[remarkEon]

Nowhere in the economic research does it explain what you are so confidently stating, that wages are, somehow, the only thing in all of economics where positive supply shocks do not matter. The arguments that tend to be made are that, on a long enough time horizon, mean wages increase because overall economic output goes up, and mean economic output goes up because there is a higher supply of available labor.

[JackYoustra]

You're fundamentally misunderstanding both the economic research and my argument. No one is claiming wages are "the only thing in economics where positive supply shocks don't matter."

The research shows that labor markets aren't simple supply-demand curves because of complementary productivity effects and gains from specialization, selection effects, and, of course, demand generated by the immigrants. If you have general labor size increase, in general equilibrium with a responsive central bank interest rates will lower to keep employment tight.

This isn't about "long enough time horizons" - studies find positive or neutral effects in the short and medium term too. The fundamental issue is that your model assumes a fixed economic pie that immigrants simply divide into smaller slices, when in reality immigrants help grow the pie overall.

[remarkEon]

Okay. Which other things don't see effects from positive supply shocks? You're just restating my premise about time horizons. The pie grows, with time, if a bunch of other things happen in the right order. Wages haven't grown in two decades in the UK, your original example. So, how are you defining short and medium term? Three decades?

[JackYoustra]

man idk, maybe it was the long conservative rule after the crash? Maybe it was the long austerity? Maybe it was the huge mass of natives that voted to crash out of an agreement with a bloc that handles over 80% of their trade?

More seriously...

- for US: The newest NBER IV estimates put the wage effect of all 2000-19 US immigration at +2 % for non-college natives. Show me a UK study of similar vintage that finds anything near –2 %.

- for UK: UK real wages tracked productivity one-for-one after 2008; BoE and NIESR pin that on capital deepening, Brexit and austerity. Not on immigration, which the MAC finds moved wages by _at most_ –1% (aggregate, not yearly!) and the final report was ~0.1%, basically a null finding.

- We've already been through lump of labor, so I don't know why you've been banging on equilibrium.

And to finally address your time horizons: Short-run? Mariel-style shocks still show null effects. Medium-run? 2009-20 UK data flips positive. Long-run? Productivity wins. Pick your horizon. Immigration is at worst a rounding error next to TFP, which is positively associated with migration.

Happy to dive deeper, but at this point the burden of proof is on anyone claiming large negative wage effects. The best evidence, across multiple methods and countries, just isn’t there.

[remarkEon]

Got a link to that NBER study? It's not that I don't believe you or think you're making it up, but I would like to understand what instrumental variable they were using to make the claim that an increase of low skilled immigration makes wages for non-college educated natives go up.

[JackYoustra]

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32389/w323...

[remarkEon]

I skimmed this and read a few sections closely. Most econometric papers spend too much time rambling on about stuff that most people who actually seek out and read these things already know. Anyway, +2.6% in wages for non-college educated natives, over 20 years, is not a ringing endorsement. I honestly doubt anyone would notice this, and over two decades that's just noise, frankly. If I'm understanding one of the central claims correctly, it's not that low skilled immigrants "took" jobs from natives, it's that natives ended up working more, and as a result their earning power increased. That's ... also not a ringing endorsement. Sure, you didn't get fired in favor of an immigrant, but you had to take a second shift to stay in the game. Wow what a benefit.

I'm also going to quibble a bit with how they constructed this Instrumental Variable. The way it's constructed, the higher the turnover (for lack of a better term) from native to foreign, the better the predictor it is (because in their theory, it's exogenous to wages at the local level). Does anyone really believe this? Immigrants respond to incentives just like anyone else. They're not choosing to immigrate to Sac City, Iowa, or any other low-COL/low-wage town, for a reason. It also doesn't answer my original question, which was central to my initial claim: why? The "why" is going to answer a lot of other layered questions about hostility to ever-increasing immigration. Are firms moving in that exploit low-wage immigrants, generating other adjacent economic activity? Probably! Not controlled for or referenced at all in this, and this paper is by no means a definitive conclusion that high low-skill immigration is good (even on a two decade timeline, which even typing that is just absurd).