by JackYoustra | 2025-04-27 03:29:17+00:00
I'm going to take this in three parts:

- Immigrants are good, especially if you let them assimilate

- Immigrants will assimilate if given the tools

- Current NGOs can provide the tools effectively for low cost

I'm going to crib from the badeconomics faq and igm polls for this first part on econ, it's pretty good:

There's a few different papers:

- The first big one that I'm aware of is the Card Mariel Boat Lift paper by the nobel prize winner David Card way back in 1990: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523702. He found that this labor shock - an increase in the labor market by 125k (7%) in the sequence of three months (May to September 1980) led to practically no impact on wages and employment of locals, even in the very short run (you'll find me arguing with someone else elsewhere in this thread about someone who doggedly refuses to believe this result).

- For an aggregate, very broad look, the best thing is the national academy study: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/23550/chapter/1. This engages people from all over the spectrum and is compiled by 14 economists in consultation with tens more, including some from the Center of Immigration Studies (this is, in my opinion, a hack organization by Stephen Miller, but I'm including it just to underscore the commitment to ideological breadth by the authors). It finds basically what I've been saying, direct effects of wages are small and reject the null hypothesis only on localized non-high-school graduates, and then only just, and the long run economic and fiscal impacts are very positive. As the united states has... more or less unlimited financing capability, all else equal, this makes them a near-unconditional asset from an economic perspective.

- Here's some polls on migration by the US econ experts panel (they also have surveys on other topics, I always enjoy reading them) - High skilled immigrants (you'd agree with them): https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/high-skilled-immigra... - Low-skilled immigrants: https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/low-skilled-immigran... . Note that some of the disagreement is driven by comments such as "Real income of avg the American would rise, but social strains and inequality would also increase." which is a bit different than a pure economic argument

For completeness, here's a 2011 literature review, but this is much more broad than the econ effects: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...

Anyway, I can also give some stats on why remigration would be an actually economically devastating policy, but I'd like to address nonprofits because I think this is our biggest disagreement and I think that the possible benefits flow naturally into this next part.

The literature review and the large NAS report allude that to get the maximum benefit from migration, you need assimilation (as anyone hearing miserable stories of Stockholm and Goteborg ghettos can attest to, to say nothing of hawkers in SF denied work permits). The government can technically asssimilation services (the easiest one being work permits! Costs negative!), but traditionally does not. Instead, when it does get involved, requires taking a third party service (a bit like driving school).

The biggest example for this is language! In this, a paper in 2021 shows that there's a "significant, permanent, and positive effect on earnings" using denmark as an example - notably, it also brings _crime_ down for the children of the parents who took the reform. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26834

Reading the related work in the paper, some hits: - In the US, there's similar results. Massachusetts rolled out an English second language program and it led to a similar significant, permanent, and positive effect on earnings. - In France, there's similar results, but the details are huge: only 100 hours of language training raises labor force participation by 15-27 percent. I'd be careful with this result, there's some weird variables about it, but this is a gigantic swing (overall labor force participation is ~80% in france)

Note that this _actually combines with our earlier analysis_: remember how I said that the only example of there being some wage discontinuity with natives was in very low paying jobs? This is likely due to language: https://www.nber.org/papers/w17609 - the gap in wages disappears upon learning the language

Beyond language training, other services exist: job matching programs, housing programs, cultural programs, all things with similarly positive spillover effects. No paper sticks out here but I can search harder upon request.

As for the NGO overhead performing these services, as far as I can tell a lot of these charities aren't particularly lavishly paid? Here's one: https://givefreely.com/charity-directory/nonprofit/ein-13257...

On $200M of revenue, the CEO's TC was 500k, eyeballing the execs seems like ~$200k for 9 directors with the rest unpaid and an average salary of $55k. That seems fine to me.

A last note - why is it not private? The largest beneficiary of migration is the immigrant, who can boost lifetime earnings by 2 or 3x just because of location, even before considering the intrinsic human capital increase. There's clearly value to be captured.

This is something I'm a lot more curious about. 100 or fewer years before it was obvious: indentured servitude was banned, so there was no way to properly align incentives from any way except at the national level through taxing the economic activity that they generated (income, consumption, whatever. It's all the same in the end).

I'm not sure if it'd be _impossible_ now, income driven repayment plans exist, which are essentially weird capped equity slices in people. I'm not sure if legally it all works, but at a high level it's possible! However, we've seen pretty miserable results elsewhere with for-profit companies in the human capital improvement space, despite access to similar financial tools. For some reason, nonprofit universities are the best and for-profit ones are terrible. I'm not familiar with the literature here.