CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Friends Don’t Let Friends Cite George Borjas
Noah’s subhead for this piece of his post: “Borjas again”. Failed replications are embarrassing, but they happen. However, they need to be not too common, and they very much need to not always lean th
Noah’s subhead for this piece of his post: “Borjas again”. Failed replications are embarrassing, but they happen. However, they need to be not too common, and they very much need to not always lean the same way. Then they are not inadvertent errors or “mistakes”: they are violations of the principles that justify academic freedom. And if this be method, then there is a madness in it…
Watching this Borjas story over the years has been depressing. I do, however, very much want to ask the Kennedy School faculty: What have you been doing? At the very least, it is very embarrassing to you when you have a colleague whose studies are both out on the limb and also fail to replicate. And it is your business to vet your colleagues’ work in progress so that it does replicate, and is respected:
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH:Friends Don’t Let Friends Cite George Borjas
Jun 08, 2026
<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/roundup-83-i-told-you-so> <https://www.noahpinion.blog>
I’ve been writing over the years about how the right’s favorite immigration economist does shoddy, subpar work. Despite having a job at Harvard, George Borjas — whose analyses miraculously always seem to find that immigration is much worse than all the other economists think it is — consistently uses both poor data and flawed methodology. In another roundup back in February, I pointed out how Jianxin He and Adam Ozimek had found yet another example of Borjas doing subpar economics:
Borjas’s February 2026 working paper attempted to answer whether H-1B workers earn less than comparable native-born workers…[His] findings result from substantial data errors.…The most significant mistake is a…mismatch between his H-1B and native-born samples: the H-1B applications span 2020-2023, while the ACS data covers just 2023…[Accounting for this discrepancy cuts] the wage gap roughly in half…
The second error stems from controlling for geographic wage drivers using each worker’s PUMA (public use microdata area)…The problem is that Dr. Borjas uses the PUMA where visa holders work alongside the PUMA where native workers live. Consider a native-born software developer working at Google in Mountain View who resides in a cheaper area like Fremont. If residential areas have lower average wages than business districts, this mismatch systematically inflates the apparent native wage and negatively biases the H-1B wage gap.
Again and again and again, economists catch Borjas at it. It seems pretty obvious that Borjas simply wants to conclude that immigration is bad, and doesn’t much care about methodological errors as long as they reach his desired conclusion.
In order to fight back against this accusation, Borjas decided to accuse his critics of ideologically-driven research instead. In a paper with Nate Breznau, he wrote:
Our study exploits an opportunity to observe 158 researchers working…during an experiment. After being asked their position on immigration policy, they used the same data to answer the same empirical question: Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? The researchers estimated 1253 alternative regression models, and the estimated impacts ranged from strongly negative to strongly positive.
We find that teams composed of pro-immigration researchers estimated more positive impacts of immigration on public support for social programs, while anti-immigration teams estimated more negative impacts. The differences arise because different teams adopted different model specifications. The underlying research design decisions are the mechanism through which ideology enters the process of producing parameter estimates.
The idea here seems to be to turn one researcher’s clear pattern of errors into a he-said/she-said sort of situation. If all researchers just engineer results based on their ideology, then why should we selectively get mad at Borjas for doing what everyone else does too?
But — surprise! — it turned out that this Borjas paper also contained critical errors that invalidated the whole result! Katrin Auspurg and Josef Brüderl pointed out in a comment paper that if you fix one simple coding error in Borjas’s analysis, his entire result about ideologically-driven research just vanishes into thin air:
Borjas and Breznau…recently reported that researchers’ ideology influences their empirical findings. Although we were able to reproduce B&B’s numerical results, our reanalysis shows that the reported association is not robust. Specifically, the association hinges on a coding error.
Data from four teams that contradict the ideology hypothesis were excluded from the analysis due to idiosyncratic variable coding. Correcting this error renders the ideology effect no longer statistically significant. Also, B&B employed a different outcome variable and weighting scheme to that used in a previous paper based on the same data. These two analytical decisions further contribute to the observed ideology effect.
Correcting the coding error or using the same specification as in the previous paper renders the ideology effect indistinguishable from zero. Therefore, we conclude that B&B do not provide robust evidence of ideological bias in this context. Instead, the reported association appears to be a statistical artefact resulting from questionable modelling decisions. [emphasis mine]
How does this just keep happening again and again, and why is it always Borjas?
In any case, I think the implication here is pretty clear: Friends don’t let friends cite George Borjas.
Brad here: Over the years, George Borjas has discovered over and over again that immigration is much worse than the rest of the profession finds. And it really does fail to replicate.
There are three ways in which the work you do can fail to replicate:
Your calculations can simply be, arithmetically, wrong—arithmetic errors.
Your data can be wrong, or the wrong thing. For example, here below: “Borjas uses… where visa holders work alongside… where native workers live. Consider a native-born software developer working at Google in Mountain View who resides in a cheaper area like Fremont. If residential areas have lower average wages than business districts, this… negatively biases the H-1B wage gap…”
You can have made your specification choices based not on what you believe is the best thing to do but on what pushes your estimate in the direction you want. Make 10 such “garden of forking paths” “pushing” decisions and you will get an effect not one in a thousand other honest researchers could possibly match.
Academic freedom has extraordinary breadth and reach, but trust on it rests on a bedrock foundation commitment to truth, reasoning, evidence, and a willingness to learn that one was mistaken. The non-curious and the non-open-minded do not belong in academia. Thus it is one of our jobs to set up systems to make sure that the ideological crusaders find their proper places outside more attractive. How is that working for us?
Again: I very much want to ask the Kennedy School faculty: What have you been doing? And there are the deans—Look: I respected Joe Nye enormously and liked him a lot. I like and profoundly respect Carnesale, Ellwood, Elmendorf, and Weinstein. But it is the role of a dean to call faculty members in, and say: Things are in a state that your next paper needs to replicate, to be bulletproof, and to be well-respected, so how do we make this happen? And I have seen no signs that any of that was done here.
Just posted, discussing the GOP lie campaign about California voting: "It's always difficult when Trump makes a false statement if he's lying or ignorant. But you can always bet he doesn't GAF."
Sic Semper Republicans.