Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"That central concern, that migrants lower wages and employment prospects for natives, is misplaced, but the fear of overcrowding, especially in the half-built cities of the third world, is not entirely unwarranted."

"Mobility (internal and international) is a key channel through which standards of living can even out across regions and countries, and regional economic ups and downs can be absorbed."

"In other words, there is a chicken and egg problem: young educated workers will not come unless these amenities exist, but the amenities cannot thrive unless there are enough workers like them around."

"There are other reasons to stay put even if opportunities are scarce at home and better elsewhere; childcare, for one, is expensive in the United States, due to a combination of strict regulations and lack of public subsidies."

"For at the same time as they were becoming less tolerant of international migration, Americans became less mobile themselves."

"This is perhaps why migrants, at least those not pushed out by desperation, tend to be not the richest or the most educated, but those who have some special drive, which is why we find so many successful entrepreneurs among them."

"It takes an ability to dream (Albert, Esther’s grandfather, was seeking adventure rather than escaping from a bad situation), or a substantial dose of overconfidence, to overcome this tendency to persist with the status quo."

"And if it is important to hold on to a certain self-image, then it also makes sense to burnish it. We do this actively by filtering out negative information."

"Finally, failure in migration is something people take personally. They have heard too many success stories, admiringly told, to not feel that failure would reveal something about them to themselves, if not to the world."

"Additionally, there is good evidence that people particularly hate mistakes of their own making. The world is fraught with uncertainties, many of which people have no control over. These vagaries make them unhappy, but perhaps not as unhappy as making an active choice that ends up, purely as a result of bad luck, making them worse off than if they had done nothing."

"In addition to not knowing how the market will value their particular sets of skills, they also need to worry about where to find potential employers, whether they face competition for their services or exploitation at the hands of a single employer, the kinds of references they will need, how long it will take to find a job, how they will survive until then, where they will live, and so on."

"From the point of view of the would-be migrants in rural Bangladesh, the city (and of course any foreign country) is a morass of uncertainties."

"In fact, there is a long tradition in economics, going back at least to Frank Knight, of distinguishing between quantifiable risk (50 percent probability this happens, 50 percent that happens) and the rest, what Donald Rumsfeld memorably called the “unknown unknowns,” 65 and Knightian economists call uncertainty."

"Migration, after all, is leaving the familiar to embrace the unknown, and the unknown is more than just a list of different potential outcomes with associated probabilities, as economists would like to describe it."

"Confusion could of course go either way, dampening migration, like in Nepal, or boosting it if people are overoptimistic."

"showing that a single death of someone from a particular district (a small area) in Nepal significantly reduces migration flows from that district to the country where the death happened."

"Moreover, because the extent of misinformation about mortality was so much more severe than the misinformation about wages, those who got both pieces of information were more likely to have gone."

"those who received the wage information were more likely to be still in Nepal. Those provided with information on mortality, on the other hand, were more likely to have left."

"Their current employer knows them and trusts them; incumbency is a huge advantage."

"Despite what Karl Marx had to say, labor is no ordinary commodity."

"you can switch suppliers next week if you don’t like the melon you got. But even where the laws don’t make it difficult to fire a worker, firing is unpleasant at best, and potentially dangerous if the disgruntled employee becomes enraged."

"So one very big problem with the supply-demand analysis applied to immigration is that an influx of migrants increases the demand for labor at the same time it increases the supply of laborers. This is one reason why wages do not go down when there are more migrants. A deeper problem lies in the very nature of labor markets: supply-demand is just not a very good description of how they really work."

"A report by the Center for American Entrepreneurship found that, in 2017, out of the largest five hundred US companies by revenue (the Fortune 500 list), 43 percent were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants."

"Norwegian migrants were exactly the kinds of people Trump would instinctively prefer to keep away."

"It was the first to show the supply-demand model might not directly apply to immigration."

"Card found no difference, either immediately after the immigrants arrived or some years later; the wages of natives were not affected by the arrival of the Marielitos."

"To find out, Card took what has come to be called a “difference in differences” approach."

"It is also possible the new migrant population attracts firms into a city at the cost of other cities, and we could miss the cost to the workers in those other cities."

"It could be, for example, that the influx of migrants drives out so many native workers from the city that wages do not fall for those who stay behind."

"if you plotted the wages of nonmigrants in cities against the share of migrants in cities, you would find a nice upward-sloping line; the more migrants, the higher the wages."