Immigration's economic verdict is delivered across generations, not quarters.
The historical record shows the 1880–1920 inflow raised income per capita 8.2% by 1940 and 9.6% by 2000 as skills compounded through innovation and urban clustering, while the 1920s quotas depressed native-white mobility and wages into 1940 — horizons invisible to the short-run wage designs dominating the modern debate.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
The inflow's growth verdict compounds through skills and settlement geography across 120 years, a horizon no short-run wage design can capture.
The border closure's damage to native mobility and wages printed in 1940 outcomes, two decades after the quotas passed — a generational lag the quarterly debate never observes.