Why immigration numbers are a headache for economists
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
All sorts of statistics related to immigration are being thrown around in debates, speeches and campaign ads ahead of this year’s election. Immigration estimates are painstakingly calculated by various government agencies. But lately, economists have been wrangling with wide gaps between some of these numbers. On the show today, Jed Kolko, former under secretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce, explains how government agencies actually crunch immigration numbers, why two agencies’ estimates aren’t matching up right now and why accurate immigration data is crucial to how we understand the economy and setting economic policy.
Then, we’ll get into why the ongoing dockworkers’ strike is about more than just higher wages. And, we’ll get smarter about a common cooking herb.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Can new data solve an immigration puzzle?” from Slow Boring
- “What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S.” from Pew Research Center
- “Unprecedented U.S. immigration surge boosts job growth, output” from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
- “Key findings about U.S. immigrants” from Pew Research Center
- “New immigration estimates help make sense of the pace of employment” from Brookings
- “Opinion | The real reason 47,000 dock workers are on strike: Automation” from The Washington Post
- “Robots, automation a big factor in U.S. port strike” from Quartz
- “Tim Walz and JD Vance’s 2024 VP debate is tonight. Here’s what to know.” from CBS News
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi I'm Kai Rizdahl the host of How We Survive |
| 0:03.4 | It's a podcast from Marketplace. In 1986, before I was a journalist, |
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| 0:09.7 | Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. |
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| 0:31.6 | the Pentagon's been funding studies on climate change since the 1950s. |
| 0:35.9 | I think we will put our troops and our forces at higher risk if we don't recognize the impact of climate change. |
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| 0:54.0 | Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. |
| 1:00.0 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart |
| 1:04.4 | where none of us is as smart as all of us. I'm Kai Rizdahl. Thanks for joining us on |
| 1:08.5 | this Tuesday 1 October. Immigration is our single show single topic today immigration data to be |
| 1:14.9 | specific right so obviously in the selection year we've been talking a lot about |
| 1:20.8 | immigration it's on campaign trail all over the place and there's |
... |
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