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I would ask you: if increasing the labor pool does not exert a downward pressure on wages, what is your theory of wages? You would need to devise an entire new one, or show that immigration doesn't increase labor pools, or get a better study.
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Yeah, I don't disagree. But I'm wondering: where are these better studies? The downward pressure logic seems axiomatic to me; one would think it would be v easy to measure the impact. And yet…
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In the US, the argument I hear most often is that labor migration does not increase labor pools (e.g. farm labor). We also know that Americans wildly overestimate % of foreign born. This is why Seymour is correct to say the charge of “open borders” is abstract, if not propaganda.
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I guess the best I could say for Seymour's claim is that (assuming population & economy are increasing equally, ie zero-sum), that migration that increases downward pressure in one place lowers it somewhere else?
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Which is just classical equilibrium econ.
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I've assumed the biggest downward pressure on labor has come from the fact of its 'global' price, which is not essentially a migration story. So how do national policies uphold or diminish global differentials? There's a problem making the nation-state the unit of analysis.
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If the nation-state is the unit, why not the region, or city? The latter cases tend to generate arguments for net benefits, i.e., that immigrant labor contributes to a growing local pie, even as other regions are hollowed out, tho not as a direct consequence of > in-migration.
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So the question of scale b/c important.
@adam_tooze suggests that a background image of 'national competitiveness' distorts debates on global trade; the same might be said of immigration. Zero-sum may be systemic but uneven development operates within and across nation-states. - 1 more reply
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