Migration Policies

Executive Summary:
The United States, home to many of the world’s top universities, is a higher education destination for talented students from across the globe. When foreign-born students are able to find work in local economies after graduation, the positive economic effects extend beyond their incomes, especially since many pursue degrees in sought-after science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Yet the economic contributions of many of today’s foreign-born college students are stifled by an outdated immigration system. The temporary nature of F-1 visas, which are not connected to any immigration visa or opportunity, limits international students’ ability to work after they have completed their degrees. And undocumented students brought to the United States as children and educated in American schools face uncertain prospects for work and citizenship.

A first-of-its kind analysis of aggregate transition rates from college to work among three groups of foreign-born college students indicates that only one group—lawful permanent residents (LPR)— are fully transitioning to work in local economies. Undocumented college students are 20 to 30 percentage points less likely than their LPR peers to find local work after graduation. Aggregate transition rates for F-1 visa holders were close to zero.

Policies that increase work opportunities for F-1 visa holders and undocumented students to the same levels as their LPR peers would increase employment levels and tax revenues in nearly every state in the country. The 10 states with the most F-1 visa holders stand to gain nearly $8.3 billion in wages and $283 million in state taxes. Among the 10 states with the most undocumented students, those numbers are $1.5 billion and $40 million, respectively.

Programs like Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which offer temporary employment opportunities for foreign-born students, are moving the needle in the right direction. But it falls to Congress to legislate lasting immigration reform, including the following:

• Develop a provisional visa for STEM graduates.
• Allocate H-1B visas for STEM graduates.
• Allow US states to add geographical incentives to work opportunities for F-1 visa holders.
• Facilitate student access to investor visas.

Local economies have much at stake in better retaining talented foreign-born students in their local workforces. But even more important are the longer-term economic effects of fully maximizing foreign-born students’ contributions, particularly to critical STEM and innovation fields, driving US global competitiveness.

Introduction:
Unemployment rates vary widely across EU countries. While national institutions and policies explain much of the variation, cultural values, attitudes, and beliefs may also play a role. This column uses survey data from 26 EU countries to investigate the existence of culturally transmitted preferences for work. Country-specific preferences for work are found to have a positive effect on emigrants’ labour market outcomes, with those from countries with an above-average preference for work having higher employment rates abroad. Cultural preferences are significant enough that EU countries may never converge to the same employment rate.

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Abstract
International migrants’ cross-border political activities challenge singular notions of national citizenship and political belonging. Yet most sociological studies of migrants’ transnational political engagement are based on single national groups in the USA, and limit themselves to examining how assimilation and contexts of reception determine migrants’ propensity to engage with homeland politics—thereby under theorizing the influence of origin countries. This study moves beyond this approach by recognizing the multi-directionality of migration, and testing the applicability of existing theoretical approaches across two different origins and receiving contexts. We compare a sample of Colombian and Dominican migrants in Spain and Italy, analyzing how contexts in countries of origin, as well as migrants’ social networks across borders, interact with assimilation and contexts of reception to determine migrants’ political transnational engagement. Findings reveal migrants’ transnational political engagement in Spain and Italy appears to be a highly selective process dominated by a small minority of well-educated males from high social status in origin. Findings also suggest immigrant incorporation and transnational political engagement form a dialectical relationship operating at different scales that is simultaneously complementary and contradictory. Contextual conditions in origin countries explain observed much of variation in Colombian and Dominican migrants’ transnational political engagement.

Co-host editor with Anne Visser of a special issue on Migration and the Informal Economy of Population, Space and Place (2017).

Abstract
The State and the Grassroots presents the results of studies of immigrant organizations engaged in transnational development initiatives from thirteen different immigrant nationalities in five countries of reception. The scale of this endeavour is unprecedented. The articles represent the fruit of a long-term project known as the Comparative Immigration Organizations Project (CIOP), which was launched by the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University in the early 2000s. The State and the Grassroots makes significant analytical and methodological contributions to the migration studies field, particularly to the study of the migration-development nexus and of the relationship between assimilation/integration and transnationalism. This volume will be useful for upper-division undergraduates, as well as for graduate students and seasoned researchers interested in this field, particularly at this time of heightened anxiety about immigration and national security.

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Introduction:
Many funders, including international development banks, require that a cost-benefit analysis be carried out prior to the approval of project loans. Potential benefits of tourism projects include not only increased tourism receipts but also the employment and income multipliers they generate within the economy. Tourists rarely transact directly with the poor; thus, the poverty impacts of tourism development are largely indirect. Conventional cost-benefit analysis is likely to miss many if not most of these impacts, biasing cost-benefit analysis against funding tourism-development projects. This chapter describes a methodology for cost-benefit analysis that encompasses both the direct and indirect benefits and costs of projects. It applies this methodology to a variety of tourism-development projects in Latin America. The methods in this chapter are potentially applicable to cost-benefit analysis of other types of projects whose net benefits include indirect impacts on actors not directly affected by the project.

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Abstract:
Migration is defined by the United Nations as the movement from one of the world's 200+ nation states to another for 12 months or more, regardless of the purpose for being outside the country or birth or citizenship or legal status in the new country. According to thise fairly inclusive definition, there were 175 million migrants in 200, which means that 3 percent of the world's residents are outside their country of birth or citizenship as immigrants, foreign students and workers, or unauthorized residents.

Introduction:
This chapter was prepared for discussion at the Roundtable Session 2.1 on “Reducing the costs of migration and maximizing human development,” at the Global Forum on Migration and Development held in Athens, Greece, on November 4–5, 2009. It elaborates on the job-matching recruiters, recruitment costs, the four-stage recruitment process, and recruitment regulations and realities in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Philippines, and Sri Lanka.

Abstract:
Universities and employers want easier access to foreign science and engineering (S&E) students and workers. Most U.S. residents with degrees in S&E fields are U.S.-born citizens, and there are far more U.S. citizens with S&E degrees, about 15 million, than are employed in S&E occupations, about 5 million. Foreign students and workers in S&E occupations are concentrated in computer-related jobs, and their presence raises trade-offs for U.S. students and workers. For example, making it easier for U.S. employers to hire foreign S&E workers allows employers to specify precisely the qualities desired to fill a particular job quickly while limiting options for U.S. workers who could fill that job with some retraining. This article reviews the trade-offs between the competing goods raised by foreign S&E students and workers and the efforts of U.S. government agencies to reconcile them.

Abstract:
The large number of undocumented immigrants in the US can be reduced using different policies. Some of them, such as increased border security, increased deportation rates or increased cost for illegal to look for jobs will reduce illegal immigrants as well as total immigrants. Other, such as increased legalization rates, would decrease the illegal population and increase the legal one. These policies have also different effects on job creation as they affect the firm profits from creating a new job. Economists have never analyzed this issue. This paper fills this gap. We set up and simulate a new model of labor market, search and legal/illegal migration between two countries. We then calibrate it to the US and Mexico labor markets. Crucially we account for the incentive effect of different policies on potential immigrants (labor supply), and on job creation by firms (labor demand). We find that policies increasing deportation rates have the largest negative effect on employment opportunities of natives. Legalization, instead has a positive employment effects for natives. This is because the disruptive effects of repatriations reduces job value and job-creation by US firms, affecting also jobs available to natives. Legalization by increasing the total number of immigrants, stimulates firms’ job creation as firms obtain larger profits from immigrants, who receive lower pay, and hence post more vacancies, some of which are filled by natives.

This paper makes two contributions to the literature on the determinants of international migration flows. First, we compile a new dataset on annual bilateral migration flows covering 15 OECD destination countries and 120 sending countries for the period 1980-2006. We also collect data on time-varying immigration policies that regulate the entry of immigrants in our destination countries over this period. Second, we extend the empirical model of migration choice across multiple destinations developed by Grogger and Hanson (2011) by allowing for unobserved individual heterogeneity between migrants and non-migrants. Our estimates show that international migration flows are highly responsive to income per capita at destination. This elasticity is twice as high for within-EU migration, reflecting the higher degree of labor mobility within the European Union. We also find that tightening of laws regulating immigrant entry reduce rapidly and significantly their flow.