The Borjas Blog

Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom

For several decades, the federal government more or less looked the other way as the illegal immigration problem worsened--particularly during the Bush II years when the trend rapidly accelerated. Not surprisingly, somebody has to step into the vacuum:

State lawmakers around the country are proposing hundreds of bills this year aimed at curbing illegal immigration, but experts say the cost and public opposition will keep many from becoming law.

Lawmakers in at least eight states are now sponsoring legislation similar to Oklahoma, which last May passed the nation's most comprehensive anti-immigration law.

It restricts illegal immigrants' access to driver's licenses and other IDs, limits public benefits, penalizes employers who hire them and boosts ties between local police and federal immigration authorities.

The bills are among more than 350 immigration-related proposals unveiled in state legislatures in the first two months of this year, according to a count by The Associated Press.

If nothing else, this is a collective jobs bill for academic economists. Just think of the many papers waiting to be written comparing the impact of the various provisions across states. I shudder to think how many times I will have to hear the words "natural experiment" in academic seminars as newly minted Ph.D.'s use their newly created data to examine the impact of statutory restrictions on the setttlement of illegal immigrants in the state, on the settlement of legal immigrants, on wages, on capital flows, etc.

I Work At....

For reasons best understood by the layers of deans at my place of employment, I used to work at what was commonly known as the Kennedy School of Government (KSG). Now I work at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). And here is a terrific and mercifully brief history of the school's name. Funny--when I was commuting in today it didn't feel like I was starting a new job on what seems like the first day of spring in New England.

Now all that's left is to start spending the school's money getting new HKS stationery and business cards.

Reason #13,243,478 Why The Bush Administration Can't Be Trusted

They can't even build a 28-mile fence!

The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear, federal officials said yesterday.

Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans, Department of Homeland Security officials and congressional auditors told a House subcommittee.

Did anybody outside the Bush administration actually think this would work? Even more interesting, did anybody in the Bush administration actually think this would work?

A New Trend In Illegal Immigration

There's been a debate in labor economics about whether native workers respond to the negative wage impact of immigration by moving to areas that have fewer immigrants. Now we have another question to argue over: Do illegal immigrants move to states that are more willing to ignore their presence?

Illegal immigrants are flowing into Texas across its long borders. But they aren't just swimming across the Rio Grande from Mexico or making dangerous treks through the rugged desert.

Instead, a new rush of illegal immigrants are driving down Interstate 35 from Oklahoma or heading east to Texas from Arizona to flee tough new anti-illegal immigrant laws in those and other states.

The growing exodus is the result of dozens of new state and local laws aimed at curbing illegal immigration. The two toughest measures are in Oklahoma and Arizona.

The Oklahoma statute, which took effect in November, makes it a crime to transport, harbor or hire illegal immigrants. Effective Jan. 1, the Arizona law suspends the business license of employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. On a second offense, the license is revoked.

''It's a wave that's happening across the United States," said Nelson Reyes, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in Houston, which has helped immigrants who recently relocated in Houston from Virginia and South Carolina. ''There is a migration, within the United States, to the states and cities more receptive to the reality of the undocumented immigrant."

A word of advice if you are a student looking for a research topic: Look no further; there's a great paper waiting to be written about this.

Back In Business

Blogging has been "very light" for the past few weeks. A number of time-pressing commitments and time with family have taken up almost all of my time lately.

One reader sent me a short email: "Please get back to work on your blog! We have a presidential campaign going on!" We sure do. Yet I look around the field in both parties, consider the positions of the leading candidates, and an old Simon-Garfunkel refrain immediately comes to mind:

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon.
Going to the candidates' debate.
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose.

Publish or.....Publish More

Here's a very insightful article about the shape of the production function in big-time academics.

The Great Mexican Emigration

The number of Mexican-born persons living in the United States back in 1970 was very small--only about 1.5% of Mexicans had chosen to emigrate. By 2005, over 10 percent had moved out. Why? And why now and not 50 years ago? Here is the latest research from Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh that attempts to answer these questions:

In this paper, we examine net emigration from Mexico over the period 1960 to 2000. The data are consistent with labor-supply shocks having made a substantial contribution to Mexican emigration, accounting for one third of Mexican labor flows to the U.S. over the last 25 years of the 20th century. Net emigration rates by Mexican state birth-year cohort display a strong positive correlation with the initial size of the Mexican cohort, relative to the corresponding U.S. cohort. Labor-demand shocks also contribute to emigration, but the state-specific component of these is muted relative to labor supply. In states with long histories of emigration, the effects of cohort size on emigration are relatively strong, consistent with the existence pre-existing networks. In states without a history of emigration, the effects of cohort size on emigration accelerate as a cohort ages, consistent with the creation of new networks.

Productivity, Wages, and Tenure

A very nice new paper from Ed Lazear and Kathryn Shaw about an old topic in labor economics: why do wages rise as workers acquire job seniority?

A key tenet of the theory of human capital is that investment in skills results in higher productivity. The previous literature has estimated the degree of investment in human capital for individuals by looking at individual wage growth as a proxy for productivity growth. In this paper, we have both wage and personal productivity data, and thus are able to measure of the increase in workers' output with tenure. The data is from an autoglass company. Most of production occurs at the individual level so measures of output are clear. We find a very steep learning curve in the year on the job: output is 53 percent higher after one year than it is initially when hired. These output gains with tenure are not reflected in equal percentage pay gains: pay profiles are much flatter than output profiles in the first year and a half on the job. For these data, using wage profiles significantly underestimates the amount of investment compared to the gains evident in output-tenure profiles. The pattern of productivity rising more rapidly than pay reverses after two years of tenure.

Bloggers As Illegal Immigrants

It is not uncommon to see a Journalist (with a capital J) launch into a diatribe against bloggers and sometimes even call for regulations to stop "citizen journalists" from spreading the news. Although such calls are often couched in terms of noble-sounding goals like protecting the integrity of information in a free society, there's also an important self-serving economic motive at play.

It doesn't cost all that much to become a citizen journalist: a computer and your own time is about all it takes for you to start reporting your view of the world to whoever wants to read it.

The laws of supply and demand suggest that the rewards to being a Journalist would drop because anyone can now start reporting news and opinionating a la Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd. It's as if the Journalistic profession has received its own influx of illegal immigrants--increasing competition, lowering rewards, and creating havoc along the way.

Maybe now the Journalists will learn how those workers affected by immigration have long felt.

Noonan On Immigration

I've been a long-time fan of Peggy Noonan's work. Her latest ruminations on immigration are a gem:

It is clear in Iowa that immigration is the great issue that won't go away. Members of the American elite, including U.S. senators, continue to do damage to the public debate on immigration. They do not view it as a crucial question of America's continuance. They view it as an onerous issue that might upset their personal plans, an issue dominated by pro-immigration groups and power centers on the one hand, and the pesky American people, with their limited and quasi-racist concerns, on the other.

Because politicians see immigration as just another issue in "the game," they feel compelled to speak of it not with honest indifference but with hot words and images. With a lack of sympathy. This is in contrast to normal Americans, who do not use hot words, and just want the problem handled and the rule of law returned to the borders.

Politicians, that is, distort the debate, not because they care so much but because they care so little...

A real and felt concern among the candidates about immigration is a rare thing. And people can tell. They can tell with both parties. This is the real source of bitterness in this debate. It's not regnant racism. It's knowing the political class is incapable of caring, and so repairing.