Immigration Reform: Stand Down, IT Lobbyists!
For all the numbers bouncing around the immigration reform debate—the Senate bill is 844 pages!; it will cost trillions!; 11 million undocumenteds will have a path to citizenship!–the most relevant number is 27%. That’s the share of Gov Romney’s Latino vote and that’s the reason this much needed advance in public policy might just make [...]
A Few Thoughts on Immigration Reform
Here are a few observations on the new immigration reform proposal, with an emphasis on a part that I think is particularly important and largely overlooked given the emphasis on citizenship: the consideration of labor market impacts and the introduction of mechanisms to control them. Before getting into some policy analysis, let’s consider why the reform [...]
Today’s Papers
A few things that caught my sleepy eyes: –Jim Tankersley reviews the work of the expansionary contraction crowd, which is almost exclusively the work of economist Alberto Alesina with co-authors. I’ve long held the view that tax increases and budget cuts in weak economies are analogous to leeching in medieval medicine: it’s not that it [...]
A Natural Experiment, Anyone?
I hope some enterprising Ph.D. candidate takes advantage of what sounds like an opportunity to study the economic impact on jobs, wages, and prices as a natural experiment on the Arizona border. According to the NYT: Officers who guard the line say the [AZ] border is more secure in most places than they have ever known [...]
No Shortage of STEMs
A few posts back, on immigration economics, I wrote this: Watch for members of Congress to try to expand guest worker programs throughout this round of reform, particularly in STEM and computer related guest visas, like H-1B’s. There is simply no credible economic argument I’ve seen based on wage or employment trends that would support [...]
Immigration and Efficiency
Headed to Arizona for T-day holiday so the mind turns toward immigration reform. To restate the overstated, there’s a real opening for comprehensive reform coming off of the election. The President has made it a priority for term two, many D’s are surely ready to consolidate their electoral advantage, and some R’s recognize that it [...]
CBO: Slower Growth is Baked in the Cake…(But it shouldn’t outta stay that way)
In a new analysis of the slow growth of the US economy post the Great Recession, the Congressional Budget Office produced a result that might surprise you: the underlying growth rate of the economy has significantly slowed. If you have an historical perspective on this sort of thing, you know that in past recoveries we’ve [...]
President Obama’s New Anti-Deportation Plan
I was going to summarize this new move by the Pres as being in that all-too-rare intersection of good policy and good politics, but Harold Meyerson beat me to it! He focuses more on the politics but here’s why I like the policy. Key to immigration reform is controlling inflows from the border. History shows [...]
Jared Bernstein’s areas of expertise include federal and state economic and fiscal policies, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, international comparisons, and the analysis of financial and housing markets.
