News Mentions/Interviews

Gabriel “Jack” Chin, a UC Davis law professor and expert on immigration law, said that Robart could preclude an evidentiary hearing by deciding whether the executive order is discriminatory on its face, one way or the other. He said the Seattle judge will be moving onto “very, very tricky terrain” if he sides with the state of Washington’s lawyers that the president’s thinking needs to be investigated.

Professor Giovanni Peri suggests that a one percentage point increase in skilled immigration as a share of total employment boosts wages for both skilled and unskilled native workers by seven and three percentage points respectively.

Many of the recent political shifts in the West—the election of Donald Trump, the rise of populism in Europe and Brexit—can be partially attributed to the fear of mass migration. Yet increasing migration is one of the quickest ways to make the world richer.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has made it a priority to restrict legal immigration to the United States. To bolster its anti-immigration policies, the Trump administration has pushed the narrative that poor immigrants are a drain on government resources. New research by UC Davis professor Santiago Pérez sheds light on the economic mobility of immigrants and suggests the government’s view may be shortsighted.

The Supreme Court hears arguments on DACA today, and Kevin R. Johnson, UC Davis’ law school dean discusses the arguments and what’s at stake. Politifact looks at the role of Facebook and fact checking in campaigns. They preview a new book on domestic violence.

The mural is a community project conceived by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, as part of her dissertation at UC–Davis. Santana said she wanted specifically to tell stories of those who had been removed by President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, which set records for the number of deportations that even the Trump administration has not surpassed. “Anyone is vulnerable to deportation if you’re a noncitizen,” Santana said.

Immigrants also help the people in the communities to which they move. Research by the economists Gaetano Basso and Giovanni Peri indicates that in the United States, when immigrants move to an area, wages for natives of all education levels tend to rise.

Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, PhD candidate in Spanish at UC Davis, took her research on U.S./Mexico migration to the literal border this summer. As a 2019 Mellon Public Scholar, she conceived of, orchestrated, and painted her digitally interactive Playas de Tijuana Mural Project directly on the border wall.

Professor David Kyle was recently interviewed about the border wall by CNN.

The adult children of immigrants, almost universally, show more upward economic mobility than their peers whose parents were born in the United States. Indeed, a new working paper co-authored by Santiago Pérez finds that this is especially true for the lowest-income immigrants and remains true for the most recent cohorts for which data is available.

“The short-term perspective on immigrant assimilation that politicians tend to take might underestimate the long-run success of immigrants,” said Ran Abramitzky, a professor at Stanford and one of the paper’s authors, along with Leah Platt Boustan, Elisa Jácome and Santiago Pérez. “By the second generation, they are doing quite well.”

Chunjie Zhang, along with Julie K. Allen and Sabine Zimmermann, recently participated in a discussion for for EuropeNow.

Congressional Democrats hope to broker a deal with Republicans that would grant legal status to farmworkers currently in the country illegally but would require employers to verify the immigration status of all future hires. There have been numerous attempts since then to balance the needs of farmers, who depend on the labor, and those who want to discourage unauthorized immigration, said Professor Emeritus Philip Martin.

The impact of immigration on the property business appears to actually be positive. As researchers Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri put it while discussing their efforts in a 2006 paper, “we have showed that higher wages and higher rents for US natives are significantly correlated with higher diversity.”

H-1Bs help native-born workers. Studies by economists Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih and Chad Sparber, comparing across cities, have found that allowing in more H-1B workers raises wages for native-born high-skilled U.S. workers, and doesn’t hurt their employment levels.