
Mark Regets
2.3K posts

Mark Regets
@markregets
Economist who researches and writes about immigration, higher ed, and STEM labor markets. 'Retired' from NSF's NCSES, continuing to write for IZA and NFAP.




The Trump Admin's H-1B weighted lottery rule is prone to being rigged. The new lottery will give the highest paid people in a given occupation more lottery entries. The problem? Employers can reclassify the occupation they're hiring for. A software developer making $130k gets 2 lottery entries. But if the employer classifies that person as a computer systems analyst, they get 3 lottery entries. Overall, reclassification could reduce the expected wage gains from the rule by 42.2%. budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/p/2026-03-04-h…


@akoustov The point of that is to keep them contained so they don't commit crime all over the place and hopefully leave when their country cools down. Asylum is supposed to be temporary.






The sophisticated empirical arguments against immigration are disproven, but all the objections that matter most politically are just complete nonsense that you don't need any complex analysis to reject: -On crime: They increase crime *levels*! -On economics: They took our jobs! -On budgets: They consume >$0 in benefits! -On politics: Illegal aliens elected Biden! -On assimilation: They speak foreign languages! -On legality: They should all just come legally!

@David_J_Bier @mattyglesias Julian Simon had the more valid core idea. People are the ultimate resource.


In 1994, Imbens and Angrist published a 9-page paper in Econometrica formalizing LATE. It helped win them the Nobel. But what was happening in other fields at the same time? At least 8 groups, across economics, biostatistics, and epidemiology,t arrived at the same idea independently between 1983 and 1994. New essay on parallel discoveries in causal inference: carloschavezp29.substack.com/p/late-for-the…


Let us not forget that for years Paul Ehrlich was an adviser to the anti-immigrant group FAIR, and is therefore partly responsible for the current anti-immigrant hysteria. This also may be the first time I have ever cited SPLC... splcenter.org/resources/extr…






Arizona State University (@ASU) just posted a notice of intent to hire a H-1B software engineer Salary: $107,100 No American software engineer in Arizona was qualified for this job.


This paper is from 2024. It tests GPT 3.5 and 4. Not clear to me why the author isn’t disclosing this. Not clear to me why people discussing it didn’t check the source. Even if it was from yesterday and tested the latest models though its conclusion would still be misleading.






