Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of America A History Recorded straight after our recently published episode, what is the Chinese Exclusion Act?

And I'm joined now by the guest from that episode, Marco Tabellini, to discuss this a little bit more.

Marco, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

It's my pleasure.

Yeah, it was really great to talk to you about this.

And for anyone that's listening, if you haven't checked out the full episode, please do.

It's in the feed now, but I wanted to just pick up because we discussed a lot about what the act was and the sort of the climate at the time in the late 18 and early 1900s.

But I wonder if we can draw some parallels to present day America, because, you know, we're, when we look at what Trump's doing, this sort of mass deportation and the widespread praise for that amongst Republicans, it makes you wonder, has America learned anything?

So I don't think America and most other countries for that matter, have learned from these sort of episodes.

Of course there are many differences between 1880 and today, but I think there are a few similarities.

The Chinese Exclusion act, as we discussed in the full episodes, also it was not about deportations, but effectively it induced many Chinese immigrants to leave the United States and created a very strong negative supply shock in sectors where they were employed and where employers had a hard time replacing them.

And today the deportation efforts, at least the most aggressive version, is likely to produce strong negative labor supply shocks in sectors such as agriculture and construction, where it's not going to be easy to replace the immigrant born workers, especially in an environment like this.

So this is like, I think one similarity.

Some may say that the historical context is different also because now the Trump administration is targeting undocumented immigrants, whereas in the past this was not the case.

I think also on this note, there are still important nuances.

Many of the undocumented individuals are working, are paying taxes, and replacing them won't be actually as easy as people think.

So there are, despite the 150 years of differences, there are similarities between the two situations.

Yeah.

And one of the important points that you raised in the main podcast you touched on, again, there is the labor issue here and this assumption that if you deport any undocumented migrants and illegal immigrants, that suddenly there's going to be this, this queue of people waiting to step in and do the jobs.

And actually in reality that's just not the case, is it?

Absolutely.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that I think last Week or two weeks ago, there was a discussion between the Trump administration and the lobbying agricultural and farmers and the agricultural industry.

And that led to a shift in the approach that the Trump administration took on the issue of undocumented immigration and deportations.

Because I don't think it's going to be very easy to convince native born white workers to go and work in agriculture, pick tomatoes, strawberries or work in the dairy industry.

So that is something that then I think it's actually important also to think about.

There are some economic arguments for behind the support for restrictions to immigration, but my take is that they have less to do with the labor market and more to do with public goods provision.

And I don't know if.

So in a nutshell, I think the problem is that the immigrants documented or undocumented, especially those who are unskilled, perform jobs that are essential and that native boat workers don't want to do.

And this is great.

The cost, there is a cost.

The cost is on the local public goods.

So firms can expand quickly, jobs are created quickly.

Schools, hospitals, gyms, public facilities, it's much easy, much less easy to expand these on demand.

It takes time.

And so one mistake that the liberal governments in the US in Europe and elsewhere have done is to basically assume that because economically there are these benefits, then there are no other potential costs.

And so especially in a system in which the central government gets the tax revenues and the local governments pay for the public goods, there is a clear asymmetry.

And this I think was one of the main issues in the United States.

I think it was an issue in Germany, in many other places as well.

Yeah.

And do you think when you reduce of immigration policies to this kind of lowest common denominator approach, what does that do in terms of, you know, the long term impact of, you know, scaring people from moving to America?

Yeah, I think this is, as an American citizen, this is the, the thing that makes me more worried about what's going on because first of all, there is now ongoing discussion about restricting even high skilled immigration to the United States, which is a little bit.

Well, it's very different from what most other governments and what us was doing in the past of attracting actually talent.

So there's abundant work in economics showing the importance of foreign talent for economic growth, innovation and so on and so forth.

And as you said, I think even if you don't target the high skilled immigrants, there will be an indirect effect through the message that anti immigrant policies send.

There is actually evidence from the United States that in the 1920s when the US introduced the quotas in in principle against European immigration, it actually exempted high skilled immigrants.

Well, Petra Moser from New York University actually shows that these quotas discouraged the scientists from the countries that were most affected from joining from coming to the United States precisely because they were worried about coming to a country which was not welcoming foreigners.

And I think this is a real issue for the United States and, and you typically now there is this idea that US is the best country for work and everyone wants to go there.

It's unclear that in 10 years this is going to be so this is again from the inside.

This is the thing that makes me really worried about the economic trajectory and implications of the current turn.

Yeah.

And if anyone does want to learn more about the impact of anti immigration laws on the US Economy, please remind me and everyone listening where we can get your book so you can go.

On my website and there you can find a link to the Chinese Exclusion act paper and some other works of mine.

Excellent.

Marco, it's been a real pleasure talking to you on the podcast and I hope we can find a reason to get you back sometimes.

But I can't thank you enough for joining me.

And to anyone listening, if you haven't listened to the full episode right now, please do.

It's only a couple of episodes below this feed.

The link to everything we've discussed is in the show notes and if you want to support the show, you can do that as well.

Marco, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

It was a real pleasure.

Thank you.

And to everyone listening, thanks so much for listening and goodbye.