Question from an anonymous reader, reprinted with permission:
Hi Bryan,
First of all, I’d like to say that I really loved your new book Open Borders! It’s an amazing feat in terms of making a clear case, exploring many arguments and counter-arguments and presenting everything in a fun, engaging way.
I have one question for you. After having gone through all the literature for this book, where do you think additional research is more likely to have a high marginal return? If some graduate student wants to work on better understanding and quantifying the effects of migration and potentially opening the borders, what questions would you advise them to study?
My response:
Great question. A few ideas:
1. Getting better measures of the causal effect of immigration on immigrant children’s cognitive development.
2. Getting bettermeasures of political beliefs of would-be immigrants.
3. Getting better measures of immigrant political (and other) assimilation.
4. Improving on NAS net fiscal effect measures.
5. Look at effect of immigration on long-run growth, by immigrant type.
6. Get more empirics on actually-existing keyhole solutions.
7. Get better data, including experimental data, on what would durably change natives’ minds about immigration.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Nov 21 2019 at 6:52pm
All but 2 look very promising. Anything about “prospective” immigrants would be heavily influenced by exactly what sort of regime the prospective immigrants expected to face. I’d add to 7 what beliefs and values drive opposition to more immigration.
Tyler Wells
Nov 22 2019 at 10:14pm
Addressing idea 1, I would recommend two populations. First, the Mayan immigrants from Guatemala, comparing the immigrants and their US born offspring. This population is already a bit famous because their USA born children tend to be much taller in stature than their immigrant parents. The population is conveniently located in the USA, especially Florida and California.
The second population that deserves study is the North Korean immigrant population in China, comparing North with South Koreans. South Koreans are famous for having the highest IQ on the planet and it would be fascinating to see how the North Korean population compared. South Korea is one of the most developed countries on the planet, North Korea, not so much. Could it be that differences in IQ in such a limited geographic area and among such a seemingly homogeneous population could be the cause of the massive disparity in development?
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