So I don't think it is 100% neutral in terms of its view on immigrants.
You bring up a valid point in identifying the authors of this study. I'm just not sure what a truly neutral position in that debate would look like.
Facts no longer drive these conversations, and it’s pretty unsettling to watch.
For example: It's pretty uncontroversial to say that ${N} persons cross the Mexican-to-American border, not at official government checkpoints, annually.
It's slightly more controversial to claim that ${M} of them are doing so illegally, because matters of law are complicated and matters of judgment.
But when we get to actual policy decisions, we have competing concepts of what's good and worth attempting. For example, how do we balance competing concepts of justice? How do we balance justice and mercy? What's the proper balance for the U.S. government regarding protecting immigrants vs. current residents?
Personally, I haven't found any good, reasoned way to argue about those metaphysical issues. I have personal preferences, and I know which things rub me the wrong way more than others. But in the end it seems like a matter of taste, so I'm not even sure it's worth trying to persuade others.
One approach is to try and adopt a system that has a minimal amount of assumptions and inconsistencies. This is the approach taken by economics. The core idea is that, if somebody is willing to exchange their labour/product of their labour for something, then they demonstrably value that thing more at that time than all other possible things for which they could have exchanged their labour/product of their labour. A surprisingly large body of reasoning is built upon this and little else.
This is why most economists, mainstream or otherwise, support immigration. The immigrant wants it, their employer wants it and their landlord wants it, otherwise none of them would have agreed to it, so preventing this arrangement prevents them from realising their top preferences at that time, forcing them to settle for a less desired outcomes. What about the fact it might put a local out of a job? That argument requires some kind of assumptions that how much somebody "deserves" a job depends on where they're born; it's hard to justify without adding extra axioms, and certainly not self-evident (many people argue it's unjust to descriminate based on place of birth). Similarly, what about the argument that immigration destroys cultural homogeneity? This requires some kind of assumptions to justify why cultural homogeneity is desirable, which are hard to even specify, as it requires first clearly defining the concept of culture.
An "economic think tank" that did a bunch of research into, and then published a study on, immigration, would then be an "economic and immigration think tank."
Frankly I'm annoyed that an organization can't declare itself "concerned with" a subject without people leveling claims of bias. Why would they do the study if they didn't care about studying immigration?
If there's an issue with the research, find it and argue against it. But "they're biased," nah, I don't bite.
Maybe we should distinguish between an article being neutral vs. a person holding a neutral view.
IMO, an article would be neutral if it provided the strongest arguments from all relevant viewpoints, including supporting data.
I'm not sure what a neutral view would be, though. Aside from taking a stance of agnosticism / uncertainty, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
What it all comes down to is that like the rest of the world, the US needs to manage its influx of those seeking to immigrate here and yes, it should be able to reject any number of them.
[1] https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/new-american-...
[2] https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...
...And suddenly a wave of downvotes in less than 2 minutes. No justified concerns attached to them though.
Yes. As other commentators have noted, the methodology is terrible (counting a single immigrant cofounder as a "company founded by immigrants" even if the other 8 cofounders were all non-immigrants, counting a merged company as founded my immigrants if any of the companies that merged were founded by immigrants, even if those founders didn't have any role in the post merger world) and seems to have been chosen to give a specific conclusion.
Looking at the biases of the author usually gives a good heads up to these sorts of methodology problems.
Selective definitions were used. They weren't hidden for anyone willing to look into the details, but if this was a political move (I'm not saying it was, but if it was) then the people who did it would know full well that the headline would have far more penetration than any statistical critique with how terms were defined. Another poster here used the term 'slight of hand'. One could describe it, if it was a political move, as a form of deceit without being an outright lie.
Would you question a reply like "Please keep in mind that this opinion came from [a member of party X] / [a supporter of cause Y] so I don't think their opinion is neutral [period]" to one of your comments or remarks? And that's not even going into the whole "what's a 100% neutral opinion".
And so many downvotes for a question that was not leading in any way (offered both alternatives as equally probable) also suggests a bias to consider only the arguments that support your own views and react "aggressively" to anything that seems to clash with their beliefs.
First impressions matter. A job posting for an elite JavaScript ninja with 15 years of ES6 experience is going to have the creator of the job post judged very harshly, even if no other information is viewed. Sometimes that will be wrong, but it will be right often enough to be reasonable.
As for this particular case, an analysis of how they calculated the number has already been done by other who have posted under this same article. If you feel there is a flaw in their logic, you can reply to them directly.
>How is this different from anybody responding to a comment solely by attacking the person who wrote it and their political affiliations rather than attempt to discuss the actual content?
Because it is based on both the author and the content, and the nature of the disagreement is that the content is wrong for reasons that are only incidentally related to the author.
The argument isn't 'study is bad because author is bad. The argument is 'the combination of the author's own stated goals and the creative statistical freedom taken when calculating the figure leads me to believe there is significant bias in and behind this'. There is also a known issue of political groups injecting favorable bias in the work they do.
>Would you question a reply like "Please keep in mind that this opinion came from [a member of party X] / [a supporter of cause Y] so I don't think their opinion is neutral [period]" to one of your comments or remarks?
Well, I don't think any opinion is neutral (at least on matters of politics) to begin with and would overall trust someone who recognizes their biases more than someone who doesn't, even if that is stereotypical of me.