labor mobility

A report released recently suggests that two conservative senators are working on a plan to “dramatically scale back legal immigration,” reducing the one million immigrants who legally enter the country to about half that in ten years. Economic research time and again...

Even if there were a robust and credible negative impact on wages of non-Hispanic male natives without a high school degree from low skill migrant arrivals (which there isn’t), this would not justify limiting immigration as there are better instruments to achieve the same objectives, with much...

George Borjas has a 2015 paper on the Mariel boatlift experience arguing that, although the large and rapid influx of migrants did not affect average wages or low-skill wages, a small, demographically arbitrary, group experienced large negative wage impacts. In this blog post I want t...

Why are the world’s scarcest economic resources devoted to economizing one of the world’s most abundant economic resources?

In a recent trip to the center of the world, I found myself confronting the big development questions in a low-income country with reasonably propitious circumstances. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is larger, richer, and growing faster than I had thought. It will go to the polls this very month to ele...