Streets of Gold

For the first 75% of the book, I was confident this would be a four or five star book. But the last 25% is atrocious, leaving me questioning everything I read.

I came to this book as a person curious and confused about immigration. I was pro-immigration for most of my life but recently haven't been as sure. This book was recommended in Noah Smith's blog Noahpinion, so I thought it would be a good book to ground me.

The first 75% is dissecting various studies about immigration. It's interesting and challenging, at least without the remaining 25%. The final bit of the book is suppose to be more of this, but it becomes a real mask-off moment.

The author starts crediting immigrants as the core of music and food. Trump is always to blame but Obama, who deported more illegal immigrants than Trump on average per year, is merely credited with the DREAMERS. The author worries about immigration restrictions causing the US to lose important scientists to Palestine. The author believes its good that immigrants work farm jobs that don't pay a living wage. It's also good when those immigrants assimilate or leave, whichever they prefer. Additionally, as the author uses studies in this portion of the book, they start contradicting some of the other studies in the prior portion.

It just gets WEIRD! The only explanation I can think of is that the author's bias is that "the immigrant is always right." This doesn't help resolve any of my confusion around immigration. It did leave me with two conclusions.

1. Anti-immigration sentiment will ultimately win out over the next couple decades.

2. Many in academia are going to be increasingly shocked by this result.

Source of Obama vs Trump deportations: ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table39

In this book, Abramitzky and Boustan systematically exorcise most myths and complaints about immigration in the US - that modern immigrants don't integrate into US society like previous waves of immigrants, that immigrants take jobs from native born US workers, that immigrants and their descendants are fiscal drains on the government, and so on.

There's a lot of time spent on the children of immigrants, as they show that this group has very positive economic outcomes relative to their parents. These sections are insightful, and the hypotheses posed about the causes of this success - namely that immigrants tend to take jobs below their true skill level and that they tend to move to economically growing regions - is convincing.

Some major omissions here, however, prevent this book from being a complete home run. Native Americans and colonialism in North America, for example, is literally never mentioned or examined. Most analyses here compare immigrants to white Americans, explicitly because Black Americans have poor economic mobility. This coupled with the nearly complete avoidance of any discussion of the effects of racism (there's only one section that spends time on this), is especially galling. While a consideration of these issues would frankly only make the conclusions of the book stronger, they stain an otherwise solid contribution to the scholarly literature.