The Zeroth Amendment
Immigrant Harvard economist George Borjas says immigration is bad for African-Americans. Washington Post readers ask: How dare he?
For a long time, I’ve been pointing out that an awful lot of people think of immigration policy purely in moralistic terms: If you or your ancestors ever immigrated to America, that means you and your descendants until the end of never have no moral right whatsoever to vote to keep anybody else out who wants to move here.
From the Washington Post’s news section:
The Cuba-born Harvard economist behind Trump’s immigration crackdown
George Borjas has provided the intellectual underpinnings of the White House’s sweeping immigration policy changes, including restrictions on H-1B visas.
By Lauren Kaori Gurley
Stephen Miller has been the public face of the Trump administration’s unprecedented immigration crackdown and deportation campaign, but a Cuba-born Harvard University economist who prefers a lower profile provided the intellectual underpinnings of President Donald Trump’s sweeping policy changes until he left the White House on Friday.
In the 1980s and 1990s, George Borjas pioneered the field of immigration economics. In seismic papers, Borjas’s research described the drawbacks of immigration, including his oft-cited, though much-disputed, findings that the arrival of lower-skilled immigrants hurts American workers who compete for jobs, especially poor people and African Americans.
More recently, his research has found new attention and urgency in President Donald Trump’s second term: Borjas, 75, worked as a top economist on the Council of Economic Advisers, a post he stepped down from last week.
Borjas is an immigrant and refugee who escaped Cuba for the United States in 1962 and later obtained citizenship — a point of tension he has referenced in his writing.
“Not only do I have great sympathy for the immigrant’s desire to build a better life, I am also living proof that immigration policy can benefit some people enormously,” he wrote in a 2017 opinion piece for the New York Times. “But I am also an economist, and am very much aware of the many trade-offs involved. Inevitably, immigration does not improve everyone’s well-being.”
One of Borjas’s direct contributions to the Trump administration this past year was his extensive behind-the-scenes work on Trump’s overhaul of the H-1B visa system for highly skilled workers that added a $100,000 fee, according to three people familiar with his work and a White House official, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to share internal deliberations. Borjas had previously written about the “well-documented abuses” of that program over the years.
The White House official said Borjas was among many Trump administration members involved in redesigning the H-1B visa program and confirmed that Borjas provided intellectual support for other Trump immigration initiatives last year.
Now you might think that the fact this social scientist has, despite his personal bias as an immigrant, come to a different conclusion about the empirical reality of immigration makes his view even more persuasive…
Paywall here.
