There is nothing so important as open borders. Biden could take essentially whatever foolish economic actions he wants, but if the borders get opened, none of it will matter.
Also, I think (somehow - they’re so large already) the positive effects of immigration might very well be underrated - because not only do people who move get far higher wages and increase production, governments elsewhere are less able to be expropriative and stupid - cause people can just leave! The East Germanys of the world are nothing without their walls - why must we build it for them?
*****The other big argument you hear against high-skilled immigration is “brain drain”. Why, people ask, should we be selfish and rob the world of their talented people?*****
If America is really in a global competition with China for top dog status (and I'd say it is) then the US should be encouraging as much brain drain as possible from the PRC. The Xi regime isn't the slightest bit concerned when the US blocks talented Chinese researchers from heading to the US. Indeed, they're happy, precisely because brain drain then becomes less of an issue (and also generates antipathy for America among ordinary Chinese). Needless to day, cutting oneself off from a fifth of the global research talent pool probably isn't a good move on the merits, either.
As for the broader issue of brain drain from developing countries: I've always thought it obvious that high income countries should welcome highly educated immigrants with open arms, among other reasons to keep the pressure on poor-governance states to get their acts together. Rich countries aren't doing ordinary folks in countries like Myanmar and Zimbabwe a favor when they make it easier for such states to continue to deliver poor results and engage in massive corruption.
"[R]ecruiting the world’s top talent doesn’t mean we keep out low-skilled immigrants! Don’t think about immigration policy in those zero-sum terms."
Noah has found my personal hobbyhorse. Immigration policy *is* zero-sum in an important sense that advocates often overlook: there's an upper limit to the volume of immigration that public opinion will tolerate. The limit isn't fixed or well-defined--for example, it's probably higher if the immigrant mix is high-skilled than if it's low-skilled--but that's different from saying it doesn't exist.
When you look at it this way, instead of assuming that any level of immigration is feasible and that the goal is to pick the best one, the policy implications change dramatically. Every low-skilled immigrant admitted to the United States effectively excludes one high-skilled immigrant (or perhaps more than one, if you assume that raising the average skill level of immigrants increases the public's tolerance). The "why not do both" meme doesn't apply in this situation, and here's why.
Consider the following policy options:
A. Current level and mix of immigrants;
B. Status quo plus one additional low-skilled migrant;
C. Status quo plus one additional high-skilled migrant;
D. Status quo plus one low-skilled and one high-skilled migrant;
E. Status quo plus two high-skilled migrants.
Noah's arguing that C is preferable to A, which it certainly is if C is politically feasible (in other words, if we're not already maxed out on the public's tolerance for immigration). And it's preferable to B in any case.
To people who say low-skill migrants should be admitted as well, Noah's response is "No problem! D is even better than C!" But D may not be politically feasible even if C is, because it involves a higher total level of immigration. And if we're not maxed out and D is politically feasible, than E will be both feasible and better than D.
I don't mean to overload the thread with dorky decision theory, but this is very important. The benefits of aggregating high-skilled people are indeed enormous and those benefits are the *strongest* argument for excluding immigrants without four-year college degrees. If you want to maximize the volume of legal immigration, that's what has to be done.
There isn't an appropriate or inappropriate level. People have preferences about how many immigrants there ought to be and although those preferences aren't completely exogenous--you can shift them through reasoned debate, for example if people are uninformed about the economic benefits of immigration--they are *partly* exogenous, so it's pointless to act as if public opinion doesn't exist.
If the goal is to help poor people in poor countries, a well-designed foreign aid program is much more cost-effective than allowing (a tiny fraction of) them to move to the US and become net beneficiaries of the tax/transfer system. You can be a universalist and still believe immigration policy should aim exclusively at national self-interest.
I coach young children and see how powerful role modeling is.
If you have a choice between telling children how to do something and showing them, always choose showing.
I also lead and manage adults, albeit slower on the uptake, they also tend to do as I do, not as I say.
To me- the idea that the strongest predictor of becoming an inventor is knowing inventors, makes intuitive sense, and is probably also true of becoming a soccer player, a waiter, an engineer or whatever.
Seems to me that paper measured the amount of prizes awarded to what amounts to a tiny portion of scientists actually competing in that arena. It does not prove anything about productivity of scientists overall.
To me funding is a much more likely reason for attaining those prices. The cost of a lot of that research is very high.
The US has big scientific institutions with a lot of funding.
The chart compares the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals in eleven STEM disciplines. China leads in all of them. It also leads in patents granted.
On the 'softer' side of originality, it is leads in solving social problems like crime and poverty and, of course, its economists have no peer.
How many of those journals are Chinese? There's little doubt China produces a huge quantity of important research these days. As I've written elsewhere on this very thread, I think US policy under Trump got it badly wrong (a country is surely mad to block Chinese scientists from living and working on their shores). The last thing I'm arguing for is complacency with respect to the rise of Chinese science.
Nonetheless, quantity obviously ≠ quality. It may be that factors unique to the PRC put pressure on researchers to publish (and patent). Or maybe not! I'm simply skeptical a government that puts so much energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry is quite the 800 lb gorilla of science touted by some.
Meanwhile, since the year 2000* American scientists have won eighty-seven Nobel prizes in the sciences.** Chinese scientists? Two*** Nobel prizes.
*I chose that year because it's fully two decades after Deng's great opening up, so you can't blame the dearth of Nobel prizes post-2000 on Maoist isolation.
**Needless to say the gap looks even worse for China when you include economics, literature and peace.
***One of those was awarded to Charles Kao, who performed the bulk of his ground-breaking research not in China but in Britain.
Chinese scientists are all young, which is one reason we haven't seen many Nobels yet. The other reason is Sweden's extreme anti-China bias.
As to "I'm simply skeptical a government that puts so much energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry is quite the 800 lb gorilla of science touted by some," China puts far less energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry than the US–by a long, long way.
****China puts far less energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry than the US*****
And yet strangely, when I visit family in the States, I no longer have to employ the use of a VPN to browse the internet (and I can even visit sites highly critical of the US government!), but when I return home to China, I do. Funny, that.
The most trusted media on earth are Singapore's and China's–and for the same reason, as Lee Kwan Yew explained:
"The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption disappears. Now I'm telling you, that's not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.
“Singapore’s domestic debate is a matter for Singaporeans. We allow American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their fellow countrymen. We allow their papers to sell in Singapore so that we can know what foreigners are reading about us. But we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media play in America, that of invigilator, adversary and inquisitor of the administration. If allowed to do so, they will radically change the nature of Singapore society, and I doubt if our social glue is strong enough to withstand such treatment." A Third World Perspective on the Press. RH Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
Chinese VPNs, which anyone can rent for $1.50/mo., allow misinformation into China. If you want misinformation, and are willing to pay a small premium, go right ahead.
It's also not a bad way to get an edge over China. As long as more of China's talent stays here than goes back home, we're breaking even on the "educating the competition at our own expense" vs. "bleeding them of talent".
Which means basically every diploma in America should come with a complimentary Green Card. Period.
- Re: Agarwal et. al, is there a reason I see math professionals always selected as the subject of economist immigration studies? Think Matt Yg posted a study about how the dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in an influx of highly skilled theoretical mathematicians to the United States. Idk, maybe it's just pure chance...
- Noah, do you plan on doing more posts about what it takes to develop homegrown talent? I agree more talented people coming to America to work, especially on basic research, would be a good thing, but I'd also like to see more 'homegrown' talent. Maybe I've missed it, but my take is this is underreported.
There is nothing so important as open borders. Biden could take essentially whatever foolish economic actions he wants, but if the borders get opened, none of it will matter.
Also, I think (somehow - they’re so large already) the positive effects of immigration might very well be underrated - because not only do people who move get far higher wages and increase production, governments elsewhere are less able to be expropriative and stupid - cause people can just leave! The East Germanys of the world are nothing without their walls - why must we build it for them?
*****The other big argument you hear against high-skilled immigration is “brain drain”. Why, people ask, should we be selfish and rob the world of their talented people?*****
If America is really in a global competition with China for top dog status (and I'd say it is) then the US should be encouraging as much brain drain as possible from the PRC. The Xi regime isn't the slightest bit concerned when the US blocks talented Chinese researchers from heading to the US. Indeed, they're happy, precisely because brain drain then becomes less of an issue (and also generates antipathy for America among ordinary Chinese). Needless to day, cutting oneself off from a fifth of the global research talent pool probably isn't a good move on the merits, either.
As for the broader issue of brain drain from developing countries: I've always thought it obvious that high income countries should welcome highly educated immigrants with open arms, among other reasons to keep the pressure on poor-governance states to get their acts together. Rich countries aren't doing ordinary folks in countries like Myanmar and Zimbabwe a favor when they make it easier for such states to continue to deliver poor results and engage in massive corruption.
"[R]ecruiting the world’s top talent doesn’t mean we keep out low-skilled immigrants! Don’t think about immigration policy in those zero-sum terms."
Noah has found my personal hobbyhorse. Immigration policy *is* zero-sum in an important sense that advocates often overlook: there's an upper limit to the volume of immigration that public opinion will tolerate. The limit isn't fixed or well-defined--for example, it's probably higher if the immigrant mix is high-skilled than if it's low-skilled--but that's different from saying it doesn't exist.
When you look at it this way, instead of assuming that any level of immigration is feasible and that the goal is to pick the best one, the policy implications change dramatically. Every low-skilled immigrant admitted to the United States effectively excludes one high-skilled immigrant (or perhaps more than one, if you assume that raising the average skill level of immigrants increases the public's tolerance). The "why not do both" meme doesn't apply in this situation, and here's why.
Consider the following policy options:
A. Current level and mix of immigrants;
B. Status quo plus one additional low-skilled migrant;
C. Status quo plus one additional high-skilled migrant;
D. Status quo plus one low-skilled and one high-skilled migrant;
E. Status quo plus two high-skilled migrants.
Noah's arguing that C is preferable to A, which it certainly is if C is politically feasible (in other words, if we're not already maxed out on the public's tolerance for immigration). And it's preferable to B in any case.
To people who say low-skill migrants should be admitted as well, Noah's response is "No problem! D is even better than C!" But D may not be politically feasible even if C is, because it involves a higher total level of immigration. And if we're not maxed out and D is politically feasible, than E will be both feasible and better than D.
I don't mean to overload the thread with dorky decision theory, but this is very important. The benefits of aggregating high-skilled people are indeed enormous and those benefits are the *strongest* argument for excluding immigrants without four-year college degrees. If you want to maximize the volume of legal immigration, that's what has to be done.
What is an appropriate level of tolerance for immigration?
There isn't an appropriate or inappropriate level. People have preferences about how many immigrants there ought to be and although those preferences aren't completely exogenous--you can shift them through reasoned debate, for example if people are uninformed about the economic benefits of immigration--they are *partly* exogenous, so it's pointless to act as if public opinion doesn't exist.
If the goal is to help poor people in poor countries, a well-designed foreign aid program is much more cost-effective than allowing (a tiny fraction of) them to move to the US and become net beneficiaries of the tax/transfer system. You can be a universalist and still believe immigration policy should aim exclusively at national self-interest.
I coach young children and see how powerful role modeling is.
If you have a choice between telling children how to do something and showing them, always choose showing.
I also lead and manage adults, albeit slower on the uptake, they also tend to do as I do, not as I say.
To me- the idea that the strongest predictor of becoming an inventor is knowing inventors, makes intuitive sense, and is probably also true of becoming a soccer player, a waiter, an engineer or whatever.
People need models.
Seems to me that paper measured the amount of prizes awarded to what amounts to a tiny portion of scientists actually competing in that arena. It does not prove anything about productivity of scientists overall.
To me funding is a much more likely reason for attaining those prices. The cost of a lot of that research is very high.
The US has big scientific institutions with a lot of funding.
These findings do not accord with any reality I have observed. China leads the US in all STEM research areas and much else besides.
https://i.imgur.com/Pw3H1w8.png
Based on what? The link you provide gives a single graph claiming something about "science journals."
The chart compares the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals in eleven STEM disciplines. China leads in all of them. It also leads in patents granted.
On the 'softer' side of originality, it is leads in solving social problems like crime and poverty and, of course, its economists have no peer.
How many of those journals are Chinese? There's little doubt China produces a huge quantity of important research these days. As I've written elsewhere on this very thread, I think US policy under Trump got it badly wrong (a country is surely mad to block Chinese scientists from living and working on their shores). The last thing I'm arguing for is complacency with respect to the rise of Chinese science.
Nonetheless, quantity obviously ≠ quality. It may be that factors unique to the PRC put pressure on researchers to publish (and patent). Or maybe not! I'm simply skeptical a government that puts so much energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry is quite the 800 lb gorilla of science touted by some.
Meanwhile, since the year 2000* American scientists have won eighty-seven Nobel prizes in the sciences.** Chinese scientists? Two*** Nobel prizes.
*I chose that year because it's fully two decades after Deng's great opening up, so you can't blame the dearth of Nobel prizes post-2000 on Maoist isolation.
**Needless to say the gap looks even worse for China when you include economics, literature and peace.
***One of those was awarded to Charles Kao, who performed the bulk of his ground-breaking research not in China but in Britain.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country
They are all international. You can play with the rankings here: https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?year=2019&area=2100.
Chinese scientists are all young, which is one reason we haven't seen many Nobels yet. The other reason is Sweden's extreme anti-China bias.
As to "I'm simply skeptical a government that puts so much energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry is quite the 800 lb gorilla of science touted by some," China puts far less energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry than the US–by a long, long way.
****China puts far less energy into censorship and the stifling of free inquiry than the US*****
And yet strangely, when I visit family in the States, I no longer have to employ the use of a VPN to browse the internet (and I can even visit sites highly critical of the US government!), but when I return home to China, I do. Funny, that.
*****Chinese scientists are all young*****
Um. Ok.
Have a nice day.
The most trusted media on earth are Singapore's and China's–and for the same reason, as Lee Kwan Yew explained:
"The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption disappears. Now I'm telling you, that's not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.
“Singapore’s domestic debate is a matter for Singaporeans. We allow American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their fellow countrymen. We allow their papers to sell in Singapore so that we can know what foreigners are reading about us. But we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media play in America, that of invigilator, adversary and inquisitor of the administration. If allowed to do so, they will radically change the nature of Singapore society, and I doubt if our social glue is strong enough to withstand such treatment." A Third World Perspective on the Press. RH Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
Chinese VPNs, which anyone can rent for $1.50/mo., allow misinformation into China. If you want misinformation, and are willing to pay a small premium, go right ahead.
Why do you say that chinese economists "have no peer"?
They have doubled GDP every decade and increased real wages faster than GDP for 70 years.
Their national debt burden is the lowest on earth and, with one-fifth of America's health expenditure, Chinese now outlive Americans.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
“They have doubled GDP every decade”
True but no anymore.
Simple reason is the rule of 70; means that if GDP growth rate is > 7% over a decade, over a decade then GDP, then the GDP in a decade will double.
But China’s GDP scores < 7% recent years since at least 2017.
Another strong case for diversity in thought which is a core but often overlooked component of diversity and inclusion initiatives.
With place mattering less than ever, there's less reason than ever to do it in the US and pay US salaries to have it done anymore.
"Brain drain" is the gentrification of immigration takes
RE: "brain drain"
It's also not a bad way to get an edge over China. As long as more of China's talent stays here than goes back home, we're breaking even on the "educating the competition at our own expense" vs. "bleeding them of talent".
Which means basically every diploma in America should come with a complimentary Green Card. Period.
Two things:
- Re: Agarwal et. al, is there a reason I see math professionals always selected as the subject of economist immigration studies? Think Matt Yg posted a study about how the dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in an influx of highly skilled theoretical mathematicians to the United States. Idk, maybe it's just pure chance...
- Noah, do you plan on doing more posts about what it takes to develop homegrown talent? I agree more talented people coming to America to work, especially on basic research, would be a good thing, but I'd also like to see more 'homegrown' talent. Maybe I've missed it, but my take is this is underreported.