Today I will be R1ing this video by none other than Will Ravioli of Unbiased America.

Let's begin with a little background first to get us all in the mood. First of all, it turns out that Unbiased America is far from being unbiased. They are a far right page which does nothing better than tow a conservative line. Indeed Will Ravioli doesn't even have any idea what a cogent argument for Britain remaining in the EU would have looked like. That doesn't sound like a person who "shows no prejudice for or against something or is impartial." In the words of William F. Buckley, "because practically nothing is [indefensible]," and yet still many might be reticent to call him unbiased.

Second of all, Will Ravioli has a nasty habit of impersonating an economist. I deleted this comment string to avoid doxing myself but I confronted him publicly about his claiming to be an economist, and the most I got in reply was someone else posting a picture of Mr. Ravioli's bachelor degree in political science & economics from a school I didn't care to remember. He hasn't so much as a master's degree or PhD, nor is he employed as an economist, nor has he any published work. The fact that he uses this title to lend legitimacy to his massive amount of ideological drivel is quite frankly disgusting. But this is enough introduction, let's get into this R1.

Will Ravioli's The Truth About Immigration is just teeming with bad politics, bad economics and bad logic. It's a disorganized mess. As such I will not be addressing everything. I won't be touching the fact that he generalizes the entire left as Marxists, that he constructs strawmen arguments in favor of immigration in order to try (and fail) at debunking even these, and that most of this video is easily dismissed hyperbole and rhetoric (you know when someone uses the word 'import' to describe a county's migrant intakes, they're just going to be espousing their opinion rather than any evidence or reasoned argument). Instead I will be examining 2 of the 3 main economic arguments Will Ravioli provides us.

The 1st, which I will not address in any great detail is that poor immigrants abuse the welfare state by taking out more than what they put in. To this I would say it is true on aggregate. Because immigrants to the United States tend to be disproportionately poorer than the average American, they tend to consume more welfare as a whole, while putting less back in. However, holding income constant reveals that poor immigrants abuse the welfare state less than poor natives. If such a thing were politically feasible it would make more sense to kick out the native poor first, and get to the immigrants later.

But I digress, let's get to the 2nd point. Ravioli tells us that the truth about immigration is that low skilled immigration is not the kind of immigration the United States should allow (of course he does this by disparaging Mexicans, and praising the Chinese). This is one of the most persistent low effort arguments I hear from the anti-immigration crowed. High skill immigrants are good, low skill immigrants are bad. Most immigration is low skilled, therefore we need to cut back on most immigration. But why is that low skilled workers are bad for the economy? Since when do we not need low skilled work? There is nothing inherently good or bad, economically speaking, about low skilled or high skilled labor. This is essentially just a value judgement. What matters here is context. Do we have too much or too little of each kind of labor such that there are large amounts of unemployment, for example.

Let's first establish that the distribution of skills is different among natives and immigrants. Let's look at this shitty ms paint graph to see what I mean. The x-axis shows us skill level, and the y-axis shows us how many people are in that skill level. Natives are the black line, immigrants the red. Immigrants to the US tend to disproportionately be low and high skilled, compared to American natives who are mostly in the middle. And I didn't just pull this out of my ass like Mr. Ravioli does. Let's use education as a proxy for skill. About 29% of immigrants were college educated as of 2014, and this number is growing. 44% of immigrants who entered the US after 2010 had some form of college education. Comparatively, 30% of American natives are college educated. On the low end, 30% of immigrants lack either a GED or high school diploma as compared to 10% of natives.

So why is this important to establish? Well it's important because the difference in the skill distributions of natives and immigrants suggests that in fact these two groups come into competition far less that what immigration critics such as Mr. Ravioli would like to believe. What we may actually see is that the immigrant skill distribution complements the native one, freeing up natives to pursue more productive work, better suited to their skills making everyone better off in the long run. And there is a good amount of empirical literature to suggest this.

According to Boubtane, Dumont, and Rault, "the growth impact of immigration is high even in countries that have non-selective migration policies. Indeed, a 50% increase in net migration of the foreign-born generates, on average, an increase of three-tenths of a percentage-point in per worker GDP per year in OECD countries. The long-run effect is, on average, about 2%." Seems like something we would expect if immigrants were making us more productive. And we can look to Peri to see how immigrants actually improve the functioning of the US labor market despite Ravioli's insistence to the contrary. Peri in his article also rightly points to the fact that even within the same skill levels immigrants and natives don't compete as much as people like Ravioli think. Take a look at the top 10 most popular jobs immigrants take compared to the same list for natives. You'll notice natives are in jobs which require a lot of social interaction, while immigrants often do more manual labor. This table here suggests the same conclusion. Natives are disproportionately represented in management and sales positions, while immigrants are more involved in construction or production.

And now this is a good time to transition into Will Ravioli's 3rd point. Immigrants depress wages! That's just a fact! Now give me a moment to google the guy that told me this... Oh yes! George Borjas. Ok, fine, I concede, Borjas is a good source on immigration. He has many papers in which he tries to prove that there is a large negative effect on the wages of native high school drop outs. But even Borjas does not go as far as Ravioli who has provided no qualifications. Ravioli is unequivocal, immigration depresses wages and that's a fact, while Borjas is careful to focus primarily on native high school drop outs. And Borjas is not without his critics, nor is he unopposed. As I brought up in my first R1, there is evidence that even native high school drop outs' wages could grow in the long run due to the economic growth and specialization I mentioned earlier.

The immigration skeptics' folly, such as that of Mr. Ravioli, is buying into the idea that immigration is a simple supply shock to the labor market. In the short run, it may be, but in the long run it could be so much more. First we need to ask, are natives and immigrants perfect substitutes? If they are not, then the depressing effect on native wages of an immigrant labor supply shock will not be pronounced. And if the two groups' labor are complements as I have suggested they might be, we could see wage increases as a result. Finally, let's not forget that immigrants make money so they can spend money. Immigration is not just a supply shock, it can also be a demand shock, and that also has the potential to spur growth, and make everyone better off in the long run.