Effect of the Inflows of Immigrants on European Workers’ Careers (2013) [pdf]
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
globalmigration.ucdavis.eduResearchstory
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Labor Market
A 2013 research paper examines the impact of immigration on European workers' careers, sparking discussion on the study's findings and methodology.
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Immigrants arrive, natives move up the food chain to better jobs rather than becoming unemployed.
Because it is a published paper and therefore sciencey, your anecdotes count for nothing.
Not sure it is still happening in 2025 judging by the reactions of natives lately.
In fact, this is such a common practice that it's nigh impossible to publich an empirical paper without discussing identification and employing an identification strategy.
You can always tell people who are not familiar with modern Economics because of it too, they will bring "but correlation is no causation" up and feel pretty good with themselves. Then you mention the identification strategy, and they just stare at you blankly without getting what you mean by that. I've seen this happen so many times.
So maybe try to consider this yet another data point. A paper estimating a certain effect size in a certain context shouldn't flip your entire mental model of a certain phenomenon, but it's also totally irrational to handwave away empirical results that don't match your intuition.
Meanwhile, the rentier class has expanded on the back of cheap money and a whole new class of service jobs has arrived to suit the rentier class, for example car detailing, yoga instruction, property management, food delivery and dog walking.
The rentier class don't add value, they are parasites, plain and simple. They have got richer, for sure, but the price of this has been everyone else priced out of their own homes and communities. This rampant house price inflation is ridiculous, hence stagnant pay just doesn't go as far, even if manufactured goods are cheaper than they were before the Reagan/Thatcher revolution.
Hence my problem with the 'scientific' paper. It has nothing to do with immigrants, more to do with not believing people are better off.
Speaking personally, I only got into software development because my customer service job was outsourced to India. Yes I did get a boost to my salary, and yes I did have to reskill to achieve that when I could have happily bumbled along being nice to people on the phone all day doing customer service. However, that only got me back to the start, with a wage that, accounting for inflation, was less than what I was getting as a student during my 'year in industry'. Furthermore, I was still just sat at a desk with a screen, just typing different keystrokes.
I have always been welcoming to whomever arrives from wherever, however, I always feel bad for those that have had to move due to war, which our Western governments are invariably complicit in.
> which our Western governments are invariably complicit in
You are not the center of the universe, my friend. People in the Global South have agency too. This sort of performative anti-imperialism goes around itself and becomes an Empire-centered account of world politics.
That time basically only some intro-European migrations happened: Germans repatriating from the recently dissolved USSR, other Europeans moving back and forth, maybe some refugees from the Balkans.
Interesting stuff started happening much, much later.
Also what with this line spacing? It renders the paper nigh unreadable!
Even more mysterious are the arcane notations such as “TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE” with the actual table/figure contents placed at the end of the paper. Understandable when authors provided hardcopy figures for photoreproduction, baffling when the entire submission was generated with LaTeX or Word.