yourself). Possibly one can work out a way to make it work, but a first step towards doing that is recognizing that "Immigrasia" does not exist. There is no country where all the immigrants come from, immigrants are not a homogenous sample, so when we discuss immigration, the immediate question to ask should be "immigrants from where"?
> I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example).
The problem with the gulf states example is that the reason why the gulf states work is because they're despotic states with draconian laws where citizenship is almost impossible to get and foreign workers are basically cannon fodder. Sure, in such a system, you can argue that immigration *could* work, but the problem is everyone who pushes for open borders (mostly libertarians and leftists) want to get the benefit of open borders as with the gulf states without adopting the style of governance of gulf states because they like freedom or liberal democracy. Fundamentally, those are incompatible stances.
Proposition (open borders + citizenship apartheid) ≠ Proposition (open borders)
I can personally grant that if you implemented segregation or apartheid in the West, we can negotiate more low-skilled workers, but if you’re willing to accept this proposal to make open borders work, you are obviously in the slim slim minority of open border advocates.
> What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations?
Resources wasted. If the government could have spent a set amount each year on R&D research but had to siphon a portion of it away for social services to accommodate migrants, that's an example of reducing innovation. Any inefficiencies they are responsible for that diverts resources could have gone to innovation. But let's use a simpler example besides innovation to illustrate the same idea: nobody likes getting into accidents, both because it's expensive and presumably because you don't want to die. The likelihood of you getting into say a car accident is a function of three things: your ability to drive properly (positively correlated with IQ), the the ability of everyone around you to drive properly (also positively correlated with IQ), and how well the roads are maintained (government and private spending). Even if you had incredible driving skills (high IQ and practice), if everyone around you are awful drivers who should've had their licenses revoked (low IQ), and the roads are full of cracks and holes (the government siphoned some of the money for road maintenance to pay for social services), your risk of getting into an accident also increases. This is probably not a good thing.
However, negative externalities on innovation is not limited to low-skilled migrants. Foreign students are notorious for engaging in academic fraud, which is obviously not good for innovation if reviewers have to go through more trouble with retractions and investigations. There is another aspect to this, which is that our foreign students are largely from China and India, and surveys shows that nearly all of them share technological insight with their peers back in their home countries. If all you care about is global prosperity, this is not necessarily bad, but for people who would like the United States to maintain its competitive edge against China, this is of course very bad. So, migration is also a way for opponents to narrow the technological gap with the West.
> This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating?
Assortative mating exists but it is not perfect. It is actually astonishingly weak for many personality traits, meta-analytic literature puts it at around 0.3-0.4 between couples. Genius can be thought of as an interaction effect between extremely high IQ and the right personality, the fact that assortative mating is not strong with regards to personality screws with the likelihood of producing a genius. Miscegenation also blurs racial boundaries, so even if we had some whites who preferred dating whites over nonwhites, the blurring of racial boundaries will make it more acceptable for those whites to mate with "white-passing" clines that will eventually result in genomic extinction. It's also a simple fact of population biology that uniform mixing between originally differentiated populations results in some loss of the original genetic diversity.
> How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
I am not sure what examples you have in mind specifically. People in historical times were also far more implicitly prejudiced against other groups of people and any sort of "marrying out" was generally frowned upon.
Yes, this is a clear case wherein Economic Theory is a lot more ambiguous about a topic than the impression given by Economic Policy pundits
There's an important point regarding the Economic arguments for loosening immigration: "labor shortages" is a euphemism for "wages are too low"
In a free market, long term labor shortages shouldn't happen - wages should rise until more of the native population enters that workforce, and this proceeds until a new equilibrium with both more workers employed as well as higher wages are realized.
Instead of importing workers to fill a labor shortages, why not figure out the reasons for structurally depressed wages in the first place?
(the answer, of course, includes a lot of the parasitic regulatory functions of progressive policy, which is why this question is not explored)
Discussed in more detail here:
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/on-inequality