My question here is: How else do election manifestos affect immigration policy and wage growth?
One well-researched answer has been given
by my academic advisor while at Essex Economics Department, who is now teaching
at Warwick Economics Department, Prof. Francesco Squintani. He agrees with the
above, and in an outstanding theoretical economics paper that focuses on the
micro-theory of pandering in elections, he and 2 co-authors argue that politicians
overindulge in scrupulous policy announcements, to the detrimental welfare of
the electorate.
This got me thinking about the task of comparing election promises (manifestos and wider announcements) in US. UK and to a lesser extent, French incumbent electoral campaigns. In his paper, Prof. Squintani argues that a politician’s motive is essentially viewed as a singular outcome - to be elected by voters - which poses an obstacle to precise information gathering and complete information because both politicians along a Hotelling location model (which is explained in the paper) pander around policies and create informational asymmetries.
I wrote in the original draft of “Pareto-Nash Reversion Strategies” (Mayaki, 2024) that burden of ascertaining skilled immigration demand must rest in the hands of institutional employers and not left at the doorstep of central government. The figures from this report by Pierce and Selee (2017) highlight the enormity of the task at hand when identifying precise immigration policy.
Pierce and Selee (2017) argue that in the U.S. seven executive orders signed by newly elected President Donald Trump which restricted immigration policy and led to a 3.9% reduction in tourism to the United States in the first six months of 2017, a 9% reduction in newly arriving international students, and a decline in H-1B visa applications by employers’ with only 199,000 applications received that year – the lowest number since the Great Recession. These are not mercantilist numbers. If anything, they represent exactly that which won Trump’s election against H. Clinton. Promises of this sort are usually not credible, but what makes them credible is swift action immediately after an election victory as opposed to delayed implementation.
In that sense, I am completely fascinated by the discussion surrounding this WSJ / US Bureau of Labor Statistics chart, posted by Jason Furman on X (formerly known as Twitter). As Furman's argument goes, based on this chart, foreign-born workers have been and are more likely to be in post-pandemic employment (albeit at a much lower wage) than US-born workers. Furman (Former Chief Economic Adviser to President Barack Obama) says it reflects the work ethic of immigrant labor and by extension, the positive sentiment toward favorable migration policy in the United States.
My only response as a left-leaning economist is to highlight that because of an absence of a notable contribution in the form of structural unemployment shortages in the US-born population, the consensus around the debate fails to acknowledge that the wage at which workers enter the US labor market is not only directly affected by the level of legal migration, as my latest arXiv paper outlines but this threshold is often set arbitrarily and may be interrelated to the overall price level, particularly in the most populous states in America.
References
Charles, K. K., and Stephens Jr, M. (2013). Employment, wages, and voter turnout. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 5(4), 111-143, Available at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17270/w17270.pdf (Accessed on 03 July 2024)
Kartik, N., Squintani, F. and Tann, K. (2024) “Pandering and Elections: Information Revelation and Pandering in Elections”, University of Warwick Working Paper Series, Available at https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/fsquintani/research/pandering.pdf (Accessed on 03 July 2024)
Mayaki, A (2024) “Pareto-Nash Reversion Strategies: Three Period Dynamic Co-operative Signaling with Sticky Efficiency Wages”, SSRN: Optimisation & Control e-Journal, pp. 1-12, Available at https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4858795 (Accessed on 27 June 2024)
Pierce, S. and Selee, A. (2017) “Immigration under Trump: A Review of Policy Shifts in the Year Since the Election”, Migration Policy Brief, December 2017, Available at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/TrumpatOne_FINAL.pdf (Accessed on 03 July 2024)