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The Essential Podcast, Episode 90: Breaking Down Immigration Myths Using Big Data

Transcript Provided by Kensho

Nathan Hunt: This is The Essential Podcast from S&P Global. My name is Nathan Hunt. I'm informed by the media that New York City is in the midst of a migrant crisis. According to the Washington Post, 110,000 migrants have arrived in the city since spring of 2022. We are, I'm told, awash with migrants, which is odd because on average, about 50,000 people move to New York City every year. I guess the headline "New York received slightly higher-than-average new residents" doesn't generate nearly as many clicks as one about a migrant crisis.

By the way, on the streets of a city of over 8 million people, I've yet to notice the statistical blip of these extra new neighbors. This is the way of things with immigration. The news media generates slightly hysterical stories using coded words like migrant, and people exchange apocryphal accounts of immigrants who refuse to work, refuse to learn the language and refuse to become, in a word, American. This is not unique to a certain political party or a certain news channel. It seems that everyone understands immigration so well, it is unnecessary for anyone to possess actual facts.

My guests today have actual facts on immigration, Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky are the authors of "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success". Leah is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University and Ran is in the Economics Department at Stanford University. On a personal note, while the book is clearly serious and deeply researched academic work, I found myself making a mental list of which of my friends to share it with next. It so engaging and uplifting that it feels selfish to keep my copy moldering on my book shelves.

Leah, Ran, welcome to the podcast.

Leah Boustan: Great to be here.

Ran Abramitzky: Yes. Thank you for having us.

Nathan Hunt: I credited you both in my introduction with having actual facts, and this is pretty unique in the world of immigration and immigration policy. Can you tell me a bit about your data sets and the methodologies that you have employed?

Leah Boustan: I think what we all want to know about immigrants is how they succeed over time. So after they arrive in the U.S., are they able to move up the economic ladder? And what happens to the children of immigrants in the next generation? So the challenge here is that we need data that follows individuals and follows families over time, sometimes over 50 or 60 years, and that's a challenge in the modern data.

It's especially hard if you go back to the Ellis Island period and you want to follow historical migrants. So what Ran and I have done for the historical period is to use data that you may think of as genealogy data or data for family history. A lot of people are familiar with the website ancestry.com. And that's a place where you can go and you can type in your grandfather's name and you can find out whether he's in the census records.

Well, Ran and I started out that way actually, going to Ancestry, looking up a couple of hundred families, a couple of thousand families, getting a little bit greedier and seeing if we could locate as many immigrants as possible there, really so much so that Ancestry noticed an uptick in their business. And so now we have a research partnership with them, and we were able to use the census data there to try to follow these families over time in the past.

Ran Abramitzky: And one thing I will add to it is that the reason you can do this is because after 72 years, in federal government documents like the census, all the information becomes publicly available. So that way you can look up your great grandparents and you can see their names and the name of the children, where they live, what they did for a living, their incomes, things like that. 

And so that allowed us to think about, well, if we see Nathan Hunt in the 1900 census, why don't we try and look him up in the 1910 census because we know his first name and last name, maybe we know his year of birth and his place of birth. And so let's try to kind of link people over time, in that way, create like genealogies or families that we can follow over time.

Leah Boustan: And interestingly here, using the modern data is even more challenging than using the historical data because like Ran is saying, for privacy reasons, we want to keep this information away from the public for a while. And so for the modern data, we have a partnership with Opportunity Insights, a group at Harvard that is connected in with the IRS. And so they have aggregated for us tax data.

And for all of us filing our taxes and possibly claiming tax dependence when our kids are living at home, you know that you write down your kid's social security number. And then when your kid grows up, and hopefully, him or herself in the labor market filing for their own taxes down the line, you can connect the child to the parent that way. And so we just want to emphasize that we have not touched any individual, any household records from the tax data because, of course, that's highly, highly secure, but we have been able to look at some averages that have been reported to us.

Nathan Hunt: So Ran and Leah, I know from my dad, who became very excited to dig into family history a couple of years ago, that this can be a very laborious process. And you go through even a source like ancestry.com and you're sort of sketching out family trees, one individual at a time. I can't imagine with the huge amount of data that you guys are analyzing that you're using such a high-touch method. What kind of tools did you use to analyze the data that you pulled in?

Ran Abramitzky: That's a great question. So at first, we did -- it's also addictive. It's laborious but also very addictive. Like once you find yourself in ancestry.com, you can find yourself 7 hours later, still you are looking for all these branches of your family tree. So it's really fun if you're a nerd like us.

But you're right. If you try to -- you can only do 100, 1,000, 2,000, like a few thousands. But what do you do if you want to trace like millions of millions of immigrant and their families? And so we ended up developing some kind of like an algorithm that it sounds kind of very fancy, but it's kind of very simple at first, which is to say, if we -- let's say, 20 years ago, it would be impossible to do this kind of work at scale even with the algorithms we develop because the information was not digitized. So the information was publicly available and you could go to some kind of like a basement of the census and good luck searching your grandfather in the 100 million records that they have there.

But with the rise of ancestry.com and family search and all these genealogical websites, they now digitize the information so you can at least search for the record digitally. So then we said, what if we require you to have, say, if I look Nathan Hunt in 1900 and I want to look you up in 1910? Let's look people based on their name, their first and their last name, based on their year of birth and based on their place of birth. And so for example, if I know that Nathan Hunt was born in Ohio in 1982, like I can -- we can then kind of look you up. And that was the first way we did it like some years ago.

And it's inevitably -- I think what's important to know, it's inevitably imperfect process because the Ran Abramitzky of the world are very easy to find. There is only one in the United States and very easy to find if you base it on your name. But if your name is James Smith, even if I know you were born in England in 1900, there are maybe many of you. And so we -- over the years, in parallel to research and integration, we are refining and improving our algorithms, but essentially boils down to we can develop very conservative algorithms that only call you the correct match if we are pretty sure with you. So if there is only one of you and we can't find anybody else within 5 or 10 years.

And then we generate samples that are relatively small, but ones that we are very sure are the right ones. Or we can develop algorithms that are more lenient. They kind of use probably stick methods or they allow you to -- they allow them to be more than one person. And that way, we create larger samples, but with some option to have like some false positives. And so what -- all of what we are talking about are things that are kind of robust, findings that are kind of robust across the many -- every way we can, we know how to link people.

Leah Boustan: What's exciting is that these methods are improving and changing so much just over the past decade. So it used to be that we could link around 20% of the U.S. population. And now there are approaches that we're working on and other people are working on in this area that can link 50% or 60% of the U.S. population.

We're never going to be able to link everyone because if you go from one census to another, some people went back to Europe, some people died, some people just are not listed in the census at all because the census taker didn't walk down this long rural road to find them. But we are really improving a lot as a science in using this data.

Nathan Hunt: So that was a really important part for what I'd like to dive into next, which is some of the immigration myths that you tackle in your book and some of them you debunk and in some ways, you confirm. But the millions of records that you've looked through allow you to sort of move beyond the anecdotal or the apocryphal into analyzing these large data sets. 

So let's dive into some immigration myths that I'm hoping you can confirm or deny using your historical and present-day immigration data. Let's start with the big one. The big myth that is sort of a -- it's like a political football today, which is immigrants today are different. They aren't integrating into American society and they aren't learning English. What did your research show on that idea?

Leah Boustan: Well, the first part of the myth is correct. Immigrants are different today, but the second part is wrong. Despite the fact that immigrants are different, they are integrating into American society and they are just as quick to learn English. So in terms of immigrants being different, there's a couple of different dimensions here.

If you go back 100 years, 90% of immigrants in the U.S. were born in a European country. Today, it's only around 10% of immigrants born in Europe. And immigrants are coming from a very diverse set of countries all over the world. Those countries are also poorer relative to the U.S. than the European countries of the past. Sure, Italy, Norway, Poland, those countries were very poor, but our top sending countries today are even poorer in relative terms.

And so there's a lot of reasons to think, well, geez, our immigrants today are probably going to look very different in their outcomes. But that's what really surprised us with the work. No matter how you cut it, there's a lot of different ways to measure assimilating. And so we can talk about some of our favorite measures, but no matter how you cut it, we're finding that immigrants are just as quick to assimilate today.

Nathan Hunt: I'd love to dive in, Ran, with one particular measure of assimilation that really appealed to me. I mean it's just -- it's charming because we can all think of examples from our own lives, which is names. And as immigrants come to the country and they have kids, and the names they give their kids tend to change over time. And that's something you guys talk a lot about in the book. And I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about that.

Ran Abramitzky: Yes. So we also like the name measure. There is something about it that when you think about assimilating into the economy, it's a bit simpler to think about it. When you think about assimilating and integrating into society and culturally assimilating, it's becoming a bit more tricky. Because customs of immigrants, like the way they dress, their accent, what they eat is not something that you have systematically measured.

And of course, sociologists have looked into this when they do a deep dive into a community. But we wanted to see if we can learn something from the big data. And one measure that people typically use is, let's say, who you marry, like marriage. Do you marry others from your own ethnicity? Or do you marry a U.S.-born and so on.

But there is something about this measure that is not a pure choice because who you marry is both a choice, who you want to marry, but it's also a constraint like who wants to marry you. So it's not a pure choice by the immigrant who they marry. And so we thought one measure that is a pure choice is how you name your children.

This is a choice that is available to immigrants, how you name your kids without any interference by the society around them, by the U.S.-born. And of course -- and the other nice thing about it is that it's a tool that is available both for the rich and the poor. It doesn't cost money to name your child, so that even poor immigrants can give American-sounding name to their children and signaling that they want to assimilate into the larger culture.

But of course, there is something nuancedly nice about name because while it doesn't cost money to name your child, it has some kind of what we call identity cost. So for example, if I named my child Dallas, then my mom from Israel will call me and she will say, "Where is Dallas coming from? How is that related to anything that you grew up?" My siblings maybe will make fun of me every time I go to visit.

And so -- but that's exactly what we kind of wanted to capture, this trade-off that immigrants face between retaining their original identity and the benefits of assimilating into the broader culture. And what we end up finding is that, indeed, immigrants give more American-sounding names to their children when they spend more years in the United States. And so of course, they don't go all the way from like Ricardo to Dallas, but they kind of -- and so they do retain some of the original identity.

But even within their lifetime they culturally assimilate, as mentioned, by giving more American-sounding names to their children, eventually erasing about half of the naming gap between their ethnic names and the U.S.-sounding name, and like Leah said, to a similar degree, between the past and today. So both today and in the past, immigrants give more American-sounding names to their children when they spend more years in the United States.

Nathan Hunt: Leah, if you could talk a little bit about the methodology you used there. And maybe with a specific example, you have some great ones in the book. But how is it that you designated, okay, this is an ethnic name and this is more of an American name?

Leah Boustan: Well, we did not want to make our own judgment call on that because everyone's opinions differ on what makes a name truly an American name. So instead, we said, let's turn to the data and let the data tell us which names are really American-sounding. So in the census data that we just described, we can count up the number of people who are holding each first name.

And if you think about a name that today, for example, sounds really American, at least to me, like Eric. That was a name that was actually highly associated with being foreign-born in the past and particularly from a Scandinavian country. So we would count up all of the Erics who were from Sweden and compare that to everyone born in Sweden. And maybe 1% or 2% of all Swedes at the time were named Eric. And then we would count up the number of Erics that were U.S.-born and compare that to everyone who was U.S.-born. And it was a much smaller percentage. It wasn't 2%. It was something like 0.2% or even smaller than that.

And so in comparing those 2, we can give you a sense of a relative probability that the name is given to a foreigner versus given to U.S.-born. And so that's exactly what we're tracking as immigrant moms spend more time in the country. The first trial born maybe after 1 or 2 years, and having just left the home country, will tend to be a name like Eric historically. 

And then, let's say, the second or the third or the fourth child would be a childlike Jeffrey or David or Michael. So names that are very commonly shared between foreign-born and U.S.-born households. And so not shifting necessarily all the way to the Dallases or some of the names that would be uniquely American, but kind of shifting from the very foreign to the more shared set of names in order to signal some kind of belonging or embracing of U.S. culture.

Nathan Hunt: Let's dive into another immigration myth. And that's sort of it's the rags to riches math, which was prior generations of immigrants were more industrious and they achieved success faster than today's immigrants. What did the data show you on that?

Ran Abramitzky: So the data showed us that both parts of the rags to riches story are based in myth. So immigrants don't necessarily start in rags in the past. So immigrants from some countries and some immigrants do start like -- as soon as they come, they earn -- they hold occupations that pay less than the U.S.-born for sure.

But immigrants from some other countries are actually doing well in the labor market, even upon first arrival to the United States. So not all immigrants started in rags. And those who start in rags, many of them do start in rags, they don't move to riches very quickly. So many of our immigrants that we find in the past continue to work in menial jobs their entire life, even 30 years later.

So it's not the case, even in the past in this nostalgic view of the streets were paved with gold where immigrants used to come and with nothing and then they move very quickly. Sure out of the 30 million immigrants that come, you can find cases like that. But when you look at the big data and you try to find the average patterns, you don't see that there is a fast move from rags to riches even in the past. And that is true today as well.

And so somehow, the myth came to be -- you can ask how does the myth come to be. And so it's hard to give a precise answer. But it's in part because like family stories become more and more heroic as time passes. Oh, you know, like I came with nothing. I only came with $1,000, and then like your brother. Oh no, my mom said that they only came with $100. Oh, dad said that they came with nothing. So like -- and the heroic stories are, of course, the more interesting ones. Like a story like, yes, we didn't have much, we were trying -- we sacrificed, worked our way is not as catchy as the ones who make it from rags to riches. But we kind of wanted to follow the phone book, not just the Einsteins of the world.

And the second thing has to do more with -- it's a bit more of a mundane reason why the rags to riches story persistent, which has to do with the data. If you only have -- if you don't have the data that you can follow the same person over time, you're going to conclude something about immigrant mobility in the labor market by comparing immigrants that are here -- who came here 5 years ago and ones who came here 25 years ago, for example. 

And you would assume in your mind that that's probably the path that immigrants would take. But immigrants who came 25 years ago might be quite different than the ones who came 5 years ago, they might be, for example, more skilled. And so that will appear to you like there is a quick moving up from rags to riches where, in fact, it's not the same person that you are following.

Leah Boustan: I think another factor as to why this myth has really persisted for the past is that immigrants did eventually move up. It just didn't happen in the first generation. It happened as we have found in our data in the second generation for the children of immigrants. So if you go back 100 years and you're talking great-grandfather and grandfather, that sort of blends in your mind about when exactly your family was able to make it into the middle class. But what we've been able to document is that children of immigrants are actually remarkably successful in the past and today. 

So today, we haven't just given immigrants enough time. We need to have a more generational view and not take a temperature on immigrant success after 5 or 10 years in the country, but actually wait for that family to have kids, and those kids to be educated in U.S. schools and then move into the U.S. labor market to get a better sense of total immigrant success and really is a generational success rather than a single career.

Nathan Hunt: Leah, following up on that. There is obviously a very strong myth that immigrants are a drain on public finances and public services. What does your research indicate in terms of how much they're taking away versus what they're giving?

Leah Boustan: Well, our research really confirms what comes out in a National Academy of Sciences report, where they crunched all the numbers and found that the first generation of immigrants do take more out of the system than they give in taxes, but that what their parents take is more than compensated by what the children are giving in, in the next generation. In fact, much of what the first generation is taking out of the system "is really the money that it takes to educate their kids. Public schooling is expensive, but then the children's generation and their strong success more than makes up for that investment that we're making in these immigrant families."

And so our research was really consistent with this accounting. So we were looking at the children of immigrants who are being raised either in the median household or below the median, so in a household that's earning less than the average American all the way down to the 25th or 20th or 15th percentile. So immigrant families that are really, you think of them in the working poor. Imagine 2 working parents working full-time for minimum wage.

Then what happens to the kids? Are the kids also stuck at the minimum wage in the next generation? Are they also working in low-skilled and low-paying occupations? And the answer is not at all. Those children are moving up. Even though they're being raised at the 20th, 25th percentile, they're moving up to the 50th or more. And so that's exactly how it is that, that second generation earns enough to more than pay for the investments that we're making.

Nathan Hunt: Yes. I just want to reiterate the point you just made because when I read it in the book, it knocked me back on my heels because at first, when I was reading, actually, immigrants do take out more in services than they pay in. I thought, oh no, like people are going to use this fact to oppose immigration to close the borders. But the source of that, the source of the services that they're using is public education, which I don't think anyone would want to deny the benefits of public education for the good of the country and the good of the workforce going forward.

Ran, I'm going to follow up with you for our final myth before we move on to some other things. And it's the toughest immigration myth, which is that immigrants depress wages for American-born workers. If you let immigrants in the country, Americans are going to be paid less as a result.

Ran Abramitzky: Yes, that is the toughest myth and one that we have the least maybe clear and precise answer to. I think it's -- and it's also a very hotly debated topic in economics right now. So I wouldn't want to weigh in too much on like one versus the other. But I would say that I think it's fair to say if I summarize what economists -- many economists think is that there are no -- there are always winners and losers from immigration.

So for example, if you are a past immigrant, for example, that is working exactly in the same occupation as the new immigrant, you are going to naturally lose. Even if you're not a past immigrant, but you are just a U.S.-born worker who work in a very close substitute to what the immigrants are doing, you might be losing. But at the aggregate level, we -- there are no large negative effects of immigration on the U.S.-born. 

And we can show you in various contexts, there is the Mariel boatlift paper that Card is having. We looked at another setting where we look at when the border closed in the 1920s and many way fewer immigrants came, did U.S.-born become much better off? In all this context, the answer seems to -- and the Bracero Program when it stopped, do you see that U.S.-born worker earn much more? And you always see -- and the answer always tends to be not very much. There are not very big negative effects.

And I think that the reason why this persists so much despite some of the findings is that it's a very appealing story if you think about the U.S. economy as a zero-sum game. So there are fixed number of jobs, and they can be either hold by -- held by U.S.-born or the immigrant. And so if an immigrant come, naturally, a U.S.-born worker will be crowded out and he will lose his job. But that's not really how the economy works. And so the economy is not really a zero-sum game.

So for example, we focus this conversation a lot about low-skilled immigrants. But high-skilled immigrants, for example, many of them create jobs to the U.S.-born. They start up firms, they are academics. They actually are creating jobs for the U.S.-born. 

And even low-skilled workers, many of them end up doing just the kind of work that the U.S.-born workers don't do, like taking care of the elderly, like picking crops, like cleaning the dishes, like working in agriculture and in construction. And so -- and the U.S.-born workers tend to work in more -- like in the middle of the distribution, not in the very, very high skilled and not in a very, very low skilled. And so somehow the economy is just not a zero-sum game, and that's why the -- where the intuition of an immigrant come and necessarily the U.S.-born worker will be worse off breaks.

Leah Boustan: Without immigrants here, one hypothesis that I've heard is that wages would rise in agriculture or wages would rise in elder care and U.S.-born workers would move into those sectors. And that's certainly one possibility. But another possibility is that we would end up with missing markets. So at the wage that would end up being the case after we no longer have immigrant workers, that would become a service that consumers would just find too expensive. So rather than having someone from the market take care of your older parent, you might leave the workforce and take care of your older parent yourself. 

So it would be something that would happen in terms -- in domestic production rather than in market exchange. Or rather than buying fancy hand-picked vegetables, you would end up buying just a few types of vegetables that could be easily harvested by a machine. And so it's not obvious that if we simply shut the border and immigrants don't come in, do the sets of jobs that Ran described, that wages would rise and we would suddenly find a lot of U.S.-born workers shifting into those occupations.

Nathan Hunt: So wages and the level of wage is subject to very complex forces, not easily reducible just to levels of immigration. Leah, immigration is a hot-button topic in America today. That's really not new. It's been a hot-button topic almost for the length of the history of the country. What is the history of immigration and of immigration politics in the United States? I know that's a huge question. So maybe let's just tie it to a couple of waves of immigration.

Leah Boustan: Well, before we get into the politics of the question, we first need to understand how many immigrants were coming to the U.S. at different points. So if we go back around 100 years to the nineteen-teens, we can classify that as part of the Ellis Island period. And during that period, we had for around 50 years in a row, 1 in 7 American resident born abroad.

If we go forward to today, to 2023, we again have 1 in 7 residents born abroad. But in between that 100-year stretch, we've actually had quite a lot of change. So in the 1920s, the border is substantially restricted for immigrant entry and the share of the population born abroad starts to decline. It bottoms out right around the time that I was born, and I was a kid in the 1970s. So many people who were born in the 50s or 60s, 70s, even into the 80s, probably had an experience in childhood where if they looked around them at the residents in their local city or neighborhood, a much smaller share would have been born abroad, bottoming out at around 4% and up now in recent years to 14%.

And so how did that number rise from the 4% up to the 14% today? Well, the border reopens in a constrained fashion, not a completely open border, but it reopens to some entry in 1965 and then the numbers start to climb again. So the 2 key moments we need to think about are the 1920s closures and the 1965 reopening. And so when we think about the politics, we can think about the politics of those 2 moments. And what's really fascinating to us is that leading up to the border closure of the 1920s, we were not actually seeing any major groundswell of anti-immigrant sentiment.

In fact, there was pretty steady and very negative anti-immigrant sentiment starting in the 1880s and going forward to the 1920s. And Congress tried to close the border 4x before they were successful. Why were they not successful in the first 3x? The President kept vetoing the border closure legislation. And eventually, in the 1920s, Congress passed border closure legislation over a presidential veto. That means they had a supermajority. And if you can imagine any topic in the U.S. today that would generate enough sentiment for a supermajority vote, I can't think of anything. So the extent of anti-immigrant sentiment 100 years ago was really immense.

And what's different today is not that we have anti-immigrant voters or politicians. We've actually always had them, and we've had them in greater number. What's different today is that we actually have some pro-immigrant politicians and pro-immigrant voters. And that's what distinguishes us now. So now we're in this era of polarization where we have 2 different groups of voters and politicians, some that are opposed to immigration and some that are in favor, whereas historically we really were speaking with one voice before we closed the border in the 1920s. And that voice was keep new immigrants out.

Nathan Hunt: Ran, I want to return to something you referenced earlier, which is the economist David Card, who did a study of the economic impact of Cuban immigrants who came in with the Mariel boatlift, which was sort of this massive immigrant influx that came into particularly Miami. Attempts within economics to debunk some of these immigration myths aren't really new. I remember hearing David Card lecturing in the early 1990s on that exact subject on his research. Why do you think beliefs about the negative economic and cultural impact of immigrants enjoys such staying power? Why do we have these sort of big studies that sort of show something different, but we keep going back to the same narratives?

It's a good question. And again, it's a tough question. I think in part, the economic part is -- has to do with a zero-sum view of the economy. And when things are not going well, like not going well, you are worried about bringing more workers that will make things even worse. In the economic part, I think that's it. 

The cultural part is a bit more -- for example, one of the things we noted was that every time that the immigration reaches to around the level of 14% of the population, there is like -- there are some politicians who now use that to create a group of others that are very different from us, like -- and so in the past, for example, you can think about Senator Henry Cabot Lodge who had Harvard PhD in history, who was one of the architects of the Dillingham Commission report that put an end to the first age of mass migration in the 1920s. And he would say things like immigrants are from "races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest", and things like that.

And then more recently with like speeches by President Trump, like before he was elected and after, about like singling out how immigrants are not just like crowding out our workers, but they are also different from us. And so I think that this -- so I think that much of the resistance to immigrants has not much to do with their economic impact, but rather with them, with the cultural differences that they bring to this country. 

And like whether you think about them as being a threat to the U.S. culture or whether you think about them as "oh, you know, but they brought pizza and sushi and tacos and they create diversity in this country" is what separates people who like immigrants, like who are in favor or against the immigration.

Leah Boustan: Actually, in some of the work that we've done, we have some quantitative confirmation for Ran's hypothesis here. So we have been analyzing the congressional record, all the speeches on the floor of the House and Senate about immigration over the past 150 years. And I had mentioned that we're becoming more polarized on the topic of immigration lately. That's not that surprising if you're just reading the newspaper or hanging out in your local neighborhood. But that's confirmed in the congressional record as well.

And what we were interested in is what are the topics that are underlying that polarization? What are the topics that Republicans are talking about when they talk about immigration versus Democrats talking about when they talk about immigration? And interestingly, economic issues and labor market issues are not topics that are generating that difference. So you don't hear Republicans that much more than Democrats talking about how immigrants might take jobs or create some kind of economic uncertainty.

But instead, the topics that Republicans discuss is the link between immigration and crime and concerns about legality. The idea that, well, I'd be fine with immigrants, but I want them to come into the country in the right way. So it could be that we've really learned actually from work by David Card and others about the economic impact, but that's not the only issue that voters care about. They also care about their local communities. They care about the cultural topics and they care about this actually untested and not quite factual connection between immigration and crime.

Nathan Hunt: So let's return to where I started, which is the migrant crisis in New York City. I'm frankly uncomfortable with the word migrant because I see there's implications of ruthlessness in there. So let's call these people immigrants, which is what we would have called them in the past, and I think we should continue with that. Based upon your research, what do you see as the likely outcome for these 110,000 New York immigrants and their children looking forward 10, 20 and 30 years?

Ran Abramitzky: I think, unfortunately, I think what the future is, is fully depending on the policy that they are facing. So for example, remember how Leah told you about how the children of immigrants are doing very well in this country. One of the things we find is that especially the children of immigrants who grow up in poverty, again, like in the 25% of the income distribution, they are highly mobile. 

So from nearly every sending countries, they are more upwardly mobile than similar children of the U.S.-born. But that optimistic finding was in the context of looking at immigrants who came to this country, like in the late '70s and early '80s and their children are old enough for us to be able to look them in the 2010s, and they did great.

But remember who these -- who are these children? Those are the children, for example, that Reagan's IRCA granted asylum to like millions of immigrants who -- like who came to this country without documents. And this meant that the children that we are able to follow grew up in mostly legal households. And when they did, they did very well. 

But today, of course, the situation is very different. And like the question -- and so for example, the children, there are 2 million children -- people in the U.S. who arrived, these children without documents to the United States. And I'm not quite sure that once they are old enough for us to be able to see how they are doing, that we will find that they are doing as well as the children who grew up in the 1980s. And that's not because of them.

It's because they might go to school and maybe they will be accepted into good universities and so on. But when they think about the future, where we -- who will hire me if I'm without documents and what would I be? They quickly realize, well, is there really a return to the efforts that I'm putting in the -- like in studying and will -- and they are kind of a little bit stuck in the limbo and it's not clear.

And that is something that policy can change very easily, if, for example, you give like documents to people who came here before the age of 2 and the only country that they've ever known is the United States. But that's not happening. And like there is the DREAM Act and so on. But -- and so that's why I think that the answer to your question of how will the children of today during the future will fully depend on the path that they are offered in the United States, and that's a function of policy, not so much of the economic forces.

Leah Boustan: Yes. It's long been the case in the U.S. that if you arrive as a refugee or an asylum seeker that you have access to the labor market, whereas in European countries, refugees and asylum seekers are required to live in special transitional housing. They're not allowed to work oftentimes for 1.5 years or 2 years while they're waiting for their case to be heard. And not surprisingly, when you look at the data comparing how refugees fare in the U.S. versus how they fare in Europe, refugees fare so much better in the U.S. when they have access to the labor market, where they're embraced by their local community rather than having to live separately and apart in special migrant housing.

What worries me about what's going on in New York is not that we have 110,000 arrivals. It's that, for the first time, these are arrivals who are being kept apart, who are living in separate housing and who until just the past few days, with some changes in the Biden administration, we're being told, if you want your case to be heard, you can't work. And I'm worried about going down the path that many European countries have chosen policy-wise because the U.S. has been remarkably successful through its history in integrating both immigrants and refugees who might be arriving to the country fleeing persecution. And I don't want to see that long history of success falter because of changes in policy.

Nathan Hunt: Well, thank you so much. The book, once again, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success". This particular immigrant from the far away country of Canada, definitely enjoyed the book. I highly recommend it.

The Essential Podcast is produced by Patrick Moroney. At S&P Global, we accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence that is essential for companies, governments and individuals to make decisions with conviction. From the majestic heights of 55 Water Street in Manhattan, I am Nathan Hunt. Thank you for listening.

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