Roger Karma
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
A lot of the most advanced chips are made in places like Taiwan, and so a lot of the best talent is abroad. And so if you're a US semiconductor manufacturer, The industry in the US estimates that even if we had the best job training programs possible, that would only fill about 50 percent of the high skill demand for the labor force in this field.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
So you need to bring in folks who have this highly specialized knowledge, probably because they've worked in other countries, But then what that allows you to do, once you have a subset of foreign born workers who can do this sort of specialized manufacturing, what you then have is then you have people to come in and support around them.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And then because a company has that need met, they're able to then hire a bunch of other workers to fill other needs that they have, but they don't require that same kind of specialized knowledge. And on the other flip side is that we actually have some studies that look at what happens to the companies that don't get H-1B visas? What happens to those companies? Do they hire more native workers?
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Do they invest in more job training? And it turns out that they don't. In fact, they end up often just either A, producing less or growing less quickly, or B, and this is a finding of a lot of the recent literature, they end up outsourcing the jobs instead.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so instead of bringing in this new worker and then hiring more native workers around them, they just say, well, look, we have an office in China or we have an office in Singapore or we have an office in Hong Kong or India. Let's just hire more there because we're not going to be able to get the talent that we need here.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
There are a handful of outlier studies, but I think right now the broad consensus in the field is that the H-1B program, even for all its flaws, doesn't seem to have these negative employment or wage effects.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Well, I think where Bernie's coming from, and I think where a lot of Democrats are coming from, and quite frankly, some Republicans, is that there are two things that are true here at once. The first thing that's true is that we don't find these huge negative effects from the H-1B program.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And the second thing that's also true is that despite that, the H-1B program has a lot of flaws, a lot of loopholes that companies have learned how to game. So one of these is that a significant portion of H-1B visas are used by so-called outsourcing firms, which are these companies that basically bring in foreign workers, they train them here,
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And then when their H-1B visa expires, they employ them in their home countries for a fraction of the cost. And so they're functionally using the H-1B visa to train workers here and then employ them at lower labor costs elsewhere. That's just bad on the face of it.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
The fact that we still don't see negative effects overall is really telling, but we should fix that loophole by, among other things, raising the minimum wage for H-1B visa holders, making the program merit-based instead of random. You can more closely regulate how companies use those workers.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Part of what Bernie Sanders is getting at, part of what some of these critiques are getting at is that this program does have a lot of flaws that allow corporations to game it. And it's actually kind of shocking that despite all these flaws, it still hasn't produced these horribly negative results. But imagine how much better it could be if we fix them.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
So I really think that this might be a place where you see the sort of messy realities of immigration politics running up against what really people all across the political spectrum agree is a pretty common sense set of reforms. But that doesn't always mean it makes good politics.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Well, I went into this because I kept hearing, right, Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller make these kind of claims that sound kind of intuitive, right? That when immigrants come in, they take jobs from natives, right? There's a sort of econ 101 logic which says... When the supply of any good goes up, including labor, the price of that good, like wages, goes down.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so I kept hearing these arguments and thinking, well, like maybe there's something to this. And so let's like actually look at what is happening. And it turns out that the sort of Trump-Vanz view was pretty much the conventional wisdom for most of the 20th century, both among policymakers and economists, until a study came along that sort of shattered the consensus.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so to tell you about the study, I'm going to go back a little bit. So in 1980, Fidel Castro, the president of Cuba, opened up emigration from his country. He lifted the ban on emigration. And what that allowed is for 125,000 Cubans to leave from Mariel Harbor to Miami, Florida, an event that ended up becoming known as the Mariel Boatlift.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
In just a few short months, Miami's workforce expands by about 25 times as much as the US workforce expands every year because of immigration. This created the perfect conditions for what economists call a natural experiment. It was like this big massive shock that only happened to Miami.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
So what the economist David Card later realized is that you could compare what happened to workers in Miami to workers in other cities that had not experienced the boat lift, track how wages did in both, and then see what actually happened. His view was, look, if there is a negative effect of immigration on wages, Miami in the 1980s is exactly where it should show up.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
It's this big unprecedented shock. That makes what he ended up finding so shocking because he ends up finding that this huge influx of immigrants has virtually no effect on both employment or wages of native-born workers in Miami, including those without a college degree.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
It seems completely counterintuitive. There are a few reasons, but I think the big one and the big thing that the common sense view of immigration misses is that immigrants aren't just workers. They're also consumers. They're people who buy things like healthcare and housing and groceries.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so at the same time that they're competing with Americans for jobs, they're also buying lots of things that then increase the need for more jobs. And I think this sounds counterintuitive, but we think about it in other contexts all the time, right?
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
When's the last time you heard a Republican politician railing against the upcoming group of high school graduates because they were about to come in and compete with people currently in the workforce? You probably haven't because we understand that population growth has these two sides to it, that people are consumers who create demand for jobs and workers who take jobs.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so I think that's the gist of the problem with the conventional view.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
It has. So after that study, it got a lot of researchers interested, and this has now been studied in countries all over the world, from Israel to Denmark to Portugal to France, and almost all of the high-quality studies come back with very similar results. I think the one complication in all of this, the one challenge has been, well, what about the least skilled workers?
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
What about, okay, maybe on average, Immigrants don't hurt the employment prospects or the wages of native-born workers. But what about the least skilled workers? What about high school dropouts, folks without a high school diploma? And a lot of the more recent literature has shown that even that group doesn't suffer when immigrants come in.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so I think the broad consensus in the literature now is that, right, immigration does have costs. It can exacerbate inequality. Tellingly, the wages of other immigrants often get hurt by new immigration. you could see some negative effects in certain sectors, even if it's balanced out by other sectors.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
But on the whole, it appears to be really beneficial for basically all classes of Native workers.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
There is actually. And I think the claim from Trump and his advisors is that the ultimate pro-worker policy is mass deportation, right? Because what happens when you get rid of a bunch of immigrant laborers, now those employers have to hire natives at higher wages because there's a sort of artificially created labor shortage.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And again, very intuitive. But when we actually look at what happens in the real world, we see something very different. So the best study on this, I think, although there's a few, is from the Secure Communities Program, which is a Department of Homeland Security program that between 2008 and 2014, deported about 500,000 immigrants.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Because the program was rolled out community by community, it created this really nice natural experiment where you could see what happened to the communities that had experienced it and the ones hadn't. You could compare them and see what the overall effect.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And what researchers found actually shocked me, it shocked many of them, was that for every hundred immigrants that were deported, you actually ended up with nine fewer jobs for natives. That's not just temporary, you know, work. That's like nine jobs permanently gone for
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
in this community and there are many studies that reinforces funding from all across history from the bracero program studies on the h2b program which is like h1b but for lower skilled immigrants studies going all the way back to the great depression that all find similar things and the reason is that immigrants are deeply interwoven into their local economies and so take the restaurant industry
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
If you're a restaurant owner and suddenly you lose a big chunk of your workforce to the point where you either have to have higher labor costs and at the same time you have less demand, there's a good chance you have to go out of business altogether. And when you go out of business, that doesn't just hurt the immigrants who are working for you, that also hurts the native-born workers.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so there are all these sort of synchronicities, all of these interconnections that allow immigration to have this positive sum effect. But then as soon as you – if you rip out the immigrants, then Native workers often get caught in the crossfire.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
I think part of the fixation on the economics of immigration is a way for many people like us, elites, people in the media, to try to find a more materialist explanation for a set of instincts that I think many of us are uncomfortable with. And I think that is actually kind of a tragedy. I think...
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
If people oppose immigration or feel strongly about immigration because of certain cultural beliefs or concerns about national identity, it's important to take those concerns seriously. And I think it's actually a problem and even a bit patronizing that we tend to project these sort of more wonky economic concerns onto that.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
I actually think that's a really important point. One of the greatest shifts in public opinion on immigration has happened in the last few years, where in 2020, according to Gallup, there were only 28% of Americans said they wanted immigration decreased. Four years later, that number was 55%. So it had almost doubled.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And that is much larger and much faster than even the public opinion shift on something like gay marriage. So this is like a huge, almost unprecedented shift. And as I dug into why, what came up over and over again is this feeling of chaos, this feeling that we are not in control of our own border. And when you actually look at questions about how people feel towards immigrants themselves,
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
they hadn't changed nearly as much. People weren't necessarily anti-immigrant as much as they felt like the immigration process had gotten out of control and the immigration process was no longer serving the country. And so I think it is really important to distinguish those two things. And I think a lot of the public opinion shift we've seen over the last few years, it isn't about economics.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
It's really about the sense of control and chaos.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Unfortunately, like, you know, any good journalist, I'm not quite as good at the solutions as I am about identifying the problems. But I will say I think... at the root of a lot of this is the fact that there's an underlying scarcity, right? So I think an example of this is housing. Recently, we haven't talked about this in particular, but J.D.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Vance and Donald Trump made a big deal in their campaign about how immigrants were responsible for driving up housing costs. That argument has never held weight in American politics before because it is only over the last decade that housing costs and a housing shortage has become a big problem. When there is material scarcity, people look for a villain. People look for someone to blame.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so I think one answer to, for example, the blaming immigrants for housing costs is to say, well, if we fix the housing shortage such that people don't feel that scarcity, maybe we can avoid some of that. I think the other sort of way I look at this is, in some senses, one of the most pro-immigrant things you could do is reduce the amount of chaos.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
So I think there's actually a sort of middle ground here where you could reduce a lot of the chaos at the border while expanding legal immigration in a way that keeps immigrants coming in but creates a more orderly process that people feel comfortable with and you can actually get more positive sentiment as a result.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
I just think what makes it difficult is the politics are almost perfectly aligned to make that difficult from happening. And it's been, you know, immigration reform is something that politicians have been talking about for more than 20 years now, and it hasn't happened.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
I think it's not just a single question.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
Well, luckily, the H-1B program allocates workers randomly to companies based on a lottery. And that allows researchers to study what actually happens to the companies that did get workers as opposed to the companies that didn't. And I agree with you. I think there's a real sort of man on the street argument. There's a sort of view that there's a fixed pool of jobs.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so any immigrant that we bring in is going to take away a job that would otherwise go to an American. But when researchers have looked at this, the overwhelming majority of the studies have actually found no negative impact on either employment or wages, which I think at first sounds a little bit counterintuitive. But the reason is a fewfold.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
One, companies who get H-1B workers actually end up growing and scaling up faster than the companies who don't. And then because of that, they have to then hire a bunch of more native-born workers around that immigrant. The second reason is innovation. One of my favorite statistics comes from Jeremy Newfield, who's a fellow at the Institute for Progress. And he pointed out that 30% of U.S.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
patents, almost 40% of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50% of billion-dollar U.S. startups belong to immigrants. Now, not all of those are H-1B holders, but there's a lot of evidence that the companies who are awarded H-1B visas, they produce more patents, more new products, get more VC funding, and all of that actually creates jobs.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
So on the whole, I actually don't think there's a lot of evidence for this broader nativist claim about this program.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
I think what's important to remember here is that getting one of these H-1B visas is actually pretty difficult. And so the idea that a company is going to be able to systematically bring in foreign workers to replace their native ones using this program, it's just really hard to do because there's such a low chance they're even going to get those workers in the first place.
Radio Atlantic
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Coalition Starts to Fracture
And so a lot of times when companies use this program, what they're doing is they're looking for a very important skill set. So let's use semiconductors as an example. This is an industry, when it comes to the manufacturing of semiconductors, that US companies haven't really done for a while.