One of the worst aspects of the proposed immigration reform bill is the replacement of family preferences with "skill" point systems for new legal immigrants.  The idea is that people with higher education and other skills will contribute more to the economy than family members of existing immigrants.  The change is anti-family but it also makes less economic sense than it seems.

In the abstract, more skills might seem better, but if those skilled immigrants are coming by themselves with no built in family support system, it's less clear that the economic gain will be greater.  Because of ties to their communities, new immigrants are driving economic growth in communities ranging from New York to Los Angeles, according to the Center for an Urban Future. The New York Times emphasizes a similar point today:

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I really appreciate Chris's well-written take on the modern economic profession. One thing worth highlighting is how heterodox analysis of the economy has fled into other disciplines outside Economics. My Ph.D. is in Sociology but I was very much identified with the Economic Sociology tradition based on a range of thinkers analyzing the social structures of how markets work-- and don't work. (My own research was on what it took to build the social structures that sustained the interlinked growth of the Internet and Silicon Valley).

Other "heterodox" analyses of the economy exist in scattered Geography departments, City and Regional Planning schools and a number of other disciplines where more empirically-minded and less equilibrium-obsessed schools of thought have bred.

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I really appreciate Chris's well-written take on the modern economic profession. One thing worth highlighting is how heterodox analysis of the economy has fled into other disciplines outside Economics. My Ph.D. is in Sociology but I was very much identified with the Economic Sociology tradition based on a range of thinkers analyzing the social structures of how markets work-- and don't work. (My own research was on what it took to build the social structures that sustained the interlinked growth of the Internet and Silicon Valley).

Other "heterodox" analyses of the economy exist in scattered Geography departments, City and Regional Planning schools and a number of other disciplines where more empirically-minded and less equilibrium-obsessed schools of thought have bred.

Read more »