Economists' migration negligence

Mainstream economic models treat migrants as interchangeable economic inputs and ignore cultural and positional externalities; that omission has political consequences and, the authors argue, may amount to intellectual negligence given historical evidence (e.g., Fogel) that migration can fracture polities. The claim reframes migration not merely as an economic variable but as a cause of durable institutional and political reconfiguration. — If economists systematically understate migration’s non‑market effects, policy debates and institutional designs based on those models will be misinformed, increasing the risk of social and political instability.