Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan on Immigration Then and Now

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2022

⏱️ 74 minutes

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Summary

Immigration to the United States, say Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, is more novel than short story: It takes decades for new immigrants to catch up economically. But their kids on average thrive economically and have higher rates of upward mobility than American-born kids. Abramitzky and Boustan talk about their book Streets of Gold with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Using an extraordinary data set of millions of Americans, Boustan and Abramitzky find that today's immigrants and their children are surprisingly similar to yesterday's.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics
0:07.0	and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:13.0	Institution.
0:14.0	Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
0:18.6	the information related to today's conversation.
0:21.4	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.8	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.3	We'd love to hear from you.
0:37.3	Today is June 16th, 2022, and my guests are Leibouston and Ron Abramisky.
0:42.6	Our topic for today is their new book, Streets of Gold, America's Untold Story of Immigrant
0:48.0	Success.
0:49.2	This is Ron's second appearance on econtalk.
0:51.2	He was here in October of 2018 talking about his book, The Mystery of the Caboots.
0:56.4	Leah, welcome to econtalk and Ron, welcome back.
1:00.6	Great to be here.
1:02.6	It's great to be back, Russ.
1:05.7	Your book is a rather creative use of a very large data set and we'll get to that in
1:13.1	a little bit.
1:14.1	I want to start with what I thought was one of the most interesting findings of the book,
1:18.2	which is a comparison of the past and the present.
1:21.7	America's had different waves of immigration, there were times before, particularly 1980 to
	...

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