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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. -
I think you can accept that position (though I have a series of caveats regarding the ignored significance of "combined in "combined & uneven dvlpmnt)" while still recognizing that the effects of labor migration can't simply be detached from wage suppression.
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Gareth Dale in Leaving the Fortresses: "Study after study has shown that immigration generally has a minimal or positive effect on wages" :) +
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well,
#notallstudies — here is some pretty measured and comprehensive work (ignore the political conclusions) h/t@alienvsrobbinshttps://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216 … -
yeah i’m an inveterate tweet deleter
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well, these things are notoriously hard to measure. We could, if we wanted, take the rise of zero-hour contracts, or precaritization, as measures as well: these are *ways* that market pressures are leveraged.
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The other great complicating factor is that wages have been driven so low that automation is a less appealing option for firms. so we could take slowdowns in productivity as measures of downward pressure, as well.
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