{"id":95381,"date":"2025-05-01T03:00:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T07:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=95381"},"modified":"2025-04-30T15:48:36","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T19:48:36","slug":"the-economics-of-migration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/05\/01\/the-economics-of-migration\/","title":{"rendered":"The economics of migration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lorenzo Warby<\/a> wonders if an entire discipline can commit suicide:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Can an academic discipline seriously decline? Yes. Disciplines which were once<\/a> mainstays of universities have either vanished or shrunk to pale shadows of their former selves.<\/p>\n

What about a social science? One can envisage a social science disappearing. The most obvious way is it gets utterly discredited and replaced. A less obvious way is its institutional bases could disappear. A final way is its entire social basis disappears.<\/p>\n

The West is currently marked by two entirely different discourses on migration that seem unable to interact. One is migration-as-economic-boon. This is the outlook of mainstream Economics. Migrants add to the economic activity of societies and potentially retard the effect of an ageing population by replacing<\/a> absent local children with foreign migrants. This discourse invokes the authority of Economic Theory and its statistical methods.<\/p>\n

This outlook typically treats criticism of migration as economically illiterate, socially retrograde, or morally bankrupt; or some combination of thereof. It is protected by the Self-Righteous, Knowing scoff which is such a feature of the modern professional-managerial class. They are the Masters of Knowledge, and of Moral Concern, who the plebs should defer to.<\/p>\n

The other discourse talks in terms of social and democratic decay, increased crime, threats of violence, increased fiscal stress, even the possibility<\/a> of civil war<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is the world where, in Sweden \u2014 due to the stress on social and fiscal order from migration \u2014 it has become policy to pay migrants to go away<\/a>. This is the world where highly intelligent and informed folk quietly discuss how the performance of economists on migration has been so catastrophically bad, it may bring down the entire discipline.<\/p>\n

The adherents of the second, problems-with-migration, discourse are well aware of what mainstream Economics has to say on migration, and judge it to be obviously and demonstrably \u2014 even catastrophically \u2014 false. That it is much harder for migrants to contribute positively to a society than mainstream Economics admits, and this gets worse the higher the rate of migration. A recent Dutch study (Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation<\/em>, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https:\/\/docs.iza.org\/dp17569<\/a>) found that:<\/p>\n