A border closure pays native substitutes and bills native complements.
The 1920s quota shock raised low-skilled wages through sustained scarcity while destroying the immigrant-native complementarities that had lifted white men's mobility and pay — redistributing opportunity among native groups by task distance rather than protecting natives as a class.
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:
Quantifies the substitute-side payoff: restriction delivered genuine wage gains to the low-skilled cohort positioned closest to the removed labor, through pure scarcity.
Shows the complementary cohort paying the bill — white men's mobility, wages, and schooling fell for a generation while closer substitutes, Black men, advanced.