Links - 2022-08-20 v.3

Highly Linkable - links you need and deserve - immigration

It is probably silly that I only occasionally link to Bryan Caplan on immigration. He puts out great stuff on the topic almost daily. I should just write a script that automatically links to him as the calendar turns. Still…

In what could also be filed under counter-conventional wisdom, he points out that immigration activists should celebrate the black market in illegal immigration. Obviously it is not a first best solution. But it is easily second best and much preferred to the letter-of-the-law status quo.

Responding to a sometimes fan, sometimes critic about his immigration position “insanity” he makes an excellent, succinct economic case for being highly open to immigrants. If you don’t understand how immigrants make you the recipient society richer, you have greatly failed basic economics.

Here is what I think would make an interesting and telling twitter poll:

• At what date would having totally stopped any future immigration into the physical location now called the USA result in wealth for those in the area “USA” be highest today?

  • 1491

  • 1776

  • 1919

  • Not yet and never

The answer to that question ranges from wrongest to 2nd wrongest to still very wrong to correct.