Dog and I are profiled in Hawaii Business Magazine.  Well actually he’s the one on the cover, Helland and I get a mention in the text.  Clearly to get on the cover, I need to grow longer hair and get some tattoos.

Barry Chiswick, head of the economics department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a respected scholar of immigration, had a surprisingly poorly argued op-ed in the NYTimes.  Here’s the opening paragaraph:

It is often said that the American economy needs low-skilled foreign
workers to do the jobs that American workers will not do. These foreign
workers might be new immigrants, illegal aliens or, in the current
debate, temporary or guest workers. But if low-skilled foreign workers
were not here, would lettuce not be picked, groceries not bagged, hotel
sheets not changed, and lawns not mowed? Would restaurants use
disposable plates and utensils?

On the face of it, this assertion seems implausible.

… If the number of low-skilled foreign workers were to fall, wages would increase.  Low-skilled American workers and their families would benefit…

Bizarrely, the rest of his op-ed explains why these statements are mostly wrong!  First, the lettuce:

A farmer who grows winter iceberg lettuce in Yuma County, Ariz., was
asked on the ABC program "Nightline" in April what he would do if it
were more difficult to find the low-skilled hand harvesters who work on
his farm, many of whom are undocumented workers. He replied that he
would mechanize the harvest. Such technology exists, but it is not used
because of the abundance of low-wage laborers. In their absence,
mechanical harvesters – and the higher skilled (and higher wage)
workers to operate them – would replace low-skilled, low-wage workers.

In other words, if the number of low skilled workers were to fall the lettuce would no  longer be (hand) picked and low-skilled American workers would not benefit from an increase in wages!

What about lawn mowing and hotel cleaning?

Facing higher costs, some homeowners would switch to grass species
that grow more slowly, to alternative ground cover or to flagstones.
Others would simply mow every other week, or every 10 days, instead of
weekly…

Few of us change our sheets and towels
at home every day. Hotels and motels could reduce the frequency of
changing sheets and towels from every day to, say, every third day for
continuing guests, perhaps offering a price discount to guests who
accept this arrangement.

And how about this for a pathetic attempt to get the environmentalists on board the anti-immigration bandwagon?

Less frequent lawn mowing and washing of hotel sheets and towels would reduce air, noise and water pollution in the bargain.

Note how reduction in services, denied in paragraph one, has now become a virtue!

Chiswick also points out that:

With the higher cost of low-skilled labor, we would import more of some
goods, in particular table-quality fruits and vegetables for home
consumption (as distinct from industrial use) and lower-priced
off-the-rack clothing.

That is correct, but this is another reason why restricting the immigration of low-skilled workers will not much increase the wages of low-skilled Americans.

Chiswick makes statements in his op-ed like the "increase in low-skilled workers has contributed to the stagnation of wages for all such workers."  But unlike my Open Letter he never tries to quantify these assertions.  Yet he surely knows that an 8% decline is on the high end of such estimates and a zero percent decline on the low-end.

Quantifying, however, would put the immigration and wages issue in perspective which is that immigration is at worst a small contributor to the decline in the wages of low-skilled workers.  Indeed, economists are agreed that technology, not immigration, is by far the more important force which is why any serious attempt to raise the wages of low-skilled workers must begin with efforts to raise skills.

In my TCS article I said:

Immigration makes immigrants much better off. In the normal debate
this fact is not considered to be of great importance — who cares
about them? But economists tend not to count some people as worth more
than others, especially not if the difference is something so random as
where a person was born.

Chiswick, however, lets the economists down.  He never once mentions the benefits of immigration to the immigrants.

Some people have long suspected me of being a pod person but now it’s official.  Russ Roberts interviews me for EconTalk on the Economics of Medical Malpractice.   

Have you seen this man?  Spot him in the next thirty days and it could be worth $100.  Rules here.

P.S.  I think you-know-who has underestimated who much money he will have to shell out.  Oh yeah, sometimes he wears glasses.

The market for economists was in a slump when I graduated.  I was fortunate to earn a visitor’s position at the University of Virginia and then a tenure-track position at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, but I had few alternative offers.  My colleagues in Muncie were good but after a few years I was unhappy enough with the university and the town to take a flying leap to become director of research at the Independent Institute in Oakland, CA.  At the time, I thought this was the end of my academic career.

David Theroux at the Independent Institute encouraged my academic work, however, seeing it as consistent with the Institute’s focus on research, and I kept publishing.  Events (and especially Tyler!) then conspired to bring me to GMU for which I am very grateful.

All this is by way of introducing Austan Goolsbee’s latest column in the NYTimes.  Goolsbee discusses two new papers which demonstrate that economic conditions in the year in which you graduate can have a surprisingly long-lasting effect on career earnings. 

The Stanford class of 1988, for example, entered the job market just
after the market crash of 1987. Banks were not hiring, and so average
wages for that class were lower than for the class of 1987 or for later
classes that came out after the market recovered. Even a decade or more
later, the class of 1988 was still earning significantly less. They
missed the plum jobs right out of the gate and never recovered….

These data confirm that people essentially cannot close the wage gap by
working their way up the company hierarchy. While they may work their
way up, the people who started above them do, too. They don’t catch up.
The recession graduates who actually do catch up tend to be the ones
who forget about rising up the ladder and, instead, jump ship to other
employers.

I take three points from my career and this research.  Leaving the academy turned out to be the just the thing to set me apart from the pack.  It didn’t have to work out that way but when your mean is low you need to throw some variance into the mix.  Finance theorists will recognize this lesson from options pricing theory. 

Second, I moved across the continent twice – from Fairfax, to Charlottesville, to Muncie, to Oakland and then back to Fairfax – sometimes with my wife and sometimes not – all in the space of about 10 years.  After moving so often, when I browsed book stores my decision to buy was based more on the weight of the book than on the price.  Jumping ship repeatedly, however, did help me to recover from a difficult beginning.

Third, luck matters.

Addendum: Now Open to Comments.