Modeled Minorities

"Only at an economics conference will people talk for two hours about immigration and never mention Donald Trump."

So opens this article, a look at a recent San Francisco economics conference at which a paper was presented on the modeled effects of an influx of low-skill immigrant workers on native low-skill workers in a given trade. While the researchers found that this situation leads to an increase in trade, it also leads to wage stagnation as the supply of workers grows to meet the demand. However, in this situation, they also found that the native low-skilled workers are more likely to seek after more job training to become mid-skilled workers, thereby bettering their circumstances by lifting themselves out of competition from the new immigrant populations. Though these results are just modeled and there is some question of whether real live people would follow these patterns, they are an interesting rebuttal to the kind of rhetoric usually thrown around when jobs and immigrants are mentioned in the same sentence.

Immigrants might be holding your salary down--and making you better off anyway