Immigration in America: Data and Myths, Revisited With Leah Boustan

Capitalisn't

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4.5 • 584 Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

If democracy is a social contract, why don’t we allow everybody who is willing to sign it? Why don’t we have open borders for immigration? In their book "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," Princeton University’s Leah Boustan and Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky provide insights from big data to explore how immigration shaped the United States by looking at the economic legacies of immigrants and their children. On this week’s encore episode, hosts Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean talk with Boustan to unpack how immigrants and their progeny have impacted jobs, wages, and housing prices for native-born Americans. Conversely, how do immigrants’ countries of origin overcome obstacles to socioeconomic change when many of their most-motivated citizens leave? Can data move the U.S. immigration debate beyond the current border crisis?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, Capitalism, listeners. I hope you're having a great 4th of July weekend. We're taking a
0:08.1	week off during our summer break, but with the Biden administration recent actions on immigration,
0:15.1	and given the centrality of this issue in the upcoming election, we thought it would be
0:20.7	important to reshare one of our
0:23.5	previous and most insightful conversations about the economics of immigration. As we've improved
0:31.7	our technological access to data, we've improved what we can say. So this idea of following an individual over the course of
0:39.4	their life. And you know, you might see an immigrant who's been in the U.S. for three or four years
0:44.6	and then find them again 10 years later and then 20 years later to trace out their trajectory.
0:49.8	And when we did that, we really were blown away by how many of our own myths were overturned by
0:55.7	looking into the data.
0:59.0	I'm Bethany McLean.
1:00.6	Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed's a good idea?
1:05.8	And I'm Luigi Zengalis.
1:07.0	We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
1:12.8	And this is Capital Isn't, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.
1:16.7	First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed?
1:21.2	And most importantly, what isn't?
1:23.2	We ought to do better by the people that get left behind.
1:26.1	I don't think we shouldn't kill the capital system in the process.
1:30.2	One of the issues that we are trying to analyze in this podcast is the interaction between
1:35.0	democracy and capitalism.
1:37.1	Now, if democracy is really a social contract, why don't we allow everybody who is willing
	...

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