Executive Action, Congressional Inaction

President Obama is preparing to issue an executive order on immigration—the executive action that has been promised for some time. As one might guess, the NYT editorial board is pleased. Some supporters of liberalized immigration (including a path to citizenship) are concerned over the damage that Obama’s actions will do to the rule of law. As …

Does Comparative Advantage Not Work for Buffalo?

Nick Gillespie notes in a recent post: [I]f working on Reason Saves Cleveland taught me one thing, it's that there's no simple solution to urban decline. Some of it is simply historical - the Northeast is not going to dominate American business and culture that way it did 100 years ago and cities such as …

Trade or Migrate?

Factor price equalization due to trade and investment flows across economies would substantially reduce economic reasons for immigration to rich countries. (Trade and investment flows will not eliminate economic reasons for migration because if polities differ in total factor productivity due to political institutions, there can still be an advantage to migrating to a more …

Occupational Licensing as an Implicit Barrier to High Skill Migration

That's the subtitle of a new working paper from Peterson, Pandya, and Leblang. Here's the abstract: Skills are often occupation-specific, a fact missing from existing research on the political economy of immigration. Although analyses of survey data suggest broad support for skilled migration occupational licensing regulations persist as formidable barriers to skilled migrants’ labor market …

“Alabama’s immigration law is economically absurd”

So says my friend Scott Beaulier, an economist at Troy University: Immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- are a force for good. They create jobs, they enrich culture and they make our state a more interesting and dynamic one in which to live. Alabama's immigration law is a pathetic, backward attempt to play politics …