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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 Hellman Fellows Fund provides grants to more than 100 junior faculty members annually at all 10 UCs and four private institutions. The fellowships of up to $50,000 are intended to give early-career faculty extra support for their research.

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.”

This paper examines the labor market consequences of an extensive campaign repatriating around 400,000 Mexicans in 1929-34. Using a repeated cross section of county level data, it finds attenuated and non-significant employment effects and amplified wage downgrading. It shows that this is due to selective in- and out-migration of natives.

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. 

Dean Kevin R. Johnson, Penn State Law School Professor Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia and University of Houston Law Center Professor Michael Olivas led an effort resulting in the filing of a Supreme Court amici curiae brief on behalf of 124 immigration law scholars in defense of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP assisted with the brief.

Industries that rely on high-skilled talent, like technology, have said for more than a decade that the cap of 85,000 H-1B visas per year is too strict, said Professor Giovanni Peri. In 2004, the government reduced the number of visas awarded through a lottery system.

Professor Caitlin Patler recently co-authored a brief in the United States Supreme Court DACA Rescission Case.  The brief summarized empirical research on DACA and immigrant legal status to demonstrate the positive and inter-generational impacts of the program.

Important new research concludes immigration restrictions that prevent companies from hiring high-skilled foreign nationals in the U.S. represent bad economic policy and are counterproductive. “When we aggregate at the national level, inflows of foreign STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] workers explain between 30% and 50% of the aggregate productivity growth that took place in the United States between 1990 and 2010,” according to economists Giovanni Peri (UC, Davis), Kevin Shih (RPI) and Chad Sparber (Colgate University).