Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Boom-Towns & Baby-Booms vs. Immigration

People do not think a baby boom is as worrisome as immigration.  Nor intranational migration. Yglesias:
When people hear about a town that's attracting many new residents, they say it's "booming" not that the newcomers are poaching a fixed supply of jobs. Nobody in Texas seems to have proposed trying to close the state to migrants from the Northeast and Midwest; rather, they see the state's attraction to migrants as one of its strengths. The "foreign-ness" of newcomers from other countries distracts people from fundamental dynamics that they understand in other contexts.