Over the weekend, I spoke with Matthew Wright on LBC about the prospect of net zero migration (and why the British economy benefits from migration).
- argues that we should stop talking about “immigration” and start talking about specific policies.
I think he has a point, but also: people do often talk about immigrants, as one group, and therefore I think it’s still useful to write things like “to date, it does not seem that immigration has driven increased crime rates”.
Immigrants waiting to enter Faneuil Hall for their naturalization ceremony were pulled out of line and told they couldn’t become US citizens because of their country of origin. This is very bad.
The list of banned countries includes Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. Yeah, I can’t imagine why people from those countries might wish to become US citizens…
- has a list of things she would fund if she could. I should write a similar list.
40% of published empirical political science papers don’t have an identification strategy. I think I feel a bit more positively about this than the authors, because descriptive work doesn’t need an identification strategy, but it does seem problematic.
The paradox of choice… doesn’t exist?
Redheads may be slower to heal than people with other hair colors.
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Thanks for the shoutout! Yes, I agree it's useful to push back on the "immigrants = crime" myths with good evidence, but I'd just keep the scope explicit: "to date in the US, it does not seem that immigration has driven increased crime rates" or "US immigrants have historically offended less than natives." Once we move to places like Sweden, both the data and the policy conversation can look very different. And I see many smart people frequently forget that.