Last Friday's immigration news dump said there were 13,099 noncitizen murderers roaming free on American streets.

The news went viral, earning concerned tweets from major accounts. The only problem is that it's not true.

🧵 . . .

alexnowrasteh.com/p/there-are-no…






Background: @RepTonyGonzales asked ICE about noncitizen criminals on the agency's deportation docket (a good question). ICE's response was detailed by crime. Nobody cared about the 1 noncitizen convicted of an antitrust crime, but many cared about 13,099 convicted of homicide.

New Cato research on illegal immigrant crime.

Illegal immigrants have a homicide conviction rate 26% below natives in Texas. For illegal immigrants, it’s 2.2 per 100k. It’s 3.0 per 100k for natives. Legal immigrants are the best at 1.2 per 100k.

cato.org/policy-analysi…
Homicide conviction rates were up for all groups in Texas in 2022, but they were up more for native-born Americans than for illegal immigrants (37%).

New Cato working paper on how minimum wages reduced the number of au pairs in Massachusetts.

What are au pairs?

How did the min wage undermine au pairs in MA?

Why is the Biden administration thinking of doing something similar nationwide?

🧵

cato.org/working-paper/…
The au pair program is a J-1 visa cultural exchange visitor program. It allows au pairs to live in American homes and work in childcare, with the intent of culturally immersing them in the US.

About 20,000 enter the US every year. There are myriad rules and wage regulations.

@hsquaredfan @FischerWerkat Economic productivity comes from many factors, but the point he’s making that immigrant-induced diversity causes economic decline is not supported in the literature. It should be pretty easy to show if he were correct. I only wrote a book about it:

amazon.com/Wretched-Refus… @hsquaredfan @FischerWerkat Good policies matter most. A diverse population reduces social solidarity, which is good for economic growth because people don’t want wealth-destroying policies to help out people who look different.

Biden’s new border plan reduced border crossers by 37.9% in January 2023.

An enormous success that proves LEGAL migration undermines illegal immigration. 🧵

open.substack.com/pub/anowrasteh… The Biden plan's main feature is Humanitarian Parole for Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians (VCNH). They can apply from their home countries & 30,000 a month can come (maybe more). Biggest immigration liberalization since 1965.

Garett is wrong on *every* citation in his 🧵. I replied to each one, but now I’ll do so in a 🧵 so my responses aren’t lost.

My criticism of the trust-growth literature focuses on “generalized social trust” – the trust measure from the WVS and GSS that is most prominently and consistently used in the trust-growth literature. I focus on that measure of trust because Garett mainly did in his book.

🧵 . . .

anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-th…

Garett wrote, “Here he cites 8 articles as evidence that survey measures of trust don't predict experimental trust. Four articles, highlighted in yellow, actually report that trust predicts trust! +”

If it's not clear, the "He" is me.

Garett is wrong about *every* citation. Now I'll go through them.

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1625237704546955265?s=20

Reflections on my debate with @RichLowry about nationalism. He was for it, I was against it.

1. We disagreed on definition of nationalism
2. An argument in favor of “reactive nationalism” would have been hard for me to counter
3. Rich is super nice

anowrasteh.substack.com/p/nationalism-… This was a challenging debate for the audience as we both spent much time defending our different definitions of nationalism. We even appealed to the Latin roots of the word!

It’s been obvious to me that people yell “rule of law” when they like the laws and “freedom” when they don’t, both as justifications for their opinions and behaviors.

As a general principle, the “rule of law” is of little meaning without discussing the ACTUAL LAWS. As always, think on the margin.

"Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the United States"

New Cato Working Paper finds that immigration reduced union density by 5.7 percentage points between 1980 and 2020, which accounts for 29.7% of the overall decline in union density during that period.

cato.org/working-paper/… We used the national skill cells method developed by Borjas (2003) to see how immigrants affected unionization in experience/education cells. Borjas used it to see how immigrants affected wages in those cells.

The Buffalo Shooter was partly inspired to kill by a nativist conspiracy theory called The Great Replacement. TGR argues that Democrats are “importing” voters from abroad to undermine the GOP, Real Americans, White Americans, other groups, or a combination of the above. 🧵 First, Democrats haven’t passed any substantive immigration reform and they’re not going to. They prefer Obamacare-style reforms, financial reforms, or other silly priorities over immigration and always have (see BBB).

Oh, I get it now. You all read him for the laughs. takimag.com/article/the-no… Demand curves. You discovered demand curves.

Rice is 1/2 correct. She's correct that an orderly system allows for broader reforms. She's wrong that more enforcement will produce order - it'll do the opposite.

This is the Catch-22 of immigration reform. Biden has to move first with a liberalization that will create order

https://twitter.com/OmarJadwat/status/1441012018706800646

Chaos will undermine support for immigration reform as it does for every other reform (drugs, alcohol, crime, etc.). People rightly want order when they view chaos, but their instinct on how to achieve order is via more central control. This is wrong almost all of the time.

My oldest son lost two teeth today.

He swallowed them both. Does the tooth fairy still visit him?

My wife says yes, I say no. What do you think? How about this, he has to write a letter to the Tooth Fairy to explain what happened and then the TF visits.

Why social conservatives decided to push abstractions like community, culture, and civil society rather than the transcendent and awesome feeling of being a parent is beyond me. Is there any portion of the political spectrum more incompetently manned than social conservatism? I’m not religious and the non-religious people I know who have kids all agree that it is an incredible consciousness-altering experience more meaningful than anything else. This makes evolutionary psychology sense. Yet, social conservatives talk about boring civil society.

Fascinating paper about Russian “migrants” to Kaliningrad behaving more like Germans than Russians.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… More on economic geography

I hope Ryan acknowledges that Cato publishes the results of our research even when the results don’t say what we’d like them to say and applies that logic to our other research on immigration.

https://twitter.com/ryangirdusky/status/1387129966761070595

Unlike other think-tanks, Cato likes to hear all sides. I invited Borjas to present his 2014 book at Cato. cato.org/events/immigra…

Cato has a wonderful survey on immigration released today, created by @emilyekins. Read the whole report here, there's something in it for everybody. cato.org/survey-reports… @emilyekins and I worked together on crafting many of the questions in this survey. We wanted to discover what people believe about immigrant and *why* they believe it. There are too many simply narratives out there and she cut through many of them.

Reminder: Closed borders incentivize illegal immigration. Mexico’s left-wing president understands this. When will the right-wing Senator from Arkansas?

cato.org/blog/mexican-p…

https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1367856374982541312

Don’t need to go back to the 1950s to see that more legal migration reduces illegal immigration. We can look at the recent increase in H-2 visas. More temp H-2 visas for Mexicans reduces Mexican apprehended by a lot cato.org/blog/h-2-visas…

The Bracero program is in the news again with Mexican president AMLO proposing a guest worker program with the US based on that old arrangement. Here’s a short explainer of Bracero and how it secured the border. cato.org/blog/guest-wor… You might be saying to yourself “that was 60 years ago, can that work today?”

Answer: It partly has.

The current guest worker visa programs have massively reduced illegal immigration from Mexico. Expanding them even more can finish the job.

Much of the opposition to immigration are ominous speculations rather than evidence-based worries. My book Wretched Refuse? takes a chainsaw to the most facially compelling bit of ominous speculation.

Don't take my word for it, check out the reviews.

amazon.com/Wretched-Refus… @bryan_caplan succinctly summarizes the argument our book attacks. econlib.org/wretched-refus…

A common counter-theme is that the Capitol insurrectionists were punished more harshly than the BLM rioters, or at least criticized more. 1/ According to that narrative, BLM rioters ran roughshod in American cities & received zero punishment so of course the Capitol Putschists thought they could get away with it. 2/