From an article in today's WaPo on zero sum thinking ftu:
...Consider immigration, the epicenter of zero-sum thinking in voters’ minds. It’s an issue that is critical to the United States’ future and a topic that is easily demagogued as a struggle between endangered Americans and some predatory “other.” Harris, like Biden, has worked to distance herself from Trump’s most implausible ideas (such as expelling 11 million people). Still, she leads a Democratic Party that believes one of its paramount challenges is stopping immigrants from coming to the United States.
The politics make sense. Fifty-five percent of Americans would rather there be less immigration, according to the latest Gallup poll, sharply up from 28 percent in 2020. Voters seem to believe that every new immigrant somehow “takes” something from the native-born.
But this proposition is wrong. Less immigration, on the whole, makes Americans poorer. Consider a landmark study of the Secure Communities program, which conscripted local law enforcement to share information with immigration authorities to identify and remove unauthorized immigrants. Secure Communities was rolled out during the George W. Bush administration in 2008 and kept by President Barack Obama until 2014. As expected, it reduced employment of likely unauthorized male immigrants. Some were caught and deported; others stayed home to avoid being expelled. Less expected was that the program also reduced the employment of male citizens. Apparently, slashing the supply of immigrant construction workers will curb demand for citizen construction managers.
There are many studies of this ilk. Yet it seems economic research cannot cut through a bedrock of hostility and mistrust about foreigners coming to take Americans’ jobs and undercutting their wages. As Michael Clemens of George Mason University put it to me, “Why don’t people look at babies born in the hospital and say that they will put downward pressure on wages? It’s because they are ‘us’; the guy camping in Del Rio (Texas) is ‘not us.’”
It is naturally hard for politicians to push back against the narratives animating their voters. It’s much easier to pander to voters’ prejudices. But zero-sum thinking could cause untold damage to American society.... |
