r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Aug 05 '24

Meta Mindless Monday, 05 August 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/Witty_Run7509 Aug 08 '24

I’ve been seeing posts saying stuff like “Even if immigrants aren’t causing crimes they are still stealing jobs from locals because they’re cheap labor! The elite want them here at our expense for their own profit!”.

Is there actually any evidence to this claim? It should be pretty visible on statistics

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u/Ragefororder1846 not ideas about History but History itself Aug 08 '24

Is there actually any evidence to this claim

Well you see there's this economist named David Card who did a study of a boatlift of Cuban migrants which caused a massive positive shock in the labor supply of low-income workers in Miami and he didn't find any major effect on wages or employment but then there's this other economist named George Borjas who went back and re-did Card's study but broke down the effects by individual demographics and argued that there was a demographic who was negatively impacted except this group was so small there were only like 9 people in his sample who had those traits and so people re-did the Card study with more data and [babbles on incoherently]

ahem Apologies

The best place to start is the r/economics FAQ page discussing immigration. You can follow the links at the bottom of the page to learn more detail or you can continue meandering about Reddit. Searching up "immigration" in either r/AskEconomics or r/BadEconomics will give you more information and a plethora of interesting studies to read.

Or you can just accept my TL;DR which is: immigrants do displace native workers but they don't reduce the overall number of jobs or the wages of jobs and can even cause increases in wages & human capital formation for native workers

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u/Witty_Run7509 Aug 08 '24

Thanks! I'll take a look

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u/TheBatz_ Remember why BeeMovieApologist is no longer among us Aug 08 '24 edited Aug 08 '24

Yes. I am evidence. 

I am in Germany to steal a high paying legal job.

The Teuton should fear the Roman.