Harvard’s George Borjas, “America’s leading immigration economist,” according to the Wall Street Journal, has started a new blog. The spark was his upcoming book, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, but the book – a layman’s guide to the immigration issue – isn’t going to be released til the fall. In the meantime, he’s published several posts that are well worth reading. In addition to a link to his recent National Review piece on the debate over the labor-market effects of the Mariel Boatlift, he muses on Germany’s experiment in open borders.

His latest posting is on “The Slowdown in Immigrant Assimilation“, looking at slower growth in wages of successive waves of immigrants and slower acquisition of English. Borjas writes that his academic paper (which the posting summarizes) is only partly successful in identifying the cause of the assimilation slowdown (emphasis is added by me): “Those immigrant groups that are larger and more geographically clustered have lower assimilation rates, and the growth of these groups accounts for about a third of the slowdown. But we still don’t know what caused the other two-thirds.” Whatever the other causes, this suggests that, as Reihan has written several times, lowering future immigration is, at the very least, more likely to promote upward mobility of immigrants already here.

(A tangential note on the quotation in the title of this item, which Borjas uses for his book. It’s by Swiss playwright Max Frisch, from the preface he wrote for the 1965 companion book to a documentary on Southern Italian guestworkers in Switzerland, Siamo Italiani, by Alexander J. Seiler. The preface was entitled “Überfremdung” (over-foreignization) and the oft-quoted line is, “Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kommen Menschen” – something like, “We called for a workforce, but people came.” In other words, immigrants aren’t merely labor inputs, as the corporate/libertarian immigration-pushers contend, but human beings who will join, and change, the receiving society. The translation I used for the title of this posting is the one Borjas uses, though I’ve always thought it more euphonically rendered in English as “We asked for workers, but they sent us men.”)