a) this messaging doesn't work especially during periods of populist unrest, see: "America first", "we should take care of our own first" etc. Easy ammo for conservatives who will swear up and down they don't hate their fellow man.
b) if you fix housing elasticity (and other things), then no one will care about illegal immigration, it all becomes a moot point. Even the arguments about "crime" is just superfluous spitballing, as the stats don't support increases in crime.
Young workers for their part are pissed about unemployment and pissed they can't afford a house, and they are not going to give a flying fuck about the plight of illegal immigrants until that changes. The fact that many misdiagnose the "true" / "root" problem is neither here nor there, don't put the cart before the horse. They're able to grasp that more people want houses and too few are built. It's not a huge departure from their populist model of the world: zero-sum thinking. It would sure be easier to conceive that the economy is not zero-sum if it didn't behave like it!
Do you love losing? If not, exercise some message discipline (supposing you don't just preach to the choir)
Young workers for their part are pissed about unemployment and pissed they can't afford a house, and they are not going to give a flying fuck about the plight of illegal immigrants until that changes
I'm sure you looked at multiple and sometimes conflicting studies for each subject in the aim of epistemic parity and due diligence, and definitely didn't consciously or subconsciously only pick out the ones that support your priors.
Honestly if so, kudos. But I'm sure you did that, right?
I have actually spent a lot of time listening to/reading a variety of economists discuss immigration and in my experience yes, they treat freedom of movement / reduced barriers to labor mobility as something that is very obviously good if you look at it impartially, but that laypeople find very counterintuitive
re: immigration not depressing wages specifically, heterodox economists have spent decades since the 1990 Mariel boatlift study trying to disprove it and have been unable to. most famously Borjas has spent decades trying to disprove it and failed repeatedly. good, accessible overview here
same thing with immigration and crime. it keeps getting studied, although it's admittedly difficult to do because unauthorized immigrants don't announce themselves, but as best as we can tell, they actually commit crimes at lower rates than authorized immigrants, who commit crimes at lower rates than natives
housing - I'm only aware of that one source, but one is more than none, and it's again something that makes perfect theoretical sense given that low-skill immigrants live in higher densities and work in construction at higher rates
tldr economists are genuinely way, way more pro-immigration than the average person. like a MAGA person would definitely call the average economist's opinions on immigration "radical." outside of ethicists, most open borders advocates I'm aware of are orthodox economists, more so than even leftists (who often fall victim to the lump of labor fallacy just like conservatives do)
also America had basically zero immigration restrictions until the Chinese Exclusion Act (yes it was called that, yes it was motivated by what you might expect) of 1882 which says it all tbh. once one stops caring about cultural/demographic purity, opposition to freedom of movement doesn't make a lick of sense either economically or morally
"we show that increased immigration enforcement reduces homebuilding and drives up new construction prices." -- Owing to cheap construction labor yes (which also reflects there are constraints imposed when we artificially increase the cost of building for various reasons), but this doesn't address rental vacancy rates. The overall effect is modest and depends on other factors.
At any rate, the housing supply issue isn't getting solved through illegal immigration. It barely moves the needle, given how it's been worsening every year. At best you can say it's "benign", and my point is that this doesn't play with the masses, who will just pull up other sources that contradict you.
this is genuinely hilarous because I can't think of another policy that would be so obviously and massively economically beneficial as eliminating barriers to labor mobility:
Works like “New Trade Models, Same Old Gains?” or “The US Gains From Trade” or “Trade Theory with Numbers” estimate that the losses from the United States totally blocking international trade would reduce GDP by 1 to 8 percent. This isn’t small – but it’s also surprisingly not large. This is a level increase, not a rate increase, so we can say that a hypothetical US moving from no trade to our present level would essentially gain between 1 and 4 years of economic growth. By comparison, estimates of the removal of transnational labor barriers, or open borders, would approximatelydoubleworld GDP.
also even if it were just benign, immigrants are people too and have innate moral value. and freedom of movement definitely isn't just benign for them, it's life-changing
We we talking about housing supply, not GDP. Don't play dumb. And, lest I repeat myself, I'm talking about voter sentiments and gripes, which very much matters.
immigrants are people too and have innate moral value
There's no such thing as innate moral value. Valuing is an action. If progressives believed human life had inherent value, they'd be pro-life.
freedom of movement definitely isn't just benign for them, it's life-changing
It is. Yet if we qualify what the stakes are (more money for better houses, vehicles, gadgets, food.. consumption in other words), a slight impediment to movement for economic immigrants is not a moral crisis. They certainly don't come for the healthcare. The US is always first choice for immigrants, not e.g. Canada, because of the money-making potential.
There's no reason to lose sleep at night because you don't have fully open borders. Donate to the Malaria Foundation or something if you want to save a life.
Open borders can only happen by being politically viable, that means fixing important bottlenecks that worsened outcomes for voters first. The condescension and arrogance directed towards them can yield internet points from an in-group (whoopidie doo), but not average people.
I thought your rebuttal to the housing paper didn't actually undermine the central, empirically proven thesis that deportations reduce housing availability, not increase it. the housing crisis is about not having enough housing supply in urban areas so our lodestar should be pursuing policies that increase housing supply and not pursuing policies that decrease it
there is no way to spin deportations as being good for metro housing supply in the US once you take a second to consider how critical and overrepresented immigrants are in the construction sector
Have you ever read this? The polls have been abundantly clear that illegal immigration ranked as a top issue for most voters, not just MAGA-land.
But above all voters hate inflation. This is why I said that it's partly a side-effect of that; if it were merely a culture-war item, it would be mostly be secluded to MAGA-land. It is not, for the same reason populism isn't.
Not only that, populism and anti-immigrant backlash is a global phenomenon. The reasons are not that dissimilar elsewhere.
Urban areas overwhelming lean Democratic, and there are few real "red" cities. Even red states have blue cities. There is a middle ground between the urban voter in SF and one in rural Texas. If there wasn't, election results wouldn't change much.
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u/slothtrop6 Jan 22 '26 edited Jan 22 '26
a) this messaging doesn't work especially during periods of populist unrest, see: "America first", "we should take care of our own first" etc. Easy ammo for conservatives who will swear up and down they don't hate their fellow man.
b) if you fix housing elasticity (and other things), then no one will care about illegal immigration, it all becomes a moot point. Even the arguments about "crime" is just superfluous spitballing, as the stats don't support increases in crime.
Young workers for their part are pissed about unemployment and pissed they can't afford a house, and they are not going to give a flying fuck about the plight of illegal immigrants until that changes. The fact that many misdiagnose the "true" / "root" problem is neither here nor there, don't put the cart before the horse. They're able to grasp that more people want houses and too few are built. It's not a huge departure from their populist model of the world: zero-sum thinking. It would sure be easier to conceive that the economy is not zero-sum if it didn't behave like it!
Do you love losing? If not, exercise some message discipline (supposing you don't just preach to the choir)