The Economist has a great post about the effects of (legal) immigration and crime. Starting January 1st, Bulgarians and Romanians will have free migration to the rest of the European Union. Ignorant xenophobic people are worried about negative effects on crime. I say ignorant because:
Researchers at the London School of Economics and University College London have studied the effect on crime of two large migration flows to Britain. One was the arrival of large numbers of economic migrants from eastern Europe after the enlargement of the EU in 2004. Rates of violent crime in the parts of England and Wales where they settled remained stable and property crime fell...Economic migrants are likely to arrange jobs before they arrive. Few are unemployed. Studies in America have shown similar trends: the crime rate among first-generation immigrants is lower than the overall crime rate.
The second group were asylum seekers...their presence had no impact on the prevalence of violent crime. Property crime did, however, rise slightly. Part of the reason behind this is the contrasting circumstances of asylum seekers...Few planned to leave their homelands.
The funny part is that their native born children commit crimes at the same rate as the rest of the native born. Sounds to me like they'll be as American or British as anyone else.
On the emigration side, I found this:
Ireland's situation is still perilous...Only mass emigration over the last five years has stopped its unemployment figures from rising...Emigration now even seems to have formally become a government policy to reduce unemployment figures.
But that shouldn't be too surprising. Ireland has used emigration as a safety valve for centuries, why change what works? Fun fact: Ireland's population before the Great Famine was over 6 million people. Many emigrated because of the famine, but the trend continued until the mid 20th century, when the population bottomed out just under 3 million. Today Ireland's population is still below its peak, at around 5 million people.
One thing fo sho is when people in rich countries complain about the socioeconomic consequences of aging populations, shrinking workforce, etc., and whatever negative consequences they are assumed to bring. While some of these are concerns, a bad thing to do is try to boost fertility rates within the borders of that country, like Singapore[1]. There’s an easy solution[2]: reduce barriers to immigration. There, same effect, but you know it will work. And someone else’s country paid to raise those chumps so you’re already ahead (and the country they come from benefits too). And world poverty will decrease significantly faster.
The reduction of artificial barriers to labor markets would lead to an average increase of 1.4% global GDP for every 1% increase in migration[3]. And this increased GDP will be distributed among a lower number of people (compared to current trends), due to more rapidly decreasing fertility rates of the poor whose incomes rise.
Which means we all get to be richer with less strain on the environment than would otherwise be the case. So shut up about declining population growth and let people have the freedom to choose how large of a family they want[4], and where they want to raise it.
"Everywhere we look we see fewer and fewer people...that understand even economics 101. People who don’t are not entitled to an opinion. People who do, but still reject econ101, are entitled to an opinion."
- Scott Sumner
November Jobs Report: it was in sort of good range. 203,000 jobs were added in November. The recent trend has improved since the summer, which has happened to some degree each summer to winter this recovery. The previous two reports number's were only slightly adjusted. The labor force participation rate changed little.
The unemployment rate fell from 7.3% to 7%, based on the numbers in the smaller Household Survey used for the unemployment rate. Al Jazeera called it a "five year low" which is depressing. Al Jazeera followed that up with "but wages barely increased". Duh, one has to happen before the other. If at any point in time you told me unemployment would be above 7% for five years in the United States I'd bet wages wouldn't grow, barely increase at best. Given a labor demand resulting in that high of unemployment for that long, either real wages would need to fall or productivity increase faster than wage growth to decrease unemployment (and both are happening to a slow extent). Increased demand for labor blah blah long run back to equilibrium.
