Immigrants and the tech economy

 

 This picture, from a tech firm, speaks for itself.

 

Visa delays likely to disrupt American hospitals and foreign doctors beginning American residencies on July 1

 Each year American hospitals seek to fill several thousand medical residencies in excess of the number of new American medical graduates.  So thousands of young foreign physicians will need visas in time to start work on or around July 1.  But visas have been delayed (in various different ways), so some physicians aren't going to be able to arrive in time, and some may be denied visas.  This is going to hit some hospitals (and some residents) hard.

NRMP Statement Regarding Recent Trump Administration Orders Related to International Citizens
June 24th, 2025

"*UPDATE* (06/24/25) On Wednesday, June 18, the NRMP learned from Intealth that the U.S. Department of State has lifted the pause on new visa applications and that J-1 physicians have been prioritized for visa interview scheduling. The NRMP is asking programs to consider a delayed start or a one-year deferral of the match commitment in lieu of a waiver. A one-year deferral allows programs to recruit for this appointment year and IMGs the opportunity to finalize visa processing and honor their match commitments next year.  

Please visit the NRMP Policies webpage for more information and send any questions to policy@nrmp.org.

The NRMP is issuing this statement in response to recent actions taken by the Trump Administration related foreign nationals.

    On May 27, the U.S. Department of State instructed embassies and consular posts to pause the scheduling interviews/appointments for J, F, and M visa applicants. The pause extends to all those applying for J-1 visas, including physicians.

    On June 4, the administration issued an order barring entry into the United States for foreign nationals from 12 countries – Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Haiti, Iran and Yemen – and partially restricting entry for citizens from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

We recognize that international medical graduates (IMGs) who are seeking or have secured residency training in the United States apply for J-1 visas and may intend to travel to the United States from countries specified under the June 4th restrictions. We are working with ECFMG, a division of Intealth,  to understand the scope of impact for individuals anticipated to begin training on or around July 1 of  this year. Programs with matched applicants from a restricted country(s) may request a waiver of the Match commitment through the NRMP website."

Immigration policy and the U.S. health care labor force (David Cutler in JAMA Health)

 Many American health care workers are immigrants, so a reduction in immigration is likely to have consequences for health care.

Trump’s Most Important Health Policy May Be at the Border  by David M. Cutler, JAMA Health Forum. 2025 doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2025.0617 

"Immigrants comprise a large segment of health care employment. According to labor market data, roughly one-quarter of practicing physicians are non–US born, as are 16% of registered nurses. Immigrants account for an even larger share of employment among low-wage health care workers, including 40% of home health aides, 28% of personal care aides, and 21% of nursing assistants. The immigrant share of these occupations has been increasing over time because US-born individuals are less likely to do these jobs at the current rates of pay.

...

"It is not known what percentage of the non–US-born health care workforce is undocumented. However, 2022 data from the Pew Research Center estimates that, overall, 23% of immigrants (11 million people) in the US are unauthorized. If that same proportion applies to health care workers (such as those in home health care and nursing homes), it implies that roughly 5% of health care support workers are unauthorized immigrants (23% are non–US born and 23% might be unauthorized).

"Thus, one might anticipate a reduction in the health care support labor force of roughly 5%.

...

"A 5% or greater reduction in low-wage health care workers would be massive. To give a sense of what this might mean, employment in nursing homes and residential care facilities is already about 5% below what would have been expected given growth rates before the COVID-19 pandemic. That employment reduction led to backlogs in hospitals during COVID-19 because patients were not able to be discharged to long-term care facilities. Adding a further reduction in postacute care capacity might create backlogs similar to the COVID-19 levels or perhaps even farther.

...

"The immigration enforcement actions of the Trump administration overall may be critical for health care in the next few years. Health care professionals and organizations will need to monitor these effects carefully, looking at policies far beyond the traditional boundaries of medicine." 

Buying exit from Gaza

 It's hard to leave Gaza.

The NYT has the story:

When the Only Escape From War in Gaza Is to Buy a Way Out . For many Palestinians, securing approval to exit the territory is possible only after raising thousands of dollars to pay middlemen or an Egyptian company.  By Adam Rasgon

"The only way for almost all people in Gaza to escape the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas is by leaving through neighboring Egypt.

"And that is usually a complicated and expensive ordeal, involving the payment of thousands of dollars to an Egyptian company that can get Palestinians on an approved travel list to cross the border.

...Over the past eight months, an estimated 100,000 people have left Gaza, Diab al-Louh, the Palestinian ambassador to Egypt, said in an interview. Though some managed to get out through connections to foreign organizations or governments, for many Gazans, exiting the territory is possible only by way of Hala, a firm that appears to be closely connected to the Egyptian government.

...

"Other pathways out of Gaza exist, but many of them require large payments, too. One route is to pay unofficial middlemen in the enclave or in Egypt, who demand $8,000 to $15,000 per person in exchange for arranging their departure within days, according to four Palestinians who either made the payments or tried to.

...

"Hala charges $5,000 to coordinate the exits of most people 16 and older and $2,500 for most who are below that age, according to seven people who have gone through this process or tried to do so."

How is immigration policy working on the US-Mexico border?

 Yesterday's post linked to a paper about immigration policy, and today let's look at a report on the results of existing policy:

After a Decade of Decline, the US Undocumented Population Increased by 650,000 in 2022  by Robert Warren, Journal on Migration and Human Security,  OnlineFirst https://doi.org/10.1177/23315024241226624

Executive Summary: This report describes estimates of the undocumented population residing in the United States in 2022 compiled by the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS). The estimates are based on data collected in the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the US Census Bureau (Ruggles et al. 2023). The report finds that the undocumented population grew from 10.3 million in 2021 to 10.9 million in 2022, an increase of 650,000. The increase reverses more than a decade of gradual decline. The undocumented populations from 10 countries increased by a total of 525,000: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and India; El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in Central America; and Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in South America. The undocumented population in Florida increased by about 125,000 in 2022, Texas increased by 60,000, New York by 50,000, and Maryland by 45,000.

"Kerwin and Warren (2023) summarized the reasons why apprehensions by DHS do not translate directly into undocumented population growth: “[S]ome migrants are apprehended multiple times, some are trying to return to a permanent residence in the United States after a visit to their communities of origin, some are seasonal workers, and some are coming temporarily to visit family. None of these cases would add a new resident to the undocumented population . . .The fact that the Border Patrol prevents most attempted entries has not received wide media coverage. In 2017, DHS estimated that it interdicted 80 percent of attempted entries in the 2014 to 2016 period” (citation omitted).

"The numbers arriving illegally across the border and the numbers overstaying temporary visas each year are offset by the numbers leaving the undocumented population. From 2011 to 2021, an annual average of more than 500,000 left the undocumented population through voluntary emigration, removal by DHS, adjustment to legal status, or death (Warren 2023, Table 2)."

Report card on Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration

 Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration sounds like a good goal for border control in the U.S.  It isn't what is happening, but there's been some progress.  The Center for Migration Studies brings us up to date with a report and a report card.

US Compliance with the Global Compact on Migration: A Mixed Record. Center for Migration Studies of New York, February 2, 2024

"When the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM)[1] was agreed to in December 2018, the United States (US) was not a party to the agreement, as the Trump administration did not formally participate in its formation. In 2021, however, the Biden administration retroactively supported[2] the nonbinding GCM and began participating in its implementation.

"Since that time, the US has achieved a mixed record of adhering to the provisions of the GCM, a document which creates a multilateral framework for the international community to humanely manage migration flows. Moreover, proposed changes to US border policy threaten to further sully the US record on migration. The following is an examination of US immigration policies and how they measure up to the provisions of the GCM.

...

"III. Conclusion

"Since it signaled support for the GCM in 2021, the United States has deployed several policies which are consistent with its goals. However, the use of restrictive enforcement policies, particularly at the US-Mexico border, has tainted its record. Should Congress adopt several additional restrictive enforcement policies in the near future, it would severely undermine, if not eviscerate, the progress the US has made in implementing humane and lawful immigration policies over the past few years. It also would send a message to the world that such restrictive policies are acceptable and appropriate, leading to a global retrenchment from the goals of the GCM in the years ahead.

Immigration, immigration law, and illegal immigrants in legal limbo. Should we have a statute of limitations after which immigrants become legal?

We're seeing so much illegal immigration, maybe we should change some of our laws, at least to regularize the status of immigrants who have successfully built productive lives here.  One suggestion is to have a statute of limitation on the crime of illegal immigration, That could work like common law marriage, after a long enough time, the status quo becomes legal.

The NY Times has the story:

Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works. Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many migrants — and U.S. employers. By Marcela Valdes

"The three most recent presidents have tried and failed to fix the problem of mass unauthorized migration into the United States. President Obama tried to balance empathy with enforcement, deferring the deportation of those who arrived as minors and instructing immigration officers to prioritize the arrest of serious criminals, even as he connected every jail in the nation to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). President Trump emphasized enforcement at all costs: revoking deferred action for minors, declaring the arrest of every undocumented person a priority, separating migrant families and trying to terminate temporary protected status for about 400,000 people — though Trump also extended deferred action to about 200,000 Venezuelans during his last full day in office.

"So far, President Biden has revived the empathy-and-enforcement strategy: resuming deferred action for minors and helping Venezuelans while also making it more difficult to qualify for asylum.

"But these variations in policy have had almost no effect on the number of migrants trying to enter the United States through the Southern border. Obama and Trump chose mostly opposing strategies, but each prioritized the arrest of unauthorized migrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Yet in 2019, before the pandemic gave Trump legal standing to force asylum seekers back into Mexico, Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.) arrested about 82,000 more migrants there than they had at the peak of migrations in the Obama years.

...

"Until the 1920s, America received migrants with an almost open border. Our policies emphasized regulation, not restriction. A few general categories were barred from entry — polygamists and convicted criminals, for example — but almost everyone else was permitted to enter the United States and reside indefinitely. The move toward restriction began in 1882 with laws that targeted the Chinese then evolved to exclude almost every other national group as well.

"Legal immigration today is close to impossible for most people. David J. Bier of the Cato Institute recently estimated that around 3 percent of the people who tried to move permanently to the United States were able to do so legally. “Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: It happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case,” he wrote in a comprehensive review of the current regulations. He concludes that “trying the legal immigration system as an alternative to immigrating illegally is like playing Powerball as an alternative to saving for retirement.”

"In other words, illegal immigration is the natural consequence of the conflict between America’s thirst for foreign labor and its strict immigration laws. The world’s increasing connectedness and fluidity have just supercharged this dynamic. There are now more than 11 million undocumented immigrants inside the United States, three times the number that lived here in 1990. And during the last fiscal year, the number of C.B.P. arrests in the Rio Grande Valley hit a record: more than half a million.

...

"Among academics, another idea keeps resurfacing: a deadline for deportations. Most crimes in America have a statute of limitations, Mae Ngai, a professor of history at Columbia University, noted in an opinion column for The Washington Post.  The statute of limitations for noncapital terrorism offenses, for example, is eight years. Before the 1924 Immigration Act, Ngai wrote in her book about the history of immigration policy, the statute of limitations for deportations was at most five years. Returning to this general principle, at least for migrants who have no significant criminal record, would allow ICE officers and immigration judges to focus on the recent influx of unauthorized migrants. A deadline could also improve labor conditions for all Americans because, as Ngai wrote, “it would go a long way toward stemming the accretion of a caste population that is easily exploitable and lives forever outside the polity.”

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement By Delacrétaz, Kominers, and Teytelboym

Learning how better to resettle refugees is not going to go out of style anytime soon.  Here's a recent AER paper:

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement By David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym, American Economic Review 2023, 113(10): 2689–2717 https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20210096

Abstract: "Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensional) sizes of refugee families and the capacities of communities. We propose four refugee resettlement mechanisms and two solution concepts that can be used in refugee resettlement matching under various institutional and informational constraints. Our theoretical results and simulations using refugee resettlement data suggest that preference-based  matching mechanisms can improve match efficiency, respect priorities of communities, and incentivize refugees to report where they would prefer to settle."

Displaced people passes 100,000,000

 The Guardian has the story, focusing on the causes of displacement. But efficiently matching diverse refugees to places of temporary or permanent asylum is still one of the biggest unsolved matching problems.

Number of displaced people passes 100m for the first time, says UN. ‘Staggering milestone’ calls for urgent international action to address underlying causes of conflict, persecution and the climate crisis, says high commissioner for refugees.  by Diane Taylor

"The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has said the global number of forcibly displaced people has passed 100 million for the first time, describing it as a “staggering milestone”.

"The UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said the grim new statistic should act as a wake-up call for the international community and that more action is needed internationally to address the root causes of forced displacement around the world.

...

"The figure hit 90 million at the end of 2021, propelled by a range of conflicts including in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar and Nigeria.

"Eight million Ukrainian people have been displaced within their home country as a result of the war, along with more than six million refugee movements registered from Ukraine.

“The international response to people fleeing war in Ukraine has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Grandi. “Compassion is alive and we need similar mobilisation for all crises around the world. But ultimately humanitarian aid is a palliative, not a cure. To reverse this trend the only answer is peace and stability so that innocent people are not forced to gamble between acute danger at home or precarious flight or exile.”

"The term “displaced person” was first used during the second world war, in which more than 40 million people were forcibly displaced."

Streets of Gold, by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan

 Ran Abramitzky writes:

As some of you know, I have a book coming out soon (with my long-time collaborator Leah Boustan) using big data to tell a new story about immigration and the American Dream. 

I’m thrilled to announce that Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success will be published at the end of the month by PublicAffairs with preorders (hardcover and Kindle) available now. Audio book is also coming soon. 

 

 Leah and I felt compelled to write this book because we believe that immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American public life. Most of the things that we believe about immigration – both on the left and on the right – are based largely in myth, not in facts.

In setting out to establish the facts, we were like curious grandchildren searching for our own family tree, but a million times over. We analyzed millions of immigrant families in the past and today. What we found surprised us, overturning many of our own preconceptions. 

• Upward Mobility: Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents – a pattern that has held for more than a century. 
• Rapid Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest. 
• Improved Economy: Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways. 

The book is a fast read, and we interweave the data with stories of immigrant families.  

I would truly appreciate your help leading up to the book’s launch. If you are interested in buying a copy, think about pre-ordering now. Preorders are essential for raising the visibility of new books. Please also share the word with other friends and family who are interested in America’s immigration history. 

 

Thank you! 

Ran

 

P.S. the book got some great endorsements (pasting here shortened versions):

“This wonderful and highly readable book sets the record straight about the hot-button issue of immigration. A must-read for anyone who care about this important issue.”

Daron Acemoglu, MIT, coauthor of Why Nations Fail

 

“A compelling story about how millions of immigrant families achieved the American Dream that will help reshape the narrative about immigration and opportunity in the United States.”

Raj Chetty, Harvard University

 

“Uplifting in its message, engaging in its composition, and powerful in its significance, Streets of Gold is A New World Symphony in words and numbers.”

Claudia Goldin, Harvard University

 

“Streets of Gold has the facts about the amazing and often surprising history of American immigration.” 

Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate in economics

 

“A gem of a book, grounded in deep original research and made lively by moving personal accounts”

Esther Duflo, Nobel Laureate in economics

 

“A highly engaging book that separates fact and fiction and busts many of the myths that pervade the current discussion on immigration policy.”

Guido Imbens, Nobel Laureate in economics

 

“Unprecedented data, empathetic personal histories, joyous writing, practical solutions and a compelling counter-Zeitgeist narrative.”

David Laitin, Stanford University

 

“The optimism that runs through Streets of Gold is based on rock solid-evidence.”

Doug Massey, Princeton University

 

“Armed with reams of new data, elegantly written, and meticulously researched, Streets of Gold is as timely as it is magisterial.”

 Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University

 

“Fascinating and hard to put down history of American immigration, based on new sources of data, and conveyed by powerful story-telling”

Alvin E. Roth, Nobel laureate in economics

 

“Pathbreaking.”

Andrew Selee, President, Migration Policy Institute 

 

“An absolute treasure, the perfect book on immigration.”

Zack Weinersmith, New York Times Bestselling author of Soonish

 

Plasma donations at the border

Here's a WSJ story about the confluence of two controversial transactions, immigration and compensation for plasma donors.

Block on Blood-Plasma Donors From Mexico Threatens Supplies. U.S. officials say crossing border to donate for a fee isn’t allowed with a visitor visa  By Mike Cherney,  Renée Onque and Daniela Hernandez

"Pharmaceutical companies and U.S. officials are fighting over whether to allow people to cross the border from Mexico to be paid for giving blood plasma, a critical ingredient in treatments for some neurological and autoimmune diseases.

"Up to 10% of plasma collected in the U.S. usually comes from Mexican nationals who enter on visitor visas and are paid about $50 to donate, according to legal filings from pharmaceutical companies. Last June, U.S. border officials indicated they would stop the roughly 30-year practice because they viewed it as labor for hire, which isn’t allowed under a visitor visa.

"The pharmaceutical companies that collect plasma have asked federal courts in Washington, D.C., to overturn the decision, which came just as U.S. plasma donations were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Some companies have argued that the payment compensates donors for their time and commitment rather than for the plasma itself, and isn’t in exchange for any actual work.

...

"The U.S., which provides much of the global plasma supply, is one of the few countries that allows payments to plasma donors, and supporters of the policy say that helps to ensure enough plasma is collected. Two big plasma companies, Australia-based CSL Ltd. and Spain-based Grifols SA, have invested millions of dollars in collection centers near the U.S.-Mexican border.

...

"A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to discuss the litigation.

...

"The agency said pharmaceutical companies could increase payments to attract more domestic supply and that Mexicans could still donate plasma without getting paid."

Black markets in border crossing

 Human smuggling across borders has become a substantial business, with the demand by desperate migrants being filled by criminal gangs, some of them more used to smuggling drugs. Here's a story from the WSJ about migrants aiming to come to the U.S. through Mexico, and then a somewhat similar story about crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

Truck in Fatal Mexican Crash Was Packed With Over 160 Migrants. Smugglers said to cram people into tractor-trailers to avoid increased inspections of passenger buses on way to U.S.  By José de Córdoba  and Anthony Harrup

"It was the worst accident involving migrants in Mexico and the highest single-day toll since the killing of 72 migrants by the Zetas drug cartel in the border state of Tamaulipas in 2010. A group of Guatemalan migrants were massacred earlier this year by Mexican security forces, also in Tamaulipas.

"More than have 650 people died this year attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, more than in any year since 2014, the United Nations International Organization for Migration said Friday.

"Most of the migrants were from Guatemala, although there were several from the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Ecuador, Gen. Rodríguez Bucio said.

"He said the migrants entered Mexico through mountain paths and dirt roads in smaller groups several days earlier. They had gathered at safe houses used by smugglers in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, from where they were loaded onto the truck Thursday afternoon.

...

"Guatemalans have few legal pathways to emigrate to the U.S., said Andrew Selee, the president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. In fiscal year 2020, the U.S. provided about 4,000 seasonal work visas to Guatemalans.

“We urgently need to find ways of creating legal pathways for people to migrate instead of driving them further into the hands of smugglers and raising the risk of the journey,” Mr. Selee added."

**********

And this from Associated Press via the Guardian:

At least 16 dead after third migrant boat in three days sinks in Greek waters.  People still missing despite major rescue effort as smugglers switch to more perilous route from Turkey

"At least 16 people have died after a migrant boat capsized in the Aegean Sea late Friday, bringing to at least 30 the combined death toll from three accidents in as many days involving migrant boats in Greek waters.

"The sinkings came as smugglers increasingly favour a perilous route from Turkey to Italy, which avoids Greece’s heavily patrolled eastern Aegean islands that for years were at the forefront of the country’s migration crisis.

...

"“People need safe alternatives to these perilous crossings,” the Greek office of the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, said in a tweet.

...

"Greece is a popular entry point into the European Union for people fleeing conflict and poverty in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. But arrivals dropped sharply in the last two years after Greece extended a wall at the Turkish border and began intercepting inbound boats carrying migrants and refugees – a tactic criticised by human rights groups.

"More than 116,000 asylum-seekers crossed the Mediterranean to reach EU countries this year as of 19 December, according to UNHCR. The agency said 55% travelled to Italy, 35% to Spain and 7% to Greece, with the remainder heading to Malta and Cyprus."

Surrogacy and citizenship in the U.S.

 Some rules seem clear: anyone born in the U.S. is an American citizen, as is any child of an American parent.  But in these partisan times, even clear rules are subject to argument, and questionable distinctions can be brought up to litigate old repugnances.

ABC has the story:

State Dept. fighting to deny US citizenship to gay couple's child: A federal judge ruled in June that the agency had to grant citizenship.  By Conor Finnegan

"The State Department is appealing a federal judge's decision that it must recognize the U.S. citizenship of a young girl born via surrogate to a gay couple -- prolonging one of many legal fights over its controversial policy that was deemed unconstitutional in June.

"Roee Kiviti and Adiel Kiviti of Chevy Chase, Maryland, are legally married and both U.S. citizens. Their daughter Kessem was born in Canada via a surrogate, so the State Department has argued in federal court that she is "born out of wedlock" and not entitled to birthright citizenship.

...

"The Kiviti's are not the only family in a legal battle with the department on this issue.

"According to Immigration Equality, Derek Mize and Jonathan Gregg, a gay couple in Atlanta, are also awaiting a ruling by a federal judge over their daughter Simone's citizenship.

"The group also represents Allison Stefania and Lucas Zaccari -- a lesbian couple fighting for their daughter's citizenship. She was born to Lucas, an Italian citizen, via in vitro fertilization, so the State Department ruled she was born out of wedlock to a non-U.S. citizen, disregarding Allison's U.S. citizenship and their marriage. The couple is also awaiting a decision."

HT: Kim Krawiec

Visa allocation, by Pathak, Rees-Jones and Sönmez

Here's a look at current U.S. visa allocation policies from a market design perspective.

Immigration  Lottery  Design:  Engineered  and  Coincidental  Consequences  of  H-1B  Reforms

Parag A. Pathak, Alex Rees-Jones, Tayfun Sönmez

NBER Working Paper No. 26767
Issued in February 2020
NBER Program(s):Labor Studies Program

Abstract: In response to increasing demand for high-skilled labor, the U.S. Congress legislated in 2005 that the H-1B visa program create 20,000 additional slots for advanced degree applicants on top of 65,000 slots open to all. Since then, the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) has implemented this policy through visa allocation rules that comply with this legislation. Following a directive in the April 2017 Buy American and Hire American Executive Order by President Trump, USCIS tweaked its H-1B visa allocation rule in 2019, in an explicit effort to increase the share of higher-skill beneficiaries, bypassing the need for Congressional approval to increase the number of advanced degree slots. The USCIS estimated that the rule change, engineered solely for this objective, would increase the number of higher-skill beneficiaries by more than 5,000 at the expense of lower-skill beneficiaries. In this paper, we characterize all visa allocation rules that comply with the legislation. Despite specifying rigid caps, we show that the legislation still allows for rules that can change the number of high-skill awards by as many as 14,000 in an average year. Of all rules that comply with the legislation, the 2019 rule adopted by the Trump administration produces the best possible outcome for higher-skill applicants and the worst possible outcome for lower skill applicants. We also discover that each of the two previous and much less known changes to the H-1B visa allocation rule resulted in more substantial changes to the share of higher-skill beneficiaries than the 2019 reform. The distributional effects of these earlier reforms in 2006 and 2008, however, were motivated by logistical considerations, potentially without understanding of their importance for the rate of higher-skill awards.

Will we learn to handle immigration by the time sea levels rise?

Below is a link to a 3-minute video of an interview (in English with Portuguese subtitles) that I gave some time ago on Portuguese TV, but just saw recently...  We talked about populism, immigration, and how we're going to have to learn from our failures today to prepare for future mass movements of people. (It starts with an advertisement, before the interview begins:(


Nobel da Economia em entrevista à TVI critica populismos e alerta para mais migração - 
Alvin Roth referiu ainda que o fenómeno do aquecimento global vai aumentar a migração
[G-translate: "Nobel la Economía in interview with TVI criticizes populism and alert for more migration
Alvin Roth also noted that the phenomenon of global warming will increase migration."

Repugnant phrasing

Japan's labor and immigration policies have been more restrictive than welcoming to an immigrant/migrant labor force.  So one can imagine a cheerful headline saying that was about to change, something along the lines of the final paragraph quoted below.  I don't think the following WSJ headline quite does the trick:

Japan Aims to Hire Foreigners for Nuclear Cleanup
The country’s largest utility is working to decommission the Fukushima plant amid radiation risks at the site of the 2011 disaster

"TOKYO—Japan’s largest utility is looking to foreign blue-collar workers to help decommission its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant amid a labor shortage exacerbated by radiation risks at the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

"Tokyo Electric Power Co. , or Tepco, said Thursday it has informed dozens of contractors that foreigners could qualify for a new type of visa that allows manual workers to stay in the country for five years. Workers who enter areas with elevated radiation would need sufficient Japanese-language skills to comprehend radiation levels and safety instructions, a Tepco spokeswoman said.

"The move is a shift in strategy for Tepco, which hasn’t employed large numbers of blue-collar foreigners at the Fukushima plant. As of February, there were 29 foreign workers, the spokeswoman said.

"Under a new law that went into effect this month, Japan plans to open its doors to about 340,000 workers over the next five years to help fill job vacancies in chronically understaffed industries such as construction and nursing care. The new law also creates another type of visa for higher-skilled blue-collar workers who can stay indefinitely."

A wedding while expecting "twiblings"

The NY Times has a very 21st century wedding announcement, of two husbands who both wanted to be fathers. Read it all here and feel proud to be human:
And You Thought Your Family Was Modern

Here's the surrogacy bit:

"Dr. Luo, 40, known for his meticulous organizational skills, created a database to track the multiple agencies, fertility doctors, legal issues, egg donors and surrogates involved in fulfilling the couple’s dream of having children.

"However comprehensive, Dr. Luo’s document could not calculate the many emotional ups and downs on the San Francisco couple’s journey to parenthood.

"Yet if all goes as planned, come September, after three years, the involvement of three women, and a significant financial investment — about $300,000 — the couple will be changing diapers for two babies. A boy and a girl, conceived with eggs from the same donor, will each be tied biologically to one of the men. In today’s parlance, they’ll be “twiblings.”

“We’re living our version of our parents’ American dreams,” said Dr. Luo..."

More on the immigration "emergency": U.S. undocumented population continues to fall

The latest  Journal on Migration and Human Security has an article whose title conveys a lot of information.  For example, most undocumented residents didn't cross the border illegally.

US Undocumented Population Continued to Fall from 2016 to 2017 and Visa Overstays Significantly Exceeded Illegal Crossings for the Seventh Consecutive Year  by Robert Warren

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This article presents estimates of the US undocumented population for 2017 derived by the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS). It focuses on the steep decline in the undocumented population from Mexico since 2010. While the president has focused the nation’s attention on the border wall, half a million[1] US undocumented residents from Mexico left[2] the undocumented population in 2016 alone, more than three times the number that arrived that year, leading to an overall decrease of nearly 400,000 undocumented residents from Mexico from 2016 to 2017. From 2010 to 2017, the undocumented population from Mexico fell by a remarkable 1.3 million.

For the past 10 years, the primary mode of entry for the undocumented population has been to overstay temporary visas. This article provides estimates of the number of noncitizens who overstayed temporary visas and those who entered without inspection (EWIs) in 2016 by the top five countries of origin.

Summary of Findings

• The US undocumented population from Mexico fell by almost 400,000 in 2017.
• In 2017, for the first time, the population from Mexico constituted less than one half of the total undocumented population.
• Since 2010, the undocumented population from Mexico has declined by 1.3 million.
• In California, the undocumented population from Mexico has declined by 26 percent since 2010, falling from 2.0 to 1.5 million; it also dropped by 50 percent in Alabama, and by one third in Georgia, New York, and New Mexico.
• The undocumented population from Venezuela grew rapidly after 2013, increasing from 60,000 to 145,000 in just four years.
• Visa overstays have significantly exceeded illegal border crossings during each of the last seven years.
• Mexico was the leading country for overstays in 2017, with about twice as many as India or China.

The estimates presented here were derived by CMS based on information collected in the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey (ACS). 

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See earlier, same author:

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Repugnance watch: Illegal migration crisis? It's hard to see in the numbers

Repugnance watch: Illegal migration crisis? It's hard to see in the numbers

Listening to President Trump Tuesday night, there's no doubt that he thinks many Americans can be rallied around the idea of an illegal immigration crisis.

I'm no expert, but evidence for that crisis is hard to see, and not just in the border state I live in.  Here's a report through 2016 by the Center for Migration Studies.

The US Undocumented Population Fell Sharply During the Obama Era: Estimates for 2016
Robert Warren, Center for Migration Studies

"Introduction
In the myriad discussions of undocumented immigration over the past two years, two of the most significant and underreported facts are that: (1) after 2000, arrivals from Mexico dropped sharply, falling to their lowest levels since the 1970s; and (2) the total population, as well as the population of most of the states and countries of origin, are lower now than they were in 2010. This report provides evidence that the historic shift from growth to decline continued in 2016."

Statement on Harmful Consequences of Separating Families at the U.S. Border, by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued the following statement today: 

Statement on Harmful Consequences of Separating Families at the U.S. Border
We urge the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to immediately stop separating migrant children from their families, based on the body of scientific evidence that underscores the potential for lifelong, harmful consequences for these children and based on human rights considerations.

Reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine contain an extensive body of evidence on the factors that affect the welfare of children – evidence that points to the danger of current immigration enforcement actions that separate children from their parents. Research indicates that these family separations jeopardize the short- and long-term health and well-being of the children involved. In addition, the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academies, which has a long history of addressing issues at the intersection of human rights, science, and health, stresses that the practice of separating parents from their children at the border is inconsistent with U.S. obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Parents’ impact on their children’s well-being may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child’s brain is developing rapidly and when nearly all of her or his experiences are shaped by parents and the family environment (NASEM, 2016, p. 1).  Young children who are separated from their primary caregivers may potentially suffer mental health disorders and other adverse outcomes over the course of their lives (NASEM, 2016, p. 21-22). Child development involves complex interactions among genetic, biological, psychological, and social processes (NRC and IOM, 2009, p. 74), and a disruption in any of these – such as family disruption – hinders healthy development and increases the risk for future disorders (NRC and IOM, 2009, p.102-104).  Young children are capable of deep and lasting sadness, grief, and disorganization in response to trauma and loss (NRC and IOM, 2000, p. 387).  Indeed, most mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders have their roots in childhood and adolescence (NRC and IOM, 2009, p. 1), and childhood trauma has emerged as a strong risk factor for later suicidal behavior (IOM, 2002, p. 3).  

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child relationship and the family environment are at the foundation of children’s well-being and healthy development. We call upon the Department of Homeland Security to stop family separations immediately based on this evidence.

Marcia McNutt
President, National Academy of Sciences

C. D. Mote, Jr.
President, National Academy of Engineering

Victor J. Dzau
President, National Academy of Medicine

• Parenting Matters: Supporting Parents of Children Ages 0-8 (2016)
• Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders Among Young People: Progress and Possibilities(2009)
• Psychosocial Concepts in Humanitarian Work with Children: A Review of the Concepts and Related Literature(2003)
• Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative (2002)
• Early Childhood Development and Learning: New Knowledge for Policy (2001)
• From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000)