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Today's column brought together several of my interests: Stephen Moore, conservative hypocrisy, and regional economics. It also had me thinking about immigration 1/ nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opi…
Declining industrial cities, mainly small cities in the heartland, are a real problem. Coming up with policies to stop that decline is hard. However, one saving grace of the situation – one thing keeping cities alive – is immigration 2/ chicagotribune.com/news/immigrati…
A LOT of immigrants move to declining cities. I've been looking at the town in which I spent the first 8 years of my life, Utica, NY. It's nothing like it was in 1960: these days it's 12.5% Asian and 12.3% Hispanic 2/ factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableser…
What brings immigrants to such cities? A while back Glaeser and Gyourko argued that durable housing mitigated urban decline: cities on the downslope have cheap housing, which makes them attractive to low-human-capital workers 3/ repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewconten…
In 21st-century America, many such workers are immigrants, and those are also the people most likely to be mobile, since they don't have roots in existing US communities. Hence they move to cheap towns even if they're troubled 4/
And by sustaining these cities, they also help the surrounding rural areas. The truth is that the heartland is a major beneficiary of immigration, even though most of its residents don't know that 5/ nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opi…
