Results for “immigration crime”
30 found

Does immigration enforcement reduce crime?

No.  From Thomas J. Miles and Adam B. Cox in the JLE:

Prior research investigates whether immigrants commit more crimes than native-born people. Yet the central policy used to regulate immigration — detention and deportation — has received little empirical evaluation. This article studies a recent policy innovation called Secure Communities. This program permits the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police and to take the arrestee into federal custody promptly for deportation proceedings. Since its launch, the program has led to a quarter of a million detentions. We utilize the staggered rollout of the program across the country to obtain differences-in-differences estimates of its impact on crime rates. We also use unique counts of the detainees from each county and month to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to confined immigrants. The results show that the Secure Communities program has had no observable effect on the overall crime rate.

That is once again via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Illegal immigration and crime

This is from only one county, but I found these numbers (check out the table) instructive:

About 2 percent of the people charged with major violent crimes in
Prince William County last year were illegal immigrants, but they were
arrested for a larger portion of secondary offenses, according to newly
released statistics and a Washington Post analysis that offer the first
comprehensive look at criminal activity since the county implemented
its controversial anti-illegal immigration measures.

The crime of prostitution has the highest percentage of illegal immigrants as arrestees, namely 21.4 percent.  If you are wondering, the new county procedure is to check the immigration status of everyone taken into custody. A few points:

1. Immigration has worked much better in northern Virginia than in many other parts of the country, most of all southern California.  The number will not be this low in many other locales.

2. I don't have a number for the percentage of illegal immigrants in Prince William County, but I believe there are many, albeit a falling number.

3. I am not convinced by the argument that illegal immigrants will try "especially hard" not to get caught, because they are illegal immigrants and do not wish to be deported.  This argument has been used to suggest that two percent is an underestimate.

4. When all is said and done, two percent is a fairly low number.

Does Mexican immigration reduce crime?

Robert Sampson writes in today’s NYT Op-Ed page:

…evidence points to increased immigration as a major factor associated with the lower crime rate of the 1990’s (and its recent leveling off).

Hispanic Americans do better on a range of various social indicators — including propensity to violence — than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages.  My colleagues and I have completed a study in which we examined 8,000 Chicago residents who were asked about the characteristics of their neighborhoods.

Surprisingly, we found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans than among blacks and whites…Indeed, the first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) in our study were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than were third-generation Americans, adjusting for family and neighborhood background. [TC: But don’t absolute probabilities play the key role here?  And should we compare Mexicans to "blacks and whites" or to each group in isolation?]  Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation.

Our study further showed that living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigrants is directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of factors…)

Alas, there is no permalink these days.  Here is the relevant project which generated the data.  No one of Sampson’s pieces on his web page seems to cover this result, though many are relevant more broadly.  Also see this summary of his criticism of "broken window" and "tipping point" theories of crime.

Here is another piece which seems to support the basic result that Mexican immigration lowers crime.  Here is a survey article on the topic.  This piece (see p.113) suggests that crime is lower in border cities than comparable non-border cities, and that Mexican immigration cannot be identified as a cause of a higher U.S. crime rate.

Yes comments are open, but purely anecdotal accounts of how you were once mugged by a Mexican, or how your neighborhood just isn’t "the same anymore" are discouraged.  I’m posting a version of this over at Volokh Conspiracy as well, look for the differing comments.

Addendum: Read Alex on this topic.

Why do immigrants oppose immigration?

This question does not receive enough discussion, but there is a new paper of note, by Aflatun Kaeser and Massimiliano Tani:

…successful immigrants in the United States (i.e., those who are in the top quintile of the socioeconomic classification), who may benefit the most from being perceived as unrelated to unskilled undocumented immigrants, have negative views about immigration, especially with respect to its contribution to unemployment, crime, and the risk of a terrorist attack. This effect does not arise in the case of countries that apply stricter controls than the United States on immigration, like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, or do not attract as large a number of undocumented immigrants. We interpret these results as evidence that immigrants’ attitudes toward other immigrants respond to the lack of a selective immigration policy: namely, if successful immigrants run the risk of being perceived as related to undocumented or uncontrolled immigration, they respond by embracing an immigrants’ anti-immigration view.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Border Crime

Alex Nowrasteh at Cato shows that crime is lower in counties adjacent to the Mexican border than in the rest of the United States:

If the entire United States had crime rates as low as those along the border in 2017, then the number of homicides would have been 33.8 percent lower, property crimes would have been 2.1 percent lower, and violent crimes would have dropped 8 percent.

Obviously border counties are different than non-border countries, more rural etc. Nevertheless, the raw fact is striking in comparison to the heated rhetoric about illegal immigration and American blood.

Crime in Europe and the U.S.

Has there been a “reversal of fortune”?  Paolo Buonanno, Francesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati, and Giulio Zanella step into these treacherous waters with a new paper (pdf):

Contrary to common perceptions, today both property and violent crimes (with the exception of homicides) are more widespread in Europe than in the US, while the opposite was true thirty years ago. We label this fact as the “reversal of misfortunes”. We investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes, incarceration, abortion, unemployment and immigration on crime. For this we use time series data (1970-2008) from seven European countries and the U.S. We find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime. Our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in Europe. Our analysis does not provide information on how incarceration policy should be made tougher nor does it provide an answer to the question whether a such a policy would also be efficient from a cost-benefit point of view. We leave this to future research.

I would stress that there are numerous controversial claims in this paper.  (I also personally believe that the heavy U.S. reliance on incarceration is morally problematic.)  Nonetheless we are committed to bringing you thought-provoking material and so there you go.

For the pointer I thank Noah Smith, who should not be construed as necessarily endorsing any of these results.

How is immigration different in 2012?

Loyal MR reader V has a request:

1. Engage with the arguments by Sailer and his ilk that Mexican immigration is different than the waves of the 1920′s, 1880′s, etc.

Specifically, they cite the example of New Mexico, current Latin America, evolving California, etc. where class-based hierarchies that closely mirror IQ differences have proven remarkably stable to all sorts of interventions over the time span of centuries (whether peaceful in the case of NM or violent in the case of the Mexican revolution).

Also, they point out that communication differences as well as the changed nature of the economy now (i.e., many fewer blue collar manufacturing jobs that transition families between immigrant manual labor to white collar knowledge industry workers, fewer overall manual labor jobs such as garment factories, the presence of a welfare state, etc.) make assimilation a much harder proposition.

Interesting to see what Tyler and Alex have to say in response to these arguments…

To that list I would add that, related to TGS, the negative effect of immigration on U.S. educational norms has been more significant than it otherwise might have been.  On the other side of the ledger, here are a few relevant factors:

1. The slower influx of Mexicans (100,000 a year vs. a former 500,000 a year) means that assimilation will from now on proceed more rapidly, and certainly more rapidly than the critics had been predicting.

2. The effect of Latino communities in lowering crime rates and revitalizing neighborhoods and cities has been stronger than might have been expected twenty years ago.

3. The notion that Latino migrants to the U.S. might help seed and sustain a broader Latin American economic and democratic boom has become a reality, and this was not obvious twenty years ago.

4. The idea that “the New World” will become a major trading bloc to rival “Chinese Asia” is a more important idea than it might have seemed twenty or even ten years ago.  The United States needs extensive Latin connections to maintain its status as active leader of that bloc.

5. Outsourcing is more of a force than we had thought, and the possibility of outsourcing raises the (relative) gains from allowing immigration.  I will write more on this in the future, so I’ll leave the details for now.

Overall, the arguments on immigration have changed quite a bit in the last ten to fifteen years, but those changes have cut in both directions.

Latino immigrants and crime

The connection between Latino immigration and criminal behavior is much overstated.  Here is an excellent article, full of good information.  Excerpt:

The overall age-adjusted national imprisonment rates are shown in Chart 1. Hispanic incarceration rates are now between 13 and 31 percent above the white average, depending upon which age range we choose for normalization purposes.

And this:

Another important point to emphasize is the wide disparity in white incarceration rates throughout the country, even when adjusted relative to the number of whites in high-crime age ranges. For example, age-adjusted imprisonment rates for whites in large Southern states such as Florida, Texas, and Georgia may be 200 percent or even 300 percent higher than those for whites in large Northeastern or Midwestern states such as New York, New Jersey, or Illinois, as shown in Chart 5. Although it is impossible to disentangle completely how much of this gap may be due to higher criminality and how much due to harsher judicial systems, it seems likely that both play important roles. So even if the age-adjusted Hispanic incarceration rate is somewhat above the white rate–perhaps 15 percent higher on average–it still falls close to the center of the overall white distribution.

Don't forget this:

Nearly all of the most heavily Latino cities have low or even extremely low crime rates, and virtually none have rates much above the national average. Eighty percent Latino El Paso has the lowest homicide and robbery rates of any major city in the continental United States. This is not what we would expect to find if Hispanics had crime rates far higher than whites. Individual cities may certainly have anomalously low crime rates for a variety of reasons, but the overall trend of crime rates compared to ethnicity seems unmistakable.

And this:

if we restrict our analysis to major cities of half a million people or more and compare the average crime rates for the five most heavily Hispanic cities–Albuquerque, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso–to the those of the five whitest–Oklahoma City, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Portland. This time, the more Hispanic cities are the ones with the lower crime rates–10 percent below the white cities in homicide and 15 percent lower in violent crime. A particularly remarkable result is that gigantic Los Angeles–50 percent Hispanic and frequently perceived as a dangerous urban hellhole–has violent crime rates close to those of Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in the nation at 74 percent.

And finally:

Los Angeles today ranks as America’s least white European large city. Half of the population is Hispanic, and many of these are impoverished illegal immigrants and their families. Yet all crime rates have been falling steadily over the last two decades, with homicide dropping a further 18 percent just last year. As Chart 14 illustrates, most major crime categories are now back down to where they were in the early 1960s, when the population really did look very much like the actors appearing in “Dragnet” and “Leave It to Beaver.” And indeed, violent crime is now roughly the same as for Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city.

There is a lot more which I did not pass along, so read the whole thing.  I thank The Browser and Ezra Klein for the pointers.

Shrinking populations will limit convergence

By me, from Bloomberg:

The main culprit could be the fertility crisis. In Latin America, for instance, fertility rates are coming in much lower than had been expected. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica and Cuba all have fertility rates of about 1.3. In one decade, Mexico had a 24% drop in births. Brazil, by far the region’s most populous nation, has a fertility rate of about 1.65, and those are likely to fall further. The UN had predicted Brazil’s population to be 216 million this year, but it turns out to be only 203 million. Over time, most Latin American countries can expect shrinking populations.

And:

The upshot, to put it in macroeconomic lingo, is that most underdeveloped countries will be seeing simultaneous contractions in aggregate demand and aggregate supply. That is bad news for economic growth. A national economy can deal with a smaller population, but a continuously shrinking population is very difficult.

More concretely, there will be no demographic dividend to help drive economic growth. Instead, caring for the elderly will become a major economic activity. The taxes and transfers necessary to support retirements will be an additional burden on already weak economies, which in turn may help to keep fertility rates low. Children will not become easier to afford. There could be a low-fertility trap, or even a vicious downward circle. As the young spend more time caring for their aging parents, that too may lower the number of children women wish to have.

Countries with falling populations will produce fewer inventors and entrepreneurs. Smaller domestic markets will make it harder to crack export markets. Toyota succeeded, for instance, because it first did well in Japan (a relatively populous country), and then refined the quality of its products and competed overseas. When the home market is smaller, economies of scale are more difficult and it is harder for companies to gain purchase.

Populations in these once-emerging economies may be hit harder than birth rates will indicate. After all, North America, Western Europe, Japan and South Korea have falling birth rates, too. Many of these countries will find it economically necessary to take in more immigrants, if only to pay for their retirement systems or to work as caregivers. That could be a further drain on populations in the less wealthy countries. Japan is already preparing its immigration plans.

Worth a ponder, and a worry.  The upshot may be this:

It won’t be all bad: Poorer countries, like wealthier ones, will benefit from biomedical advances. And as societies age, their crime rates may fall. Yet while life in many of these countries may feel more secure, they won’t be able to follow the dynamic paths of Japan and South Korea, or even those of Greece or Portugal. Memories of radical economic growth may begin to fade, which may make it harder to reboot growth.

I thank Robin Hanson for a pointer to this topic.

Emergent Ventures India, Cohort Five

The following was compiled by Shruti Rajagopalan, who directs Emergent Ventures India.  I will not indent the material:

Ankita Vijayvergiya is a computer Science Engineer and an entrepreneur. She founded BillionCarbon along with her co-founder Nikhil Vijayvergiya, to work on solving two problems that plague India – soil degradation and managing biodegradable waste. At BillionCarbon, they are nutrient mining from biodegradable waste to convert it into liquid bio-fertilizer. Their EV grant is to execute proof of concept with pilots, field trials, and technology validation.

Sujata Saha is an Associate Professor of Economics at Wabash College, Indiana. Her primary research interests are in International Finance and Trade, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and Financial Inclusion. She received her EV grant to study entrepreneurship and economic development in Dharavi, Mumbai, the largest slum in the world.

Aditya Mehta is an Arjuna Award-winning professional snooker player. Through the non-profit organization,  The ACE Snooker Foundation, he aims to teach and promote cue sports in India. He is creating a technology-based digital cue sports coaching solution, specifically aiming to develop a curriculum-based approach for schools and colleges across India.

Aditi Dimri (PhD, Economist) & Saraswati Chandra (Engineer, Entrepreneur) co-founded Cranberry.Fit to develop a virtual menstrual health coach with the aim to break through the traditional silence and apathy regarding painful periods and menstrual health. The EV grant supports the development of the virtual coach to help manage menstrual symptoms with the help of a personalized habits plan.

Vedanth Ramji  is a 15-year-old high school junior from Chennai, passionate about research at the intersection of Math, Computer Science, and Biology. He is currently a student researcher at the Big Data Biology Lab at QUT, Australia, where he develops software tools for Antimicrobial (AMR) research. He received his EV grant to travel to his lab at QUT, to develop deeper insights into AMR research and collaborate with his team on a publication which he is currently co-authoring.

Abhishek Nath is a 43-year-old entrepreneur tackling public restroom infrastructure and sanitation in urban areas head on. He is determined to bring Loocafe – a safe, hygienic, and accessible restroom for everyone – to cities around the world. He seeks to ensure that no city is more than a kilometer away from accessing a safe public toilet, providing youth easy and safe access to hygienic urban sanitation.

Sandhya Gupta is the founder of Aavishkaar, a teacher professional development institute that aims to educate, equip, and enable teachers of K-10 to become excellent science and math educators. Sandhya and Aavishkaar received an EV grant to help create an army of female Math educators helping students enjoy Math while chartering a career pathway for themselves in STEM fields.

Ankur Paliwal is a queer journalist and founder of queerbeat, a collaborative journalism project to cover the historically underserved LGBTQIA+ community in India. Over the last 13 years, Ankur has written narrative journalism stories about science, inequity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. He received an EV grant to build an online community and newsletter alongside queerbeat, to help transform public conversation about LGBTQIA+ persons in India.

Arsalaan Alam is a web developer, machine learning enthusiast, and aspiring rationalist. He is working on improving the conditions of harmonic coexistence between humans and wildlife. He got his Emergent Ventures grant to continue building Aquastreet, which consists of a hardware device that can be attached beneath a boat, after which it takes in audio of fish’s voices and converts the audio into a MEL frequency and then performs machine learning to classify the fish species, which is then displayed on the Aquastreet mobile app.

Soundarya Balasubramani  is a 26-year-old writer, author, and former product manager. She moved to the United States to pursue her master’s at Columbia University in 2017. Immigrants in the US face several barriers, including the decades-long wait times to get a green card for Indians, the lack of a startup visa for entrepreneurs, and the constant political battle that thwarts immigration reform. To reduce the barrier skilled immigrants face, Soundarya is has written a comprehensive book (Unshacked)  and is building an online community where immigrants can congregate, get guidance, and help each other.

Aadesh Nomula  is an engineer focused on cybersecurity. He is working on a single-point cybersecurity device for Indian homes and small-scale factories. His other interest is Philosophy.

Aurojeet Misra is an 18-year-old biology student at IISER Pune. He received his EV grant for his efforts on a radioactive tracing system to detect and locate forest fires. He hopes to test a prototype of this system to better understand its practical feasibility. He is interested in understanding different scientific disciplines like molecular biology, public health, physics, etc., and working on their interface.

Divyam Makar is a 24-year-old entrepreneur and developer working on Omeyo, a platform to connect local pharmacists, which aims to provide a large inventory to users with all the needed items, along with being super low-cost and interactive. They aim to deliver medicine to their users in as little as 20 minutes.

Divas Jyoti Parashar is a 23-year-old climate entrepreneur from Assam. He founded Quintinno Labs, a cleantech company driving the electric vehicle revolution by developing power banks for EVs. These compact and portable devices that fit in your car’s trunk aim to reduce range anxiety and offer emergency relief to EV users in developing countries that lack a charging station network. He is also working on deploying hydro-kinetic turbines in Assam to generate clean energy from flowing water. His recent passion project was a documentary about the impact of the 2021 volcanic eruption on the local population in La Palma Island.

Ray Amjad is prototyping scalable tools for finding and supporting the lost Einsteins and Marie Curies of the world – young people with exceptional math and science ability from under-resourced backgrounds. He received his EV Grant to help him find collaborators. He graduated from Cambridge, where he filmed many educational videos.

Amandeep Singh is a 22-year-old inventor and entrepreneur interested in machine learning and deep learning. He is building ‘Tiktok for India’, a short video-sharing app that allows people to edit and share videos with the world, create communities, and deliver authentic video content. Prior to this, he founded an AI surveillance startup, particularly for CCTV cameras.

Govinda Prasad Dhungana is an assistant professor at Far Western University, Nepal, and a doctoral candidate at Ghent University, Belgium. He is a public health researcher and co-founder of the Ostrom Center and he designs and implements high-impact HIV/Family Planning programs in marginalized communities. His EV grant will be used for piloting the community-based distribution (using Ostrom’s Design Principles and behavior change models) of a new self-injectable contraception (Sayana Press).

Kalash Bhaiya is a 17-year-old high-school student and social entrepreneur. She founded Fun Learning Youth (or FLY), a nonprofit that employs cohort-based mentorship by volunteers in their localities and received her EV grant to help reduce middle-school dropouts within underserved communities.

Kranthi Kumar Kukkala is a serial entrepreneur and technologist from Hyderabad.  He is working on a health care device – HyGlo – a non-invasive anemia diagnosing device. HyGlo is similar to a pulse oximeter, when a person puts their finger in the device probe, it investigates blood inside the finger without taking a blood sample and finds the hemoglobin percentage in the blood. This device can help young girls and women manage anemia (a big problem in India).

Kulbir Lamba is a 35-year-old researcher and practitioner, interested in understanding the startup landscape and received an EV grant for studying the evolution of DeepTech startups in India.

Keshav Sharma  is a 23-year-old entrepreneur working at the intersection of design, technology & marketing. Two years ago, he founded Augrade, a deeptech startup with his college friends. Augrade is an AI+AR platform to streamline the creation, editing, validation & visualization of 3D models at scale.

Srijon Sarkar is a 19-year-old researcher from Kolkata interested in mathematical oncology and applied rationality. He received his EV grant to study cancer systems, particularly Epithelial/Mesenchymal Plasticity through a lens of mathematical models and statistical algorithms, during his gap year. He will start his undergraduate degree (mathematics and biology) with a full scholarship at Emory University starting Fall 2023.

Shubham Vyas s an advocate for open discourse and democratic dialogue in India. With a background in data science and interest in philosophy, he received his EV grant to build his venture “Conversations on India,” into a multi-platform media venture to help shape the Indian political and economic discourse landscape.

Navneet Choudhary is an entrepreneur, and his journey started when he was 21 with a food delivery app for trains and buses across 70 cities in India. He received his EV Grant to develop LAMROD, a mobile application-based platform to manage trucking and cargo fleet operations at one place.

Srinaath Krishnan is a 20-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai. He received his EV grant to work on Zephyr, a start-up making credit scores universal and mobile, to enable immigrants to qualify for financial products using their international credit history.

Venkat Ram is an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, researching the development and deployment of human capital. He received his EV grant to study the structure and functioning of labor addas (proverbial marketplaces most daily wage laborers in India find work).

Arvind Subramanian,  is a 25-year-old sailor from Chennai and works as a product manager at Sportstar, the oldest sports magazine in India. He won his EV grant to enable his (and his team’s) participation in the 2022 J80 World Sailing Championship in Rhode Island, USA. He is working towards building and scaling the niche sporting scene in India.

Some past winners received additional grants:

Karthik Nagapuri, a 21-year-old programmer and AI engineer, for general career development.

Akash Kulgod is a 23yo cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley founded Dognosis, where he is building tech that increases the bandwidth of human-canine communication. His grant will go towards launching a pilot study in Northern Karnataka testing the performance of cyber-canines on multi-cancer screening from breath samples. He writes on his Substack, about effective altruism, talent-search, psychedelics, and sci-fi uplift.

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, and fourth cohortTo apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].

Can You Move to Opportunity?

It is not always that easy:

This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940–1970) reduced the gains from growing up in the northern United States for Black families and can explain 27 percent of the region’s racial upward mobility gap today. I identify northern Black share increases by interacting pre-1940 Black migrants’ location choices with predicted southern county out-migration. Locational changes, not negative selection of families, explain lower upward mobility, with persistent segregation and increased crime and policing as plausible mechanisms. The case of the Great Migration provides a more nuanced view of moving to opportunity when destination reactions are taken into account.

That is by Ellora Derenoncourt, in the latest American Economic Review.  Of course this also has implications for immigration policy, and it helps to show why even a very strong pro-immigration view ought to recognize some limits on the process.

Saturday assorted links

1. The forgotten medieval habit of two sleeps.

2. Serbian government strikes back.  What again is the CBA on that immigration decision?

3. Germany won’t let Estonia transfer weapons to Ukraine (WSJ).  I’ve been telling you for years that Germany is not really part of the Western alliance any more.  It is now all the more obvious.  Addendum: And get this (FT): “Ukraine said it had summoned Germany’s ambassador to protest comments by the head of the German navy, who was filmed saying Russia only “wants respect” and Ukraine would never regain Crimea, remarks that have plunged Kyiv and Berlin into a damaging diplomatic row.”

4. Excellent Colm Tóibín piece on James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100 years (FT).  One of the best pieces I’ve read so far this year.  And speaking of the FT, Janan Ganesh argues that Los Angeles is the West’s most underrated walking city.  Of course he is correct.

5. Dubov refuses to wear a mask and thus forfeits a chess game against Giri.

6. Who are various readers nominating for President?

The history and economics of Mexican drug cartels

This paper studies the origins, and economic and social consequences of some of the most prominent drug trafficking organizations in the world: the Mexican cartels. It first traces the current location of cartels to the places where Chinese migrated at the beginning of the 20th century, discussing and documenting how both events are strongly connected. Information on Chinese presence at the beginning of the 20th century is then used to instrument for cartel presence today, to identify the effect of cartels on society. Contrary to what seems to happen with other forms of organized crime, the IV estimates in this study indicate that at the local level there is a positive link between cartel presence and better socioeconomic outcomes (e.g. lower marginalization rates, lower illiteracy rates, higher salaries), better public services, and higher tax revenues, evidence that is consistent with the known stylized fact that drug lords tend have great support in the local communities in which they operate.

That is from a recently published paper by Tommy E. Murphy and Martin A. Rossi.  Note that Chinese immigration (and also German immigration, in the paper) is used for a proxy for preexisting desirability for a locale.

I can no longer recall but this one seems like from TEKL?

Open Borders: The Graphic Novel

In April, when Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration was available for pre-order Tyler wrote:

[Open Borders] is a phenomenal achievement.  It is a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration of economic analysis and graphic visuals. I picked it up not knowing what to expect, and was blown away by the execution.

I’ve just gotten my copy hot off the press and Tyler is correct. I too was blown away. I expected the ideas to be good. What I didn’t expect was how well the graphic-novel format works to convey those ideas. It’s a joy to read. Bryan’s personality–friendly, welcoming, honest but also analytic, numerate and morally and factually serious–comes through on every page. Every page also contains something interesting. The interplay of graphics and words shows two craftsmen at the top of their game–the pictures offer wry commentary, cameos, and emphases and bear careful viewing. What’s phenomenal is that in addition to being fun to read this is also the most serious book on freedom of movement that has ever been written. Caplan and Weindersmith do not shy away from discussing all the major critiques–crime, politics, culture, IQ, deep roots and more. Anyone interested in freedom of movement, pro and con, should read this book.

Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration is a leading contender for an Eisner award.

The real privacy violators

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.

Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure.

Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other “biometric data” taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of a vast majority of a state’s residents, most of whom have never been charged with a crime.

Here is the full story by Drew Harwell.

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