jakhammer
10mo ago
Migrant crisis on the third coast
Even at the best of times, the denizens of downtown Chicago streets don’t seem to be having a good time. They hold up carboard signs titled “20 dollars will get me a room tonight” or “my house burned down two weeks ago” (poor kid, he’s had that sign up for a year – he keeps getting houses and they keep burning down). But in the last 6 months a new denizen has taken up residence: the migrant family, sitting on the side of touristy main roads, sometimes selling candy and usually holding signs stating they’re from Venezuela. Every time I walk past these people, I wonder: what was your plan? Was the life you had in Venezuela really that much worse than sitting on the frozen streets of a foreign country begging for money?
This article from CBS gives an interview with a representative woman selling candy accompanied by her son. In the interview she claims she came to work but cannot do so because she can’t get the right permits. I would estimate there’s one of these families per downtown block, mostly women and young children but sometimes accompanied by a man.
(Despite claiming she has not been able to find enough food to eat, it is clear that few of these people have been running much of a calorie deficit)
Given this seems to be a new phenomenon, I’ve been wondering how the migrants plan to last out a Chicago winter that is not at all conducive to being outside. It seems some of them profiled by the Chicago Tribune are thinking the same thing.
The people interviewed are, despite being admitted to the US as asylum seekers, purely economic migrants, not fleeing oppression but coming for a better education for their children and work opportunities. One family lived in an apartment subsidized $15,000 by the city, couldn’t afford it once the subsidy ran out, and moved around a bit more before claiming they were giving up and returning to South America. The extent to which current Chicago residents are upset by the state of affairs is hard to tell, but I hear about more and more discontent at city council meetings. This week’s “This American Life” about the migrant crisis in New York portrayed a similar group of people surprisingly negatively, abandoning the legal fiction of "fleeing from violence" that the asylum seekers and traditional media use to justify the moral imperative of letting in economic migrants. The top comment on the podcast’s subreddit describes the migrants as “entitled”, an epithet I am inclined to agree with.
All of this said, I do have a bit of affinity for these people. If I had to choose one group to occupy the streets I’d certainly prefer the migrants than the aggressive “native” homeless in progressing states of mental decay. The migrants are clean, accompanied by well behaved children, and don’t bother you when walking down the street (in this way I also prefer them also to the third inhabitant of Chicago streets, lanyarded young workers of some nonprofit that will accost you with any question they judge will trick you into attention). The regular homeless population of Chicago smells terrible, yells, and makes the city feel dangerous enough that no women I know will take the train at night. In contrast, a relatively dignified family looking for work at least has motives that are comprehensible to me, even if I think they’ve made the wrong choice.
I’ll certainly agree with you in one place: Elon Musk, along with essentially everyone else expressing an opinion on inflation, has a lot of unearned confidence. Macroeconomics, and inflation specifically, is an area that brings out a lot of people fitting lines to past data and absolutely sure of causality. In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong. See Figure 1 here, where traders with money on the line completely missed their bets on CPI paths.
I’ll take a moment to share my personal hobby horse, John Cochrane’s fiscal theory of the price level. It predicts that inflation is caused when people expect the government to repay its debt by printing money in the future instead of responsibly running a fiscal surplus. Deficits in response to crisis are fine as long as you can credibly pay them back, but our recent government has shown absolutely no plans to do so. Regarding valid expertise, Cochrane pleasantly obliges by providing media anywhere from engaging (Podcasts! Sound effects!) to unintelligible without an econ degree (Calculus¡ Terrifying¡).
At least on this topic, I don’t think Musk is worse than anyone else. Everybody (including me) wants to say they have a handle of what causes inflation; we probably don’t, and will get to partake in the classic human experience of being completely wrong about the future of the macroeconomy.
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