The link between immigration and longer life

What happened when stock market players read an ominous tale of AI destruction? I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. Yes, more confusion over which tariffs apply to whom and how much, but it was what one online commenter called a scary bedtime story that caused that significant sell-off on the stock market yesterday. The S&P and the Nasdaq yesterday fell more than 1% after a lesser-known stock analysis firm published a speculative piece about how artificial intelligence could undermine the economy by the summer of 2028, i.e. the day after tomorrow. This thing by Satrini Research caught fire among financial market participants. Ben Kumar is head of equity strategy at Seven Investment Management. It actually came into my WhatsApp and I thought, OK, that's really long. I'll have a look at that later. You know, kind of 2028 retrospective. Fine. I like the idea, but come on, we've got stuff to do. And then the U.S. market opened and all I could see was Cetrini, Cetrini, Cetrini. The narrative had been AI is going to help everybody's profits by making us more productive. This thing is like AI could wipe out a lot of the economy and it doesn't present new data. It was just a scenario. And it looks like we had stock markets vulnerable to this kind of thing. It hit a lot of emotional levers for people, talking about companies that they use or that they might know. But the difficult thing with AI with any technology is historically in the last 4 years there have always been new jobs created by new technology It just very difficult to say what they going to be ahead of time. And I don't think this post kind of talked about the upside too much because it's more difficult to. So you've seen a lot of software-based companies taking a hit. I think it was just a really well-timed, compelling way to wrap up in a nice bundle everyone's fears about AI. And it just caught the public imagination. It basically went viral in a way loads of the meme stocks have done in the past. Ben Kumar at Seven Investment Management in London. Now, in recent days, Anthropic launched an AI-based tool that digs into software code to find and fix security vulnerabilities. Now, Microsoft had long been making a lot of money doing that, and Microsoft stock fell 3.2 percent, but popped back up 1 percent this morning. Today, Anthropic, backed by Google and Amazon, announced a fresh set of AI plugins just now to pick two, a system to help wealth managers review investment portfolios, and a way clawed AI could ride along in your Outlook email and calendars. Thank you Immigrants of all economic classes contribute more to the U Treasury than they draw out Today the case that older people live longer when there are more immigrants This is from the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it's about the supply of foreign-born health care workers, especially those involved in elder care. Brian McGarry is one of the co-authors of this paper. Good morning. Great to be here. Help me understand this connection, this equation between immigration policy and not dying prematurely. What did you find? Yeah, so what we find is that roughly a 25 percent increase in the flow of immigrants into the U.S. We estimate would prevent about 5,000 deaths among our nation's older adults. So these are 65 and older at the start of our study. The motivation for this study really comes from the fact that our health care system disproportionately relies on immigrant workers. And so the more immigration that's allowed in that population of immigrants, there's going to be a subset who are health care workers. And that affects outcomes? So we find in the paper that for roughly about a thousand new immigrants coming into the U.S. leads to about 173 more health care workers, both foreign and domestic. So often a concern with immigration is that the immigrants are sort of displacing domestic workers. In our case we find actually some slight sort of what we call crowd in where you know with greater capacity of immigrant workers many of them who may be sort of support staff in the health care system nurses aides may actually create jobs that allow hiring of other domestic workers And so it not necessarily bringing in people who are sort of CEO level. You're talking about more rank and file health care workers. Absolutely. And that's a really important point. In this paper, a lot of the effect seems to come through keeping older adults out of nursing homes and for those who are in the nursing homes, potentially improving the quality of the care delivered. And so a lot of the care that's delivered is done by what we refer to as low-skilled, not to imply that they don't have really great skills, but they don't require the same levels of education. And so that turns out to be a really important part of the health effects. And it must be defined as like premature deaths, right? I mean, we all die in the end, right? Yes, that's right. So what we're doing here is prolonging life for older adults. Nursing homes are inherently congregate living settings. Those are sort of ripe for infectious disease outbreaks. But we also know that, you know, for the most part, older adults prefer to age in place than to age at home. So we're showing the sort of prolonged life benefits, but there's reason to suspect that there's also some quality of life benefits at play here as well by helping older adults age in place and stay in their preferred settings. Brian McGarry is a faculty research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Thank you so much. My pleasure. 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