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Get it between 2025-03-04 to 2025-03-11. Additional 3 business days for provincial shipping.
Product Description The facts, not the fiction, of America’s immigration experienceImmigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, new evidence is provided about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories, and draw counterintuitive conclusions, including:Upward Mobility: Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents – a pattern that has held for more than a century.Rapid Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest.Improved Economy: Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.Helps U.S. Born: Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born—the people politicians are trying to protect.Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, Abramitzky and Boustan are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the “golden era” of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided. Review “The book reflects an ongoing renaissance in the field of economic history fueled by technological advances — an increase in digitized records, new techniques to analyze them and the launch of platforms such as Ancestry — that are breathing new life into a range of long-standing questions about immigration. Abramitzky and Boustan are masters of this craft, and they creatively leverage the evolving data landscape to deepen our understanding of the past and present.”―Washington Post“This wonderful and highly readablebook provides the facts and sets the record straight about the hot-button issue of immigration and is a must-read for anyone who cares about this important issue. Immigrants benefit from coming to the US, but so does the country from the diversity, skills, and energy that they bring. Remarkably, most existing evidence suggests that native workers are not harmed by immigrants.”―Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor of Economics, MIT, and coauthor of Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor“In this fascinating book, Abramitzky and Boustan ingeniously employ the tools of data science to construct the first ‘big data’ account of immigration in America. Combining rigorous statistical analysis with thoughtful narratives, they weave a compelling story about how millions of immigrant families achieved the American Dream over the last century and a half. The result is a set of timely and concrete insights that will help reshape the narrative about immigration and opportunity in the United States.”―Raj Chetty, William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics, Harvard University“While Americans are intensely polarized about immigration, facts and history can help change minds. And Streets of Gold has the facts, millions and millions of them, about the amazing and often-surprising history of American immigration. It is a splendid testament to the power of big data to illuminate our past and what it means for the future.”―Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate, economics, and coauthor of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism“Complex in its coverage, uplifting in its message, engaging in its composition, and powerful in its significance, Streets of Gold is a ‘New World Symphony’ in words and numbers. Immigrants today, as in the past, make a better life for themselves. But upward mobility comes through generations, and the succes