Are women “stealing our jobs”?

https://www.teepublic.com/user/vo_maria

An offensive, short-sighted, even nonsensical question, right? But it was a widespread fear not all that many decades ago, which helped to fuel extremely restrictive legislation against female labor force participation, for most of US history. The fear that economic participation is a sort of zero sum game: more for “them” means less for “us.”

I recently discovered and have been digging into the work of economist Michael Clemens, who has authored and compiled a wealth of research into the economic effects of migration. He first caught my attention with a striking comparison of today’s debates regarding migrant labor force participation with yesterday’s debates regarding female labor force participation.

Take a few minutes to watch a recent presentation he gave at Yale, embedded below. [A note that for the first few moments in this video, he’s playing devil’s advocate, in case you’re wondering.] Here’s an especially powerful excerpt:

Now, looking back on [yesterday’s debates], we see how–I don’t have a good word for it–how meager a conception of the economic effects of female labor force entry that is. Even though it was true that there was some limited degree of wage competition. We know now the story was just dramatically bigger than that. Women created businesses. They created entire new industries. It turned out they didn’t behave and think precisely like men when they entered the labor force, and that was a good thing. So that they ended up complementing men on factory floors and in board rooms. And they patented inventions. Even in a much deeper sense, they changed the definition of what “us” is. So it would make sense in the 1890s to say, “Well, what are these women entering the factories going to do to us?” But now that’s a nonsensical statement. Of course women in factories are “us.” And immigrants do all the exact same things… I’m not sure many people are aware that 40% of the Fortune 500 were created by immigrants or the children of immigrants. How’s that for job creation?

And if you’ve got a little more time, check out his 2011 paper “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” which surveys all known prior research on the predicted effects of global open borders and world GDP. Estimates for GDP gains ranging from 67% to 147%, which is incredibly staggering even on the low end.

Without further ado, his recent Yale presentation: