Um, so at a high level, what happens to workers when they then gain permanent residency? We'll go back to some of the specifics, but kind of what was your finding at a high level?

Yeah.

So we were...

I mean, I should say maybe to, to back up just a second, the reason we were so excited about this project is because, uh, for the first time in Canada, we had a, a data linkage that connected all of the data from Statistics Canada, which tracks all the workers in the Canadian labor market as they move between firms.

So labor economists call this matched employer-employee data 'cause you can track the employees as they move between employers.

You have essentially scrambled or de-identified worker identifiers and firm identifiers that lets you see how people move around in the labor market.

And so many labor economists here at U Chicago and the economics department at Booth, uh, have done work using this kind of data all over the world.

What about country wr- writ large?

What do you suppose the past year of on-again, off-again tariffs have meant for companies that do still, uh, make stuff here?

Yeah.

I think the uncertainty has been one of the major stories here because if the tariffs were kinda set in stone and everyone knew that they were gonna stay where they are, then businesses could start to make decisions and plans around it.

But the-- there's so-- there's been so much uncertainty about are the tariffs gonna be on? Are they gonna be off? They're changing on a day-to-day basis, then the Supreme Court's gonna be involved.

I think it's been very paralyzing to some companies that make it hard to make decisions when you don't actually know what the tariffs are gonna be in the future.

Uh, I found a quote of a CEO saying they're in a bit of limbo land [chuckles] because how can you make a decision when you don't know what, what the tariffs are gonna be a month, two months, three months from now? And I think that policy uncertainty, uh, you know, has been an unfortunate feature of what we've been dealing with over the last year.

Should we be trying to have, uh, uh, substantial manufacturing, substantial manufacturing, the way it was in this country fifty, sixty, eighty years ago?

Well, I, I still feel the same way as I did a year ago about that, which is that, you know, it's, it's hard... it's been hard to get young workers to work in manufacturing because I think they just don't see it as the, as the future of work as much as jobs in technology or healthcare.

Mm-hmm.

And manufacturing doesn't look particularly good on this, on this dimension.

Every time there's a manufacturing vacancy that opens up, uh, it takes a lot longer to fill than in other sectors, like in healthcare or technology.

I think another important statistic is that the average age of manufacturing workers has been steadily going up over time.

Basically, the reason we still have 13 million manufacturing workers is because a lot of older people are, are holding out and this is what they know how to do, but it doesn't look like the younger generation sees nearly as much of a future in manufacturing, and so they're planning to try to do something else.

They're making education choices and, um, college decisions that suggest that they might want to do something else in the future.

(laughs)

I, I, I think...

Couple of thousand ain't it, right?

Yeah, it's- it's- it's ambitious, that's for sure.

You know, I- I think when- when you think about what tariffs are doing to the economy, it's protecting these jobs as I just described, um, but it's only in the industries that are getting protected.

And- and one of the consequences of these tariffs that economists are often concerned about is there's a bunch of other industries that could be negatively affected.

Just take steel, for example.

You- you impose steel tariffs, that's good for people manufacturing steel.

There's a bunch of other manufacturing industries that use steel, and then they get negatively affected.

[laughs]