Free Republic

It looks erratic to us but may one day seem inevitable to historians that Donald Trump should have fought his anti-establishment campaign for the Republican nomination on the terrain of immigration policy. Already it is hard to recall that it was the establishment, not Trump, that insisted the battle be fought there. The candidate, at his announcement speech, spent a few minutes on immigration but then moved on to China, ISIS, Obamacare, the national debt, the Second Amendment, his desire to be a kind of National Cheerleader, and his own net worth. Trump’s skepticism about mass immigration won the attention...

In The Slowdown in the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants: Aging and Cohort Effects Revisited Again (NBER Working Paper No. 19116), George Borjas finds a cohort effect not only in the level of immigrant earnings, with more recent immigrants having generally lower entry wages than immigrants did before the 1980s, but also in their rate of earnings growth, with more recent immigrants having a smaller rate of economic assimilation compared to earlier immigrants. He suggests that this slowdown in wage convergence reflects a decline in "human capital accumulation" tied to a decline in the rate at which more recent immigrants are...

This paper uses data drawn from the 1970-2010 decennial Censuses to examine the evolution of immigrant earnings in the U.S. labor market. The analysis reveals that there are cohort effects not only in the level of earnings, with more recent cohorts generally having relatively lower entry wages, but also in the rate of growth of earnings, with more recent cohorts having a smaller rate of economic assimilation. Immigrants who entered the country before the 1980s typically found that their initial wage disadvantage (relative to natives) narrowed by around 15 percentage points during their first two decades in the United States....

Sometime around 1990, I was invited to participate in a small gathering where a few University of California professors were going to brief a number of California state representatives on some of the issues facing the state. It was the first time that I had been in such a gathering and I remember expecting the worst: finding a bunch of cynical, vote-grubbing politicians who would do or say whatever it would take to get reelected.

On June 8, the WSJ editorialized about the gains from immigration: The President's Council of Economic Advisers recently added up all these benefits, updating the procedures used by the National Academy of Sciences, and concluded that the value of immigrants to the overall economy is a net positive $30 billion a year. This statistic inspired David Frum to whip out his calculator: Well let's do some sophisticated economic research. Let's open Google, type "US" and "GDP" and see what we get. Ah, here it is: the very first entry ... United States — GDP (Official Exchange Rate): $13.22 Trillion (2006...