The immigration crackdown shows that immigrants were not taking jobs from Americans (or the tariffs caused the job growth slow down)

See More on Jobs Growing More Slowly in 2025 than in 2017 by Don Boudreaux. From a letter:

"You “laughed out loud” at Phil Gramm’s and my suggestion that Trump’s second-term tariffs helped cause jobs to grow at a much slower pace in 2025 – the first year of his second term, one filled with tariff hikes – than in 2017, the first year of his first term, before tariffs were raised. You credit your amusement to the fact that “the President is aggressive at deporting illegal immigrants which steal American jobs.” The slower job growth in 2025, you insist, “only happened because of the immigration crackdown.”

LOL!

If the jobs once held by deported immigrants were indeed ‘stolen’ from Americans, then the removal of immigrants from those jobs would have caused Americans to fill those same jobs, resulting in no slowdown in employment growth. But there has in fact been a huge slowdown in employment growth, which means – if you’re correct that this slowdown in employment growth was caused by the mass deportation of immigrants – that immigrants were not ‘stealing’ jobs from Americans."

Who Pays for Trump’s Tariffs? Americans Do

It’s U.S. companies and consumers, not foreigners, that bear most of the economic burden.

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Peter Navarro’s “Foreign Countries Bear the Burden of Tariffs” (Letters, Feb. 11) on foreigners indirectly paying U.S. tariffs is correct in theory yet detached from reality.

If the U.S. actually had the market power he describes, foreign exporters would in many cases lower their prices to keep selling their goods here, thus offsetting the tariffs’ domestic costs. In practice, however, the U.S. hasn’t been hegemonic in global markets for many years, thanks to the proliferation of regional supply chains and growing economies outside our borders.

Given the relatively low and declining U.S. share of global merchandise trade, economists predicted in 2024 that producers abroad would respond to U.S. tariffs not by lowering their prices here but by diverting trade elsewhere and forcing Americans to bear the tariffs’ costs. This is exactly what’s happened. China, for example, saw its U.S. exports decline in 2025 yet had strong overall export growth and a record trade surplus thanks to higher sales in other markets.

U.S. nonfuel import prices, which include discounts and rebates but exclude tariffs, would show major declines if exporters were eating Mr. Trump’s tariffs, but they were slightly up in 2025.

Many studies—not only from Harvard and the Kiel Institute, which Mr. Navarro blithely dismisses, but also the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, the Tax Foundation, economists Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman, and Goldman-Sachs, among others—have examined real-world transactions and found that U.S. companies and consumers are bearing almost all the tariff burden via higher retail prices or input costs. There are exceptions, but the data confirm they’re not the rule.

Mr. Navarro needn’t, however, read wonky economics papers to see that Americans are paying Mr. Trump’s tariffs (and the higher prices for U.S.-made alternatives that tariffs encourage). Instead, he could ask the thousands of American business owners and farmers who say they’re suffering under the weight of Mr. Trump’s ill-conceived trade wars. They have voiced these concerns in shareholder earnings calls, media interviews, court challenges, bankruptcy filings, regulatory comments and town hall meetings. Hundreds of small-business owners from across the country have even formed a coalition called “We Pay the Tariffs.” These good folks would jump at the chance to go to the White House and tell Mr. Navarro who, exactly, is paying these taxes—if, that is, they had enough lobbying clout to get through the front door.

Scott Lincicome

VP of general economics and trade Cato Institute" 

No, We Shouldn’t Ban AI Chatbots

By Jennifer Huddleston and Christopher Gardner of Cato. 

"Banning chatbots would not be simple. Defining artificial intelligence (AI) is difficult, and limiting it to chatbots does not solve the problem. Even in a lighthearted debate, we had to account for the many uses of AI that are often overlooked, such as customer service and specific professional tools. In legislation, this is even more difficult, as laws lock in static definitions that could prevent both beneficial existing applications and innovative future uses of a technology.

Concerns about chatbots are often tied to their use by vulnerable kids and teens, concerns about particular types of content, like when Grok generated non-consensual sexual imagery or content linked to suicide or mental health. But attempts to limit the technology only to “beneficial” chatbots or those with more specific applications may eliminate innovative uses of general-purpose chatbots or stifle future advancements we aren’t yet aware of. 

For example, an educational purpose exception might be able to cover Khan Academy’s personal tutor, but it doesn’t take into account how a student, teacher, or parent might use a general-purpose chatbot for a similar purpose. Or worse, limit our creativity in how these tools could be used to solve problems by deeming them acceptable in only a narrow set of use cases."

"there are also positive examples of individuals who have used chatbots as a form of connection when they might not otherwise have been ready to seek help from a human or were unable to access resources. Just as some individuals have had an extremely negative experience with chatbots, others have found them beneficial in ways previously thought impossible."

"For many, chatbots offer a lifeline for those without strong support systems or access to professional help. They are available at all hours of the day, react without judgment, and represent a promising source of social support. Yet the impact of chatbots can go much further than just basic social support. For at least 30 people, GPT‑3 and GPT‑4 enabled chatbot Replika “stopped them from attempting suicide.”"

"ChatGPT’s multimodal capabilities can also help those with visual impairments by instantaneously describing their environment and answering questions."

"Chatbots, by contrast, are available on demand at any time of day. They can be accessed by one’s phone in almost any environment. And they are relatively cheap."

"A variety of solutions exist that are far less restrictive than banning chatbots more generally.

First, we are seeing the industry respond with various solutions that allow responses to common concerns. Both Meta and OpenAI have announced various parental controls on their general AI chatbot products. Other industry efforts include using red-teaming type AI models to determine potential risks and identify ways to improve models to prevent the likelihood of toxic or problematic responses. Additionally, civil society groups like Common Sense and the Family Online Safety Initiative provide resources for parents or other users who want to understand the risk of exposure to certain content. Much like the internet before it, these market-based responses can help resolve problems in ways that fit both different technologies and individual needs without governments dictating what approach or specific controls are best.

If the government were to set policy, there are many steps that would be less restrictive than a total ban on a particular technology or application. Many of these would raise their own speech concerns, such as banning certain lawful, if distasteful, content. In many cases, the content in question, like non-consensual intimate imagery, is likely already covered by existing law, or those laws could be updated to ensure it is. While Jennifer has discussed concerns about mandatory AI disclosures, particularly when they are applied more generally, requiring a chatbot to disclose that it is a chatbot is certainly less restrictive than banning the technology entirely." 

The Price of the Lockdown

How the COVID era fettered science and liberty.

By K. Lloyd Billingsley of The Independent Institute. 

"“The COVID era, to me, represented a fundamental break in my understanding of how science and public health operated.” That was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times. With memories of that same era, the people have good reason to hear him out. 

“I thought public health had the best interest of the working class, the poor, in mind,” the NIH director explained. “And the COVID era shattered my illusions on all of those fronts. In particular, what happened in March of 2020 represented a fundamental break that public health authorities had with the public.” In the face of deep uncertainty, “something had to be done to guide people,” but the effort went wrong. 

“What you’re not allowed to do is assume that the thing you’re doing is going to work,” the NIH director explained. “You’re also not allowed to assume that the thing that you’re doing will have no harms. So you close the schools. You know for certain that you’re going to harm a generation of children. That’s a certainty.” 

Dr. Bhattacharya saw the need for “honest calculations” and “you could see the relative risk really easily in the data. It was really older people that were at high risk of dying from the disease. So that key epidemiological fact was known, I’d say, by January 2020.” The infection fatality rate on average for the whole population was “much lower than we thought.” Dr. Bhattacharya assumed that would change the approach but “instead, I faced, essentially, attacks on my character, an attempt to destroy my career, questions about the integrity of my work that were completely spurious.”

Targeting the Dissenters

In an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), former NIH director Francis Collins called Dr. Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist”. It tasked Fauci to attack the Great Barrington Declaration. Bhattacharya co-authored that declaration with other medical scientists, most, if not all, more qualified epidemiologists than Fauci and Collins. 

Dr. Bhattacharya called for “a scientific debate and discussion,” but instead, “the ethos of public health was that just having the debate at all was a dangerous thing.” And that was bad news for the people. 

“If all of the basic promises that we have about our civil liberties are premised on there not being uncertainty over the spread of an infectious disease,” the NIH director said, “then you just don’t have a free country.” That is Dr. Bhattacharya’s description of white coat supremacy, rule by medical bureaucrats who never face the voters and are seldom, if ever, held accountable. In the current era, the politician most dedicated to rigid bureaucratic rule is California Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

In 2020, Gov. Newsom imposed the most draconian COVID-19 regime, with shelter-at-home orders, school lockdowns, and rigid rules for family gatherings. “Don’t forget to keep your mask on in between bites,” said the governor, who partied sans mask with lobbyists at the upscale French Laundry.  

In a June 2020 appearance with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gov. Newsom said, “If you can’t practice physical distancing, are you practicing love?” During the COVID era, by all appearances, Gov. Newsom never contacted Dr. Bhattacharya, then a professor of medicine at Stanford University, and never endorsed the Great Barrington Declaration. In the current era, the governor’s stance has not changed. 

In 2025, California’s Department of Public Health maintained that infants and toddlers were “higher-risk” individuals and called for the same vaccine requirements, with no attention to possible side effects. Gov. Newsom set out to, in effect, create a new Centers for Disease Control in an alliance of western states. 

The governor hired public health officials who had been dismissed from the CDC, allegedly “politicized” in the Trump administration. After the administration cut loose from the World Health Organization, Gov. Newsom did his best to keep California attached to the globalist bureaucracy. 

The NIH

Dr. Fauci, a big fan of the WHO, maintained that the COVID-19 virus arose naturally in the wild, a matter of speculation, not science. Others saw the source as a lab leak, and as Dr. Bhattacharya told Ross Douthat, “If you just focus on the scientific evidence alone, I would say it’s certain.” The NIH director will double down on replication, “essentially democratization of who gets to decide what’s true and false in science,” and as such, “a second scientific revolution.”

Dr. Bhattacharya has eliminated a huge conflict of interest by removing Christine Grady, Dr. Fauci’s wife, from her post as chief bioethicist of the NIH Clinical Center. The NIH also cut loose Jeanne Marrazzo, Dr. Fauci’s successor at NIAID. 

On his last day in office, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci without indicating any crime he had committed. As Dr. Bhattacharya sees it, if our civil liberties depend on unelected bureaucrats who shun debate, force draconian polices on the people, and disregard possible harm, “then you don’t have a free country.” That’s something to remember moving forward."

Immigration Restrictions Cause Enforcement Excesses

By Jeffrey Miron.

"Recent ICE operations in Minnesota, marked by large-scale raids and civilian harm, are less a local controversy than a predictable product of U.S. immigration institutions. When lawful entry is heavily restricted, enforcement becomes the policy margin. That margin is exercised by armed agents with wide discretion, weak accountability or legal recourse, and strong incentives to demonstrate “control” rather than minimize error. Minnesota is an illustration of how restriction necessarily operationalizes coercion.

Ilya Somin has long argued that immigration restrictions are best understood as limits on individual liberty, with unusually poor cost-benefit justification. Movement across borders, just like movement within them, generates large economic gains and modest, manageable externalities. When the presumption flips, and entry requires permission rather than being the default, the state substitutes centralized coercion for decentralized choice. This manifests downstream in enforcement practices that must be visible, forceful, and discretionary in order to sustain the restriction itself.

This dynamic complicates debates over “better” or “smarter” enforcement. Any restriction regime requires taking a stand on how much coercion is acceptable and how much harm to civilians is an unavoidable cost rather than a failure of execution. Whether enforcement is aggressive or restrained, it operates under incentives that prioritize demonstration over precision. The result is not a binary choice between humane and inhumane enforcement, but a continuum in which civilian injury costs are present to varying degrees regardless of approach.

The Minnesota raids underscore a broader point that often goes unaddressed: immigration restriction is not merely a policy choice followed by enforcement, but an enforcement regime in itself. So long as entry is treated as an exception rather than a baseline liberty, coercion becomes structural rather than accidental. In that context, tragedies like Minnesota’s are not policy failures in need of better messaging or marginal reform; they are foreseeable outcomes of a system that relies on discretionary force to sustain its underlying premise."

The economics of mass deportation

From Marginal Revolution. 

"Following the removal of 50% of unauthorized immigrants, in the short run average native real wages rise 0.15% nationally, driven by an increase in the capital-labor ratio. In the long run, however, native real wages fall in every state, and by 0.33% nationally, as capital gets decumulated in response to a lower population. Consumer prices in the sectors intensive in unauthorized workers – such as Farming – rise by about 1% relative to the price of the average consumption basket, while most other sectors experience negligible relative price changes.

That research result is from Javier Cravino, Andrei A. Levchenko, Francesc Ortega & Nitya Pandalai-Nayar."

 

What Zimbabwe Can Learn From Chile: A Tale of Two Data Series

By Paul McDonnold of AIER. Excerpts:

"In 1996, the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) Index debuted. The model aggregated dozens of variables into a single figure for each nation, between 0 (the least economic freedom) and 10 (the most economic freedom)."

"In 1970, for instance, Chile’s EFW Index was in the bottom quartile globally at 4.69. This was the year socialist Salvador Allende won the presidency with only 36 percent of the popular vote (no candidate having won a majority, the legislature chose him). A slew of socialist reforms followed. Banks were nationalized, price controls were instituted and money printed like there was no tomorrow. Predictably, private investment plummeted and inflation spiked as the nation plunged into a recession.

A military coup overthrew Allende in 1973, with an alleged but uncertain level of help from the Nixon Administration and in particular Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The new Chilean leader, Augusto Pinochet, was no socialist. But he did wield power like one—through brutal repression. And while his advisors included free-market economists such as Hernán Büchi, the regime’s policies were at best a burlesque of economic freedom.

Consequently, in 1975 Chile’s EFW Index reached an all-time low of 3.82. But after Pinochet was defeated in a 1988 plebiscite, the nation began to liberalize its society and its economy. In 1990, it moved into the top quartile of EFW rankings for the first time, with a reading of 6.89. While the nation’s economic and political path since has not always been smooth, Chile has stayed in the top quartile every year. What does such economic freedom mean on the ground? 

According to the current CIA World Factbook, since the 1980s Chile’s poverty rate has fallen by more than half."

"Zimbabwe is another story. It began 1970 in a slightly better position than Chile, with an EFW reading of 4.96. It was known as Rhodesia then, a new republic trying to transition from British rule. The decade of the 1970s was one of political instability as a government led by Prime Minister Ian Smith contended with both Marxist and Maoist communist groups for the country’s future. The Maoist Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) prevailed, changing the nation’s name to Zimbabwe in 1980. ZANU has been in control of Zimbabwe ever since, with Robert Mugabe serving as prime minister or president from 1980-2017.

While ZANU has not remained strictly loyal to the Maoist model of communism, and has attempted some pro-business policies, government intrusion in the economy remains high. Property rights are not well enforced. Corruption is systemic and regulations stifle both new business formation and foreign investment. Consequently, since 2000 Zimbabwe has remained in the bottom quartile of EFW Index scores, with a 2023 reading of 3.91, a 21 percent decline from 1970. 

These numbers have tragic implications, especially for the least privileged. In 2023, Zimbabwe’s poverty rate was over 70 percent and an estimated half the population lived on less than $1.90 per day."