The +2.6% is hourly pay, not extra hours; it’s the difference between flat wages and one more year of raises. Every credible quasi-experiment, from Denmark’s refugee lottery to U.S. enforcement crackdowns, confirms that more immigrants leave natives at least as well paid, often better off, because firms invest, prices fall and natives climb the job ladder. Shift-share IVs have been combed over by three separate methodological papers and pass; drop them and refugee lotteries STILL give you the same answer. UK stagnation is a productivity story (zoning, anyone?), not an immigration one. So unless you have a better identification strategy that overturns all of these results, the weight of the evidence says immigration grows the pie, and natives get a slice (if you can't believe any synergy than at least just bearing a smaller share of defense spending).
I'm also going to flip it around for a second. As I said with the Mariel boatlift study, where a 7% increase in the labor force yielded more or less no impacts on hyperlocal labor force, even considering (possible? I know little havana right now is mostly spanish but idk what it was back then) language and skills barriers. How do you explain that? That is the most short term of local supply shocks with basically no short term employment or wage impact. Thirty-five years of re-checks (Card 1990 → Borjas 2015 → Clemens-Hunt 2019 → Peri-Yasenov 2019 → Lewis et al.) still show more or less zero effect on native wages or jobs (once you fix compositional glitches in Borjas’s sample). If a shock that extreme can’t push wages down, the `more workers = lower pay` story is busted.
Yeah I got that part, maybe you're misreading. You seem to be interested in advertising that you've read all this stuff, which is great, a lot of people have. But you aren't really addressing the problem statement, so I'll state it clearly: no one gives a shit about a 2.6% hourly wage increase over 20 years. They don't care because immigration comes with a bunch of other externalities, that are very near term, that academics deliberately remove from their models. "Natives get a slice ... of 1.7-2.6% ... over the course of 20 years" is not a convincing argument, which is why most of the quantitative debate about immigration is largely academic. If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually. Insofar as you care about some sort of policy outcome here, you are going to have to figure out a different way to frame this.
I'm not familiar with zoning laws in the UK to comment, so, sure. Maybe a byzantine zoning bureaucracy is the problem there, that does ring distinctly "British" to me.
I haven't read the Mariel study, and honestly I don't really have any interest in it because the underlying story is that Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship. Again, there's qualitative aspects to this that economists - especially the econometricaly inclined - struggle with.
> Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship
Damn if only there was a way to study assimilation. Wait, there is, we have, and if you look a few replies up you'll see that its basically a complete success with sufficient NGO support that vastly boosts social participation.
> If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually.
This kind of thinking leads to Trump. Unironically. Handwaving about "if it were real I'd know of it" is what leads to terrible economic policy.
Well, if it were real people wouldn’t have voted for Trump. What you’ve presented is, like I keep saying, the most unconvincing tidbit of minor benefits. You seem totally uninterested in addressing the problem, that no one cares about this study and what it says because it’s such a tiny effect on the margins, utterly impossible to translate into daily life.
I’ll keep making whatever claims I want, and you can keep gatekeeping (or attempting to) as much as you like (now I really won’t read the Mariel study, nevermind that you are conditioning success on Uncle Sam handing over money to make it work). The force with which state something as plainly obvious only appears as such inside the spreadsheets, so enjoy them.
spite driven willful ignorance is something that I didn't expect to find when starting this conversation.
I'm mostly looking for you to retract your claim about how short-run supply shocks must obviously show up in wages and employment.
EDIT: also nowhere does it require fiscal outlays for assimilation, the single biggest thing is expedited provision of work permits, which is obviously fiscally positive.
I'm also going to flip it around for a second. As I said with the Mariel boatlift study, where a 7% increase in the labor force yielded more or less no impacts on hyperlocal labor force, even considering (possible? I know little havana right now is mostly spanish but idk what it was back then) language and skills barriers. How do you explain that? That is the most short term of local supply shocks with basically no short term employment or wage impact. Thirty-five years of re-checks (Card 1990 → Borjas 2015 → Clemens-Hunt 2019 → Peri-Yasenov 2019 → Lewis et al.) still show more or less zero effect on native wages or jobs (once you fix compositional glitches in Borjas’s sample). If a shock that extreme can’t push wages down, the `more workers = lower pay` story is busted.