George Borjas is an economist at Harvard University who is discussed in three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as the leading scholarly skeptic of the economic benefits of immigration. He does not appear as a guest in any of the excerpts; he is named by other speakers, chiefly the immigration policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh and the economist Benjamin Powell, as the author of the most restrictive findings in the academic literature on immigration and wages.
The most skeptical economist
In the May 2019 episode, Nowrasteh, described by Bob Zadek as an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, introduced Borjas while laying out the economic facts of immigration. Nowrasteh said immigrants make up about 13.5% of the U.S. population and about 16% of the workforce, and that they boost GDP by somewhere around 12 to 15%. On the disputed question of wage effects, he identified Borjas as “probably the most skeptical economist of the benefits of immigration” What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019).
Nowrasteh attributed to Borjas a finding that from 1990 to 2010, the roughly 30 million or so immigrants in the U.S. who came to the U.S. lowered wages of native-born high school dropouts by about 1.7%. In the same account, Borjas found that immigrants raised the wages of every other group of Americans by about 1% or so overall. Nowrasteh placed these figures against the work of economists Giovanni Peri and Gianmarco Ottaviano, who he said find that over that entire time period immigrants raised the wages of native-born Americans by about six-tenths of 1%. Nowrasteh characterized the differences between the two bodies of work as very small differences and small effects on wages, and described the 1.7% figure as the most negative finding in the entire academic peer-reviewed literature, one outweighed even in that research by the wage benefits to other native-born Americans who have at least a high school degree or above What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019).
The wage-suppression myth
Borjas returns in the May 2020 episode, in which Zadek framed the hour around what he called the profound myths encouraged by those who favor exclusionary policy. Nowrasteh took up the most common of these: that immigrants come in, take jobs, lower American wages, and make everyone poorer. He described the evidence against that argument as so strong that it has basically convinced every economist who studies the issue. Restrictionists, he said, invoke supply and demand but focus only on supply and ignore demand, because immigrants are people who buy things and live and thereby increase the demand curve as well Immigration Myth-Busting - Redux (2020).
Here Nowrasteh again cited Borjas, this time as “the most widely cited skeptic of the benefits of immigration,” and as an economics professor at Harvard University. He attributed to Borjas a finding that immigrants from about 1990 to 2010 increased the wages of native-born Americans by about one-half of a percentage point. Nowrasteh called that a small amount but the exact opposite result that immigration restrictionists predict, and said the evidence had been rebutted by economists across the political spectrum so thoroughly that it has become a boring subject in the academic literature Immigration Myth-Busting - Redux (2020).
The two episodes thus use the same researcher to different ends. In 2019 the emphasis falls on Borjas’s 1.7% loss for high school dropouts as the outer bound of the negative literature; in 2020 the emphasis falls on his one-half of a percentage point gain for native-born Americans as evidence against the restrictionist prediction. The figure cited as Borjas’s overall wage result shifts between the two episodes — about 1% for every other group in the earlier account, about one-half of a percentage point for native-born Americans in the later one — and the excerpts do not reconcile the two.
The “new economic case” for restriction
Borjas appears a third time in the February 2022 episode, in which Zadek interviewed Benjamin Powell about the book Wretched Refuse, which Powell co-authored with Nowrasteh. Powell said the book sets out to examine what he considers the most serious objection to greater immigration, which he called the “new economic case for immigration restrictions,” made by Harvard economist George Borjas, Paul Collier, and some others. Powell noted that the case is not really new in a sense, going back to the founding fathers in the United States who worried about immigrants from other countries coming in and destroying our liberties The Economics of Immigration (2022).
Powell described the new case as asking whether immigrants bring with them beliefs, informal or formal institutions from their origin countries that are responsible for those origin countries being poor in the first place, and whether those beliefs could change the formal and informal rules governing a destination country like the United States in a way that would make it less productive. He offered an intuitive illustration: Cuban immigrants fleeing socialist Cuba and bringing pro-socialist ideas that turned Florida socialist, so that the Cubans would not see the big increase in income from leaving Cuba and Floridians would all become poorer. Powell said the book takes the objection seriously and investigates it systematically, and previewed the results by saying no, and in fact quite often the opposite The Economics of Immigration (2022).
In this episode Borjas is named as an author of the restrictionist case rather than as a source of wage estimates. The excerpt does not state what Borjas’s own contribution to that case consists of beyond his association with it, and Powell’s summary of the book’s findings is directed at the case as a whole rather than at Borjas individually.
Across episodes: the wage question
The wage question recurs across the 2019 and 2020 episodes, both featuring Nowrasteh, and the treatment shifts between them. In 2019 Nowrasteh presents Borjas’s 1.7% decline for high school dropouts as the most negative finding in the peer-reviewed literature and pairs it with Peri and Ottaviano’s six-tenths of 1% gain for native-born Americans. In 2020 he presents Borjas’s own overall result — about one-half of a percentage point in gains for native-born Americans — as the refutation of the restrictionist prediction, and describes the academic question as settled to the point of boredom. The later episode does not mention the 1.7% dropout figure, and the earlier episode does not mention the one-half of a percentage point figure. The 2022 episode moves the discussion from wages to institutions and does not revisit the wage estimates at all.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Borjas’s title beyond Nowrasteh’s description of him as an economics professor at Harvard University, nor do they give the title of any work by him. They do not state the methods behind the 1.7% or one-half of a percentage point figures, the years covered by the Peri and Ottaviano research, or how the differing figures attributed to Borjas across the 2019 and 2020 episodes relate to one another. No excerpt includes Borjas speaking in his own voice, and the excerpts contain no response from him to the characterizations offered by Nowrasteh or Powell.