Webinar Insights on Migration and Economics

Thanks very much, Emily, and welcome, everybody. Welcome to today's session of the Winter to Spring 2025 Global Affairs Expert webinar series. I'm Ted Alden. I'm a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I'm a visiting professor at Western Washington University in lovely Bellingham, Washington, and shameless self-promotion, the author of the book over my shoulder here, co-author of a new book about the COVID border closures called When the World Closed Its Doors, The COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders. Thank you all for joining us. I think Emily has already noted today's discussions on the record. The video and transcript will be available on education.cfr.org. And if you'd like to share the materials with your colleagues or classmates, feel free to do so. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. So I'm delighted, all the way from a little town just outside of Rome. to have with us Giovanni Perry to discuss migration and labor economics. I'll read you his formal background here, but for those of us who follow these issues, I did for many years as a journalist and now work on them through CFR and in my academic work, Giovanni has been the go-to scholar on issues of trying to understand how immigration affects the U.S. labor market. So I am one of a huge number of people very appreciative for your work in this field. Dr. Perry is the C. Brian Cameron Distinguished Professor in International Economics and the founder and director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis. He's also a research associate at NBER and was previously co-editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association. He serves on the editorial board of several economics journals, and he is the author of the 2016 book. the economics of international migration. So welcome, Giovanni. Thank you so much to speak with us today. Thank you, Ted. Such a kind introduction. Too generous. Thank you. So Giovanni's got some slides he's going to share with us. I'll have a follow-up or two, and then we will open it up for questions and discussions. We have a wonderful large group here, so I want to make sure there's time for everybody to interact. with our speaker so over to you uh giovanni for for the an introductory set of slides in common great uh thank you very much uh ted and i i thought that is useful to start with a few facts and a little structure on this economics of immigration which has a lot of talk sometimes and not a lot of clarity so allow me to share the screen and um to um talk about a little bit about trends and the what economists, what research in economics says about the impact of immigration. So I will proceed as follow and we'll just show you a few slides. But first, I will give you a couple of aggregate trends in terms of foreign born in the US, how many they are, what have been their evolution. Then we're going to talk a little bit about how economists characterize what impact immigration has in the longer run on income, gross domestic product, which is the measure we have of income created on productivity, on investment, on wages, and on employment in the U.S. And then I will talk a little bit about 20 years up to COVID, what we saw in immigration there, and then the four year after COVID, what we see, what we saw since then on the U.S. economy and labor market. So the first slide that I want to show, and I want to start a conversation here, is that there are a lot of noise and rumor and data about immigration. But the way in which the presence of foreign born in the US has changed is illustrated by this graph. This graph shows in millions how many foreign born immigrants of different education level, the education level will be very linked to the type of jobs that immigrants do, how immigrants of different education level have changed from 1970, actually 1960, up to 2000, and then from 2000 up to 2023. which is the last year in which the US Census has a very precise measure of these things. And the different colors are the red one are immigrants who don't have a high school degree, the two dashed are immigrants who have some high school or some college, and the blue are the college-educated immigrants. Two things jump out in this graph to you. First, that immigration has been growing steadily from 1970 until now, I would say, but in two different ways. Up to 2000, all groups were growing quite fast and the largest group was the group with particularly low education the people with no high school degree Since 2000, the group of people with low education has remained relatively flat. Only in the last year, there is this bump. We'll go back to talk about this. This is the bump that a lot of people have talked about. 22, 23 were years of particularly large immigration relative to the previous. But if you look at this bump in perspective, this doesn't look like a shocking bump, to tell you the truth. It looks like a little bit of a bump. And here we will discuss it. But that. College educated instead since 2000 have increased a lot. So immigrants in the US have always been quite a large number of college educated, but in the last 24 years, they have become predominantly college educated relative to the one who have lower education. Now, this is a fact and keep it in mind when we talk about the consequences. Keep in mind that other countries in the world have not been able to attract such a large group of college and highly educated, While many European countries, other countries have also attracted some laborer, many fewer have attracted the amount of brains that the U.S. has attracted. I am simplifying here a little bit of high skill. In fact, if you look at the concentration of foreign born in groups that go from lower to higher educated. So as a share of the population, there are in the late 2010s, 14% of the U.S. population was foreign born. But 17% of the college graduate, 22% of people with a STEM degree. And if you go among the PhD in science, master in science, one third to up to one third of the people are foreign born. So immigrants contribute to the whole spectrum of worker and skill in the U.S. But certainly the U.S. is able to attract a lot of highly skilled immigrants. So. Then how do the immigrants do when they arrive in the U.S.? Are they integrating in the U.S. economy or not? These are graphs that show for the three biggest group of immigrants, Mexican, Chinese, and Indian. And keep in mind, these groups in terms of education are very different. Mexican are predominantly low-educated immigrants. Chinese are intermediate. Indian are very high. But this line shows you the employment rate of these immigrants. relative, we standardize the U.S. natives to zero. So we compare different cohort of immigrants that arrived recently or in the past, and we can track how their employment probability, so their employment rate, how many of them are employed relative to the population, fare relative to native. One thing that you notice is that all groups, after 10 years they have been in the U.S., are at or above the employment rate of the U.S. So not only immigrants come from all groups, but they quickly integrate in the labor markets in the US. Again, this is not common in the world. In Europe, the situation is quite different. Immigrants take longer to integrate in the US, and sometimes they don't fully. With these two facts, that a lot of immigrants come in with a lot of different skills, and they relatively quickly integrate in the US market, what is the effect of immigrants? So the way in which economists first approach this idea, would say is to look at how they affect the growth of U.S. GDP, the growth of income in the United States. And the growth of income in the United States is made up of two parts. One is more workers you have in the economy, the more you produce. This clearly depends on how many body you have. And then how more productive these people are, either because they use more machine, computer equipment, they use more investment. in physical capital, or because they have more productivity, innovation because of innovation, better efficiency, the more people produce. Now, immigration, you can think, and for long time, economists have been stuck on the idea that immigrants were bodies that increased the number of employed. And that's certainly true. They increased the size of the American economy. And as we will see, they have. But immigrants also have contributed substantially to these two parts, to investment and to productivity growth. And let me give you the intuition. There is a ton of research and we can talk. Investment because immigrants themselves are firm creator. They are entrepreneur. They start companies and they generate a faster rate of entrepreneurship and productivity growth. Because if I told you a lot of them are scientists, engineer, people who work in technology, they have different type of skills than native. They come on with different idea. They generate no idea for new restaurant, new products. And so both entrepreneur at the high end of technology and low end benefit in terms of productivity from this variety. So in fact, if I put up here a couple of numbers, recent estimates of the impact of immigrant in U.S. states. or across rich country, or ECDs are all the rich countries, is that 1% more immigrants means 0.27% more investment, on top of 1% more workers, obviously. They are workers, but they also stimulate investment. And almost 1% more in growth in productivity. And in the other country outside of the world, maybe even a little bit more contribution to capital growth, and a little bit less to productivity. Productivity is where... the innovative immigrant entrepreneurial immigrant that grow the variety and the quality of goods which are produced and the quality variety and quality of firms which are there so immigrant on average on average generated in the 20 years up to 2020 a growth of employment of of population employment by six percent in the u.s and in turn this six percent more employment generated another five six percent in larger productivity per worker which is the main determinant in the long run of wages per worker so you know on average they have really helped the us economy now one question is okay they have helped everybody but did they hurt somebody did they hurt the people who are less skilled less educated and this depends on two things one is how is the composition of immigrants how many skilled highly educated versus unskilled you have if you only have unskilled immigrant and there is only competition on the side of unskilled, maybe you have a stronger effect. I've already showed you that that's not quite the case, but that's important. And the other, which is an interesting thing, which is emerging more and more, is did these people take jobs, displaced jobs, or they helped fill vacancies? Meaning, did the US in this period generate more job potential than they have employed people for, or the other way around? They have a lot of employed people. crowding a lot of job potentials so let me speak to these things for the last couple of minutes and then i'm done so the what is the distribution of immigrant that came in here in another way i'm showing what i've showed in the previous graph in the period 1980 to 2000 this is the net inflow of immigrant as percentage of non-college sorry non-high school some high school college and college plus and this is the contribution of immigrants in a percentage of the group in the post 2000 so already you see that already in the 80s up to 2000 there were a lot of college educated in there were also a lot of people with low education coming in but the distribution was balanced but in the recent period it has been even more concentrated among the high skills so the competition that immigrant have brought at the low end of the spectrum has not even been as strong as the as the inflow of highly skilled immigrant and because of that they didn't really depress wage they didn't they weren't really responsible for this for this effect but even more interestingly let's talk about the post 2020 the post 2020 and new things happens in the u.s labor force and this thing is that the u.s labor force for the first time in history starts shrinking this is the net number of million people which are added or subtracted to the labor force every year in the period 2010-14, 15-19, and 2023. You see that while the U.S. labor force was growing by one and a half million per year in the 80s and 90s and early 2000, recently has been growing much slower. But in the last four years, it has actually been shrinking. It has taken away 400,000 people in the last five years. Why? Well, covid was one reason that people left but because the age structure of the population is the uf us is that we have huge cohort the baby boomer exiting and smaller cohort now what did foreign born do foreign born offset in part this decline of the population by in the last period this bump of immigrant has generated a little bit of an offset of this loss of native however if you look at the economy it does not offset enough because on the right hand side, I have the average number of unfilled jobs at the end of each month, on average, that the US economy has generated. This number has been steadily increasing over time in the last decade plus. In fact, in the 2020-2023 period was an extraordinary period in terms of number of unfilled vacancies, jobs which stay open month after month. This means 9 million... at the end of each month per there were 9 million of job opening which were not filled at the end of each month in the period 2020 2023. so this is interesting but i say even more interesting is to look at the composition of these jobs by college and non-college. It's true that the U.S. labor force is not growing as fast. That is rate of growth have declined in the last period. But the college educated are still growing in the labor force. A little bit offset by foreign born. Is the non-college educated, which are disappearing fast from the U.S. labor force because the new generation are more educated than the old. And immigrants, which are making up a little bit, because they are not that decline again as i said non-college educated immigrants in the last period bumped back a little bit are still not enough to fill the vacancies and i put here two cons two sector which are typically generating a lot of non-college job opening construction and leisure and hospitality and the opening the unfilled jobs in each one of this sector heavy in fact growing okay so i am over time so let me conclude I think that overall there is a strong evidence in the economic facts and data that immigrants have had a very strong positive impact on U.S. income per capita. College educators have had a very important role in this, but even non-college educated have found employment at very high rates and given that labor force is shrinking since 2020, non-college immigrant could be economically even more relevant to fill some of this job and This 2022-23 bump of immigrants maybe was a good news in economic terms, at least for sure. Then Ted will tell us what tragic consequences this had politically. But for now, let me stay economist. And we don't find that it had a negative economic impact. Sorry, I went a bit long. That's it. Thank you, Giovanni. That was tremendous. That's a model for how to convey a lot of important information very efficiently. I actually have one question, one kind of comment question. I want the rest of you who are watching this to start teeing up your questions. Deanna will field those and get them to both of us. So two quick questions to you, Mani. A country that I follow quite closely is Canada, which also has very high levels of immigration, has tried through its system to attract highly educated immigrants. and yet really struggles with productivity. And Canada has a major productivity challenge. And when you looked at the numbers you presented, sort of comparing the productivity bump in the U.S. from immigration compared to the OECD average, clearly for whatever reason, we are gaining more of a productivity boost here in the United States than most other countries. What's the explanation for that? Is that a feature the immigrants were attracting? Or is it a feature of... the American labor market or the way we handle innovation? Is it something about the way our economy is structured? So how would you explain that rather large discrepancy on the productivity gains coming from immigration between the United States and other OECD countries? A great question. I would say there are three plausible contributors to this. Number one is the selection of immigrants who come to the United States. There is no doubt that the United States, because of this very high quality of its universities and of some of these companies attracting people from the world who are real genuinely talented innovative as smart and there is no doubt that wherever you are in europe in africa in asia when you think about oh where can be a top physicist the top chemist a top scientist the us come to mind so one selection of brilliant creative people two variety of brilliant and different people the us is not only the country that gets more in number it is almost the biggest number of country that contribute i mean people talk about this i put down just india mexico and china which are three very different countries they contribute a lot but the rest of latin america but europe but some countries of africa so people from all over there is a lot of research that says difference of country imply different of ideas different of different of skills and the third i would say that the us has a particularly good environment for thriving of in entrepreneurship and innovation. That's certainly a little bit the freer action activity of entrepreneurs, the friendly type of legislations that they have, and this variety of people and ideas. So entrepreneurship, variety, and talent of immigrants contribute, and I agree with you, even more than Canada. Canada is the country that I take sometimes an example of smaller U.S. in terms of what they have done so far. Let me say one thing. Canada is in a position that it can benefit a lot if the U.S. changed this drastically because they are the most similar in terms of number of people they have attracted talent. If the U.S. were to change direction and close, I think Canada will become the beneficiary of that. Excellent. And one other follow-in, and I should have remind you, Deanna's put it up there in the chat. If you have a question, click the raise hand icon on your screen or on an iPad or tablet, click the more button to access the raised hand feature. And then she will prompt you to unmute when it comes to your question. The other one, and just to elaborate a little more on the 2022. 23 period, because it was obviously significant economically and also, as you hinted at, quite significant politically. I mean, I think the way most of us look at that period is that there were two things going on. One was a sort of post-COVID bump. You had natural migration restricted in a variety of ways because of the COVID border closures and travel restrictions, the shutdown of immigration visa processing for many months. in the United States. So some of that was a rebound from that period of restraint. But the other thing, of course, that went on was that the Biden administration was actively welcoming a lot of people, particularly from Latin America, from Haiti, from Cuba, from Nicaragua, from Venezuela, as part of its border control strategy. And that had political impacts that may well come up in the questions. But what I found really interesting about your presentation is that you seem to be suggesting that what happened in that period coincided with a sort of gradual, but then perhaps a little more sudden shrinking of the native labor force. We have a crystal ball a little bit. As I say, I'm sure there are going to be questions that come up about the current administration's policies. But one of the things I think we do know is you're not going to see that kind of bump again. And you may actually see some significant reduction. We've had the administration cancel temporary protected status programs and say that they're going to move to deport a lot of people who came in in that period under these parole programs. What is the likely economic impact of restrictions? And that fits more in your lower educated level, I think, on average. There's certainly highly educated people coming in these streams, but on balance, I think, lower. So what is your opinion? analytical framework tell you about the likely consequences of the restrictions that we're already seeing and are going to see? Yes. So let me address both. So you're absolutely right that the post-COVID bump of 2022-2023, in particular, as peak year, was in part some pent-up pressure that was blocked during COVID, in part these policies in which... a couple of things changed as you say a lot of temporary protected status for several uh groups uh allowing people to come in and claim asylum in uh apply for asylum and stay which was um also not done before so generated a larger inflow as you say this was happening at a time in which a lot of these people found employment because the labor market were tightening up after covid there was these two phenomena happening in the labor market. One, a group of aging people decided to retire. So retirement went up and a lot of people decided that it was very risky for them to do this in-person manual jobs in that in the remote type of job became more available. And a lot of Americans jumped on that. And so a lot of these manual in-person job became hard to fill. And these people who arrived in that period actually did contribute to fill those. I want to say Politically or policy thinking clearly seemed a little odd. There would have been, I think, an economic case to make, to say this is a period of tight labor market. Let's try to open up for some job or work visa to this type of immigrant, which that was not even tried. Of course, this would have needed some legislation. All we are done with this special authority, temporary visa status. This, to me, speaks to the way in which the... immigration policies done in this country there is never a little bit of an economic planning we do need these people what i want to say that bump was very beneficial but the way in which it was done cows at the border a lot of people coming gave the impression that was a totally overwhelming experience i think that the same number of people coming with cleaner visa clearer situation would have found employment and being more effective going forward tightening deporting reducing i think it will in terms of trend, generate more tightening of the labor market with two results. One, some sector will not be able to grow as they have grown in the past. Hospitality, food, construction, they rely a lot on this. So what will happen? Well, it will be harder for them to fill the jobs. Therefore, they will not grow companies, hotels will not be open. Maybe the prices of some of these goods will go up somewhat, and this will reduce their growth. And so the economy in those sectors will not grow for the people who work and also for the connected as it could have. And I think this will become at some point A real concern, I would say, for an administration that looks at the economic consequences of this. So we will see how much deportation really affects the number. So far, it seems to me very in your face, some of these cases, but maybe in terms of number, it has not been so huge. But certainly there has been a reduction in the number of people coming in. So harder to fill position, slow down in growth, increase in prices. Those are the three things that I think we'll see. for a little while. And then the question is, will that push a little bit more of changing of legal immigration policies for people who can come to work in the US? Thank you very much, Jan. I watch the trade stuff very closely as well. And tariffs are also likely to be inflationary. So I think that's the theme we're going to be watching. Jan, it looks like we've got a series of questions that have come in. So I'll turn it over to you and let's get some of the other folks on the call involved. We will take the raised hand from Mojubalu Alufonke Okome, who is a professor at Brooklyn College. Thank you very much. I think this immigration thing for me also has to do with the education sector, because decisions that are being made in the larger... policy scenario is affecting some institutions such that they're not admitting PhD students from abroad. And so if innovation and brilliance is what gives America the bump, the productivity bump, isn't it, can't we just speculate and say that this is going to be affected? Also, you know, the whole variety of people, ideas and all that is being challenged because of this obsession about DEI being the problem. So how would this moving forward, how would this affect policies on immigration? And then, you know, the favorable effects from this movement of people who. see the U.S. as a place where they could thrive? Thank you. This is a great question. Giovanni, I'm just going to offer a slight addition to this. One of the striking things from some of the graphs you showed there is seemingly how immune a lot of these trends are to policy changes. I mean, I wrote a book about the post 9-11 immigration and temporary visa restrictions and others speculating that this could have a negative impact on. on how attractive the United States was to immigrants didn't really seem to have any long-term effect. Questioner raises some real questions about the research enterprise here in the United States and if it's weakened. So what's your best guess of the effect some of these moves might have? So one thing that I'm very clear, thank you for the question, is that universities in the US have been the gateway of a large part of these high skilled flows both admitting these people as undergraduate as master as phd allowing them to stay a little bit in here i just wrote the paper they came out on the importance of foreign master student as a creator of startup companies in the us almost half of the startup company in the us are created by this foreign master student who are only 15 20 percent and this is crucial now i really think and again maybe it's a little early to see But if there is a strong effect of some of the policies on the ability of university of attracting foreign students, high quality foreign students, this will have a long term impact. You're right that that graph shows that the growth of college educated has continued. However, if you look at the growth of the foreign visa students in the US, this foreign visa instead had a slowdown already during the first from 2017 to 2020. This visa peaked almost in 2017, then they slowed down, then during COVID they collapsed, then they bounced back significantly. Those students who are visa are going to be in 10 years the people who are going to produce the high skills that are entrepreneurs, innovators, scientists. An environment that makes for universities harder to fund the student, to attract the student, to allow the student in, will create I think a significant effect. And the question on on the AI. Variety of ideas needs to be in there to be strong for science. And so we will see if we lose this freedom of diversity and differences, that can be an issue as well. But certainly, I think the role the university will play is going to be very important. Great question. Thank you for the response. Diana, next question. We will take a written question from Ray Kozlowski, who's professor and director of the Master of International Affairs program at SUNY Albany. He asks, What percentage of college-educated immigrants manage to secure jobs in their fields that enable them to fully utilize their education and skills? What percentage, alternatively, are underemployed or unemployed, such as brain waste? Great question. Great to have you on the call here, Ray. Greetings. We haven't talked in too long. Giovanni. Great question. Very important question. So I actually would say the following. Again, we have a couple of recent papers that look at the career of... foreign who study in the US and what happens afterwards. So the number one thing, the number one brain not used, I don't know if it's waste for the US, is that a lot of these students who study in the US, leave the US when they have finished their study, because their visa by definition does not allow them. These are millions of visa student, 20% of them can stay and find a job. One thing that helped a lot was the extension of the OPT, this optional practical training period in which students can find some job for three years. Then it bumped up this 20% to 25, but only 20% of them stay. I would say that you don't observe too much of this brain waste because people who stay, they need to stay on very specific, either H-1B or because they're hired or because they have a clear plan. So the waste is not, I would say that these people studying in the US and then are i don't know taxidermy drivers with all respect but or do something for which only but is there a lot of them greatest education would have a company that hired them would have a position but they cannot find a visa to stay in the us um with the h1b limitation so this is a lot a large kind of emerald and we were very surprised finding that even for a master student in spite of almost half of the master's students going back, the ones who remain are very likely to create companies and create high quality companies. So I think these students who graduate do pretty well, but not so many stay. Yeah, if I can just add a little something here, Ray, you'll appreciate this because it's a US-Canada story, but there are real challenges in terms of the visa categories. I've been going to a chiropractor for the last little while. It's helped me a lot. Way more freedom in my life. And the young man working on me is a Canadian who's been down here, studied here, went to four years of chiropractor school, is working here. But his permission is about to run out. And he would like to be able to apply for what they call the NAFTA visa or the TN visa. It allows Canadians to work in the U.S. and Mexicans to work in the United States. Turns out that there's no category for chiropractors. That's not a category that fits under this relatively easy to obtain North American visa. There's been discussions for years about updating that list. But immigration has become so controversial here in the U.S. that the Americans negotiate on it. So he's looking at maybe an H-1B, but then you get into the lottery situation, right? Does his number come up? And so I think your point is a very important one. There's a lot of students who would like to stay, but they can't find a visa that allows them to stay. And we haven't updated those categories in a long time. So the same type of issue arose with the OPT, which only were for STEM. And so we had to classify STEM. So, for instance, economics was not considered STEM. And then when this passed, we reclassified the STEM to allow students to stay and take advantage of these years extra in the U.S. So it's a little crazy, the taxonomy there. Yeah, absolutely. And complicated. And complicated. I'm talking to lots of migrants. It dominates their lives in different ways. The choices that they're able to make in terms of career and family and other things are very strongly influenced by their status here in the United States, their visa status. Deanna, let's move on. We will take the raised hand from Ido Agbahonu, who is an assistant professor at Bethune-Cookman University. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for this presentation. My name is Dr. Edo Adweonu, I teach at the Tunkuk University of Political Science and International Relations. I'm an African-born, and recently President Trump has issued some restrictions. on a visa, the DV visa, also known as lottery visa. That's the visa that I came. I was part of that visa process. And he gave a red registration to some, meaning no visa to US at all, including Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia, and other. 20 or 19 other countries that have some restrictions. But the DV visa was banned for all the 54 countries in Africa. But if you look at Africa, Africa is a continent that is rich in terms of resources. But I don't think, I don't know if they think about those resources before they are making this kind of immigration policy. So they, you know. He's banning Africans to come to the United States. But what happened to their resources that all the great powers are fighting for? If you look at the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about 80% of the world's resources in cobalt are needed for the thieves and the battery and so on and so forth, both our computer and cell phone are there. United States is fighting for, China is fighting there, Turkey and so on. All those great powers are fighting, but yet he doesn't want Africans to come to the United States, but wants African minerals. So what are the consequences that will lead? At the same time, he provided about 40 non-white countries, allowed those to the visa, the DV visa. to continue going on in those 40 non-white countries. So it's a making Americans right again issue, not great issues. So those are the questions that I'm asking. That's a good set of questions. Giovanni, maybe I'll start just with some of that. Maybe you can talk a bit more about the diversity visa lottery, if there's research out there that you know about. I mean, there is reporting, as far as I know, it has not been announced yet that President Trump is going to do a much broader travel ban than we saw in his first term. The New York Times has reported that it'll affect 43 countries, and a lot of those are in Africa. So that's going to have significant impacts on our relationships with Africa. We do know from the research, and I think just from history, we looked into this, you know, more than a decade ago when I worked with Jeb Bush and Matt McLarty on the CFR Immigration Policy Task Force. But immigrants coming to the United States, the ties they create here end up paying a lot of dividends down the road in terms of strengthening relationships with the countries that they come from. And there is, as many of you on the call will know now, some significant competition over African resources. They're so important for electric vehicles and other technologies of the future. The Chinese are very active there. So I think to the extent that we are cutting those personal ties. With Africans who want to come to the United States will be unable to come in. I think that's likely to harm us efforts in Africa to secure Resources that are going to be very important for her future. Um, Giovanni, do you want to talk about any aspect of that? Yeah, I just want to add two things from an economist point of view here in particular So one is that it is well known that immigration network and links. So you're talking about Africa are also generating other economic links, more trade, more foreign investment, more technological flow. So the idea that by stopping the inflow of a group, you are punishing that group and you are helping yourself is for an economist so foreign because there are mutual gain to be done, gain from trade, gain from mobility. Again, so I agree, yes, with the question that it seems odd, this idea of generating that. it seems that another part is that the immigrant of foreign scholar in the u.s seemed to me an incredible form of the soft power that the u.s had which is the u.s has educated a lot of people who have been world leaders through this they come to study and they go and by limiting this in countries so important as africa where for sure the resources in the future are but any other this will be also reduced and going in a world where the u.s does not play this important role, I think also, is going to come to a detriment to the US. Yeah, there have been some good pieces in Foreign Affairs and other publications about the Trump administration's very different approach when it comes to soft power. I think exactly administrations, Republican and Democratic, have recognized exactly what Giovanni is talking about. This administration, much more so, I think, even than in Trump's first term, has a very different view on the virtues of these very soft power tools. I mean, you look at the... at the attempt to shut down the Voice of America and the other American radio broadcasts, which are classic. Right. Exactly. Let's move on. We will take a written question from John Eldon, who is a professor at the University of California, San Diego. How many lower skill job opportunities will disappear with continuing automation in robotics? Yes. So that's a good question. It is a question that everybody asks in the labor market. So robotics is going to play a role in the future, particularly in some of these jobs. However, it seems that there are a lot of jobs that we're still far from efficiently making robotics, that humans are still doing much better at a much lower cost, and in which I don't think that the research and the innovation will be. So there will be a massive robotics research for a lot of... military goals, military replacing, these are high value, high cost. But in terms of replacing waiters who work in a restaurant or people who take care of the kids and the elderly, I think we are still not so close to do that. This means, I think, that maybe 50 years from now, robotics will play a very big role in this. In the transition to then, though, immigrants will provide in the next... decade many of these jobs will either be done by humans or probably be too expensive and some of them will not be done think about care of the elderly for instance they're likely in the next 10 years is that if we don't have enough people who do those jobs those jobs are done in the family by people who have to give up jobs and daughters and sons they're not going to be robots likely coming in such a short term so in the longer run if the shortage continues because the us is continue to be relatively closed. I think you're right that the research and the pressure would be to replace some with robotics and technology in general and automation. But I think in the medium run, still there is going to be a lot of potential for jobs for immigrants. If that doesn't happen, the cost of those jobs will go up, the cost of the services and the availability will go down. Giovanni, just one thing I'm wondering, this is, I think, early still, but if you look at AI, My sense is a lot of the impacts there are actually more in language-based fields, so probably more likely to affect native-born workers than immigrants. I think the shock we're going to see coming may affect native-born workers more than it would affect immigrant workers. It may be too early to tell, but... Absolutely, you're right. So AI will also be another technology that has big effect. Maybe those would be even more consequential for highly educated type of jobs, what we consider. And there, as economists say, will really depend on how much AI technology replaces and complement which skills, right? Because you can think that some of that AI help people to write a better essay, but you still need the creativity of the essay. Otherwise, are you producing? So maybe some people who are creative research helps, but if you were just the copy editor of that, that job is going to go. So we will see how that balance works. Yeah, I'm certainly encouraging my students to use it and get creative with it because they're going to need to know how to use AI in their work. I'm not discouraging it at all among my students. I agree. We will take the raised hand from Luisa Blanco, who is a professor of public policy and economics at Pepperdine University. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for these. Good evening in Giovanni's case. Yeah, exactly. I know we're all over. place, but I'm in California. So, well, you know, thank you for giving me the opportunity to raise this question. So I think, you know, in the economics field, there's been a lot of conversation about the demographic cliff. There are, you know, statistics showing that, you know, the amount of population in the prime age, the working age is really going to be shrinking. And that is something we know for a fact, right? It's not like, you know, whoever's going to be 25 years later has to be born now. Right. So we know for sure that this is happening. And one thing that I would like to hear more from from from the speaker on their expertise is why we are not having more conversations in thinking how immigration policy can be a useful tool to address the demographic cliff. I was hoping, you know, that during the elections, this will probably come up, but never did. I am hoping, you know, that. We can have more conversations around this. Of course, it is. Because the demographic cliff is there. So I'm really curious to hear what are your thoughts on this and how we can move the conversation into that direction. Giovanni, do you want to start and I can talk a little bit about it? Yeah. Well, so the question, why is this not the conversation? I really cannot answer because, let me say one thing. So Luisa, you're right that this idea that a demographic... decline in aging is something that is happening at fast speed in Europe faster than in the US, in some Asian country even faster. So let me say one thing and then I leave it. I think that the economic case for having more immigration in response to an aging society, not just to replace a worker, but also to do a lot of the jobs which are linked to the aging economy is clear to everybody. However... I think that you also see some countries which are more advanced than the US in the demographic decline and decided not to go for the way of immigration as a solution. Japan and South Korea are countries where the aging is even more advanced and they have more older elderly people and if you look at their immigration policies are definitely more restrictive. So I think here there is a tension between the economic case, the demographic case and the more cultural ideological case. And maybe even with an aging population, some of the topics that make immigration a little culturally different or even a little kind of anxiety generating kind of have some impact. And so maybe we will live in a world in which countries will be aging, will need immigrants, will make an economic case. But from a cultural openness point of view, they will become less. open to accept them. And so the balance of these two things will determine what kind of policy the country will take. I don't know how to make the economic case and the demographic case more central for people that instead argue about on other ground that immigration is scary, is different, is changing things. Yeah, I mean, it's a great answer. The only thing I would add, I think that that's about 75% of the reason here in the United States. The conversation around immigration is rarely about the economics of immigration. It's much more about security and the border, cultural issues, that whole set of issues. But one thing I think people do need to be aware of is that this administration, and Stephen Miller is the figure who has most clearly articulated that, has adopted a very different view about the economics of immigration, his basic view. And it's belied by your research, Giovanni, and I think most of the other economic research out there, his view is very much. that immigrants are direct competition for American workers. And one of the explanation for low wages in the United States, which, you know, by OECD standards, we have a lot more low wage workers than a lot of these countries, that immigrant competition is an explanation for that. And by reducing immigration, we will drive up those wages. I don't think experience has tended to play that out, but he's certainly very persuaded. And I think this administration is pretty good. I agree. I agree with you. Sort of the administration, in particular, Stephen Miller, is somebody who will talk abundantly about this negative economic impact, which has really very little basis. And as soon as you think you see in reality that positivity, in a sense, is almost it seems to be almost more intellectually dishonest to go for the economic and then turn around the economic effect. One could say, look, maybe there are some benefits, but we're worried. about our culture, worry about security, and base all the anti-immigration sentiment on this other topic on which we can disagree and it's hard for me to bring data facts. But on that, there are a lot of data facts that are a little bit denied in that. So I agree, we should become better in order at least to continue to debunk that part of the immigration claim and then kind of the policy debate, of course, we'll have the other 70%, as you say. Yeah, would make for a much more reasonable discussion. Diana, next question. We will take a written question from Xochitl Bada, who is a professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. What do we know about the job competition between foreign-born workers who came without a high school degree and U.S.-born workers without a high school degree? Do we know to what extent those two groups fiercely compete for precarious low-wage jobs? A perfect question in light of this discussion. And Giovanni, if you feel like it, maybe talk a little bit about George Borjas' research. Yeah, because I think he's been the most prominent economist arguing that there really is very direct competition. Yes. So, I mean. It's logical and also as a sound economic ideas that if you have a very large increase in 1 type of workers, so let's call the people without a high school degree. And these workers are similar to the American workers. There is going to be competition. And this competition will potentially result either in some displacement of jobs or in depressing wage. Now, we have had someone different. So this is a fact that if you let. a very large number of low-skilled doing jobs that are American, in general, the tendency will be that of depressing a little bit their wages. However, this worker will have a lot of other effects also on the economy. They also demand goods, so they increase the demand. So some of this pure competition effect is not really only pure competition. And with Boris, we've had a lot of back and forth on arguing how similar immigrant and native were in doing certain jobs. And I have a lot of research that shows that immigrants do job which are somewhat different even in the same sector even in the same occupation if you look at you know maybe construction worker the immigrants are more doing the you know building of the wall the native are more doing the interaction between the worker and the supervisor so because they have different language skill manual skill physical skill they tend to do different job and this is Comparative advantage and specialization specialization is good for the economy. If you have some worker doing one thing and another another. So, in a complex economy, like the United States, you cannot just say, oh, in this 1 job. If we have only immigration in this 1 job, say, construction brick wall builder, and then, of course, just adding worker with the private group. Yes. But immigrants are not just this native move across occupation. This generate complementar. So the bottom line is that I think that looking at the number, although this competition effect exists, looking at number and looking at the fact that immigrants are somewhat different than native, they stimulate local demand. There are also high skill immigrants that generate other type of dynamics. Immigration in the last 20 years in the US has not contributed almost anything to the decline in wages of the low skill. In fact, the effect on wages of low skill has been roughly zero. more as we say is minus one percent minus two percent if you look at these estimates which are negative they are not massive and they were much bigger when a lot of no skill came which was the 80s and 90s rather than the 2000. so here we disagree on detail but they are not the cause of this stagnation of wages which i think instead have some technological causes maybe a little bit of a trade and outsourcing causes also de-unionization also changing minimum wage immigration does not seem to be the reason why low-skilled have not done very well. And in fact, immigrants have filled some job and they've given some complementary tasks that have not hurt natives so much. They have not helped them a lot. So that low-skill has not been helped very much by immigration. I agree. But there's not been too much of this competition effect going on. That's a great question and a lovely, comprehensive answer. Thanks, Giovanni. Diana, hopefully we got time for a couple more questions here. Who's next? We will take the raised hand from John Mathewson, who is a visiting lecturer at Cornell University. Thank you very much. I'm an old-time international civil servant in addition to all of that. And migration is a fascinating thing because, to a certain extent, part of the rules-based order on which the United Nations was set up was based on migration. We look at it right after World War II, there was a major refugee problem. And one of the ways you solve the long-term refugee problem was to deal with migration. And the International Organization for Migration was set up to do that. And I know some of those have been put in there. On the other hand, there has been more concern with it. And in 2016, there was an international compact on migration that was adopted. by the General Assembly. Now, I'm going to move now to the narrower thing of the current of our country. In terms of the IOM, the International Organization for Migration, the United States basically pushed it, and for most of its history, its heads were always from the United States. But now, there is some question about what's happening. Secondly, when they adopted the compact on migration, Five countries voted against it, and the U.S. was one of them. So, in other words, there is an international rule system in which the U.S. is maybe not participating so much. And the question is, to what extent does the connection between the U.S. and its economy and the rest of this rule-based order important? And I'll put one... thing on the table for that. Yesterday, the government of Florida began to try to deal with the problem. They had a shortage of low-wage workers in undesirable jobs, and their solution would have been to loosen child labor laws, that you could allow 14 years old for voting. And the good news is they can get away with it. because the United States is the only country on the planet which never ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Over to you. Thanks. Thanks for the question, John. Actually, in the book I shamelessly hawked, we write some about the international compact on migration and other efforts to coordinate and regulate migration at more of an international level. Unfortunately, it's not been terribly successful on the whole. The rules in that area have not been... been widely followed, not just by the United States, but by others. But Giovanni, are there good examples of international cooperation that help improve labor market outcomes? Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question. And it's hard to think. So, I mean, I would say that there are some countries which have had part of their immigration system designed the thinking of really solving some economic issues. You can think of course, of small country like Singapore being very open to immigration and attracting people and becoming a hub for innovation growth. In Europe, Luxembourg and Switzerland are countries which have the largest inflow of immigrants from the rest of Europe and other places where this has been the basis of their economic strength and economic growth. I would say that Canada and Australia have also some policies which are... quite immigration friendly and they've been working relatively well for their economies but this problem that you say that immigration is a complicated issue a lot of european countries also are closing rather than opening when they are also aging and they will benefit from immigration is hard up to find a country which is a model for this or a larger country and in the past i would say that in some part of its history the us has been quite a beacon for some of the immigration policies, although not now for certain. And as you say, international cooperation sometimes has been problematic in many sides on this topic. Immigration seems to be an area in which nations protect their sovereignty quite jealously. Very jealously. Of course, where they were willing to give up a fair bit of it. But as we're seeing today, even that is being clawed back. True, true. Much more national. policies across the board. So I think we are just about at time. So Giovanni, I just want to thank you so much for sharing your insights. I want to thank the group here for the excellent questions and contributions. I think this was a very rich discussion. Just looking ahead, the last Global Affairs Expert webinar of the Winter-Spring Series is going to take place, I guess, is next Wednesday, April 2nd at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Jennifer, Nuzzo, who's a professor of epidemiology, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, is going to lead a conversation on complex public health emergencies, so COVID and beyond. In the meantime, I encourage you all to learn about the paid internships at CFR for students, fellowships for professors. That's at cfr.org slash careers. And visit our various sites, cfr.org, foreignaffairs.com. I think globalhealth.org for research and analysis. And my students love the background, so I'll put a plug in there. So thanks again, everyone, for joining us. Thank you, Giovanni, for staying up late. Thank you. Thank you. We'll see you all at our webinar next week. Have a great day, everyone.

Thank you all for joining us. I think Emily has already noted today's discussions on the record. The video and transcript will be available on education.cfr.org. And if you'd like to share the materials with your colleagues or classmates, feel free to do so.

As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. So I'm delighted, all the way from a little town just outside of Rome. to have with us Giovanni Perry to discuss migration and labor economics.

I'll read you his formal background here, but for those of us who follow these issues, I did for many years as a journalist and now work on them through CFR and in my academic work, Giovanni has been the go-to scholar on issues of trying to understand how immigration affects the U.S. labor market. So I am one of a huge number of people very appreciative for your work in this field. Dr. Perry is the C. Brian Cameron Distinguished Professor in International Economics and the founder and director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis. He's also a research associate at NBER and was previously co-editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association.

He serves on the editorial board of several economics journals, and he is the author of the 2016 book. the economics of international migration. So welcome, Giovanni. Thank you so much to speak with us today.

Thank you, Ted. Such a kind introduction. Too generous.

Thank you. So Giovanni's got some slides he's going to share with us. I'll have a follow-up or two, and then we will open it up for questions and discussions. We have a wonderful large group here, so I want to make sure there's time for everybody to interact. with our speaker so over to you uh giovanni for for the an introductory set of slides in common great uh thank you very much uh ted and i i thought that is useful to start with a few facts and a little structure on this economics of immigration which has a lot of talk sometimes and not a lot of clarity so allow me to share the screen and um to um talk about a little bit about trends and the what economists, what research in economics says about the impact of immigration.

So I will proceed as follow and we'll just show you a few slides. But first, I will give you a couple of aggregate trends in terms of foreign born in the US, how many they are, what have been their evolution. Then we're going to talk a little bit about how economists characterize what impact immigration has in the longer run on income, gross domestic product, which is the measure we have of income created on productivity, on investment, on wages, and on employment in the U.S. And then I will talk a little bit about 20 years up to COVID, what we saw in immigration there, and then the four year after COVID, what we see, what we saw since then on the U.S. economy and labor market.

So the first slide that I want to show, and I want to start a conversation here, is that there are a lot of noise and rumor and data about immigration. But the way in which the presence of foreign born in the US has changed is illustrated by this graph. This graph shows in millions how many foreign born immigrants of different education level, the education level will be very linked to the type of jobs that immigrants do, how immigrants of different education level have changed from 1970, actually 1960, up to 2000, and then from 2000 up to 2023. which is the last year in which the US Census has a very precise measure of these things. And the different colors are the red one are immigrants who don't have a high school degree, the two dashed are immigrants who have some high school or some college, and the blue are the college-educated immigrants. Two things jump out in this graph to you.

First, that immigration has been growing steadily from 1970 until now, I would say, but in two different ways. Up to 2000, all groups were growing quite fast and the largest group was the group with particularly low education the people with no high school degree Since 2000, the group of people with low education has remained relatively flat. Only in the last year, there is this bump. We'll go back to talk about this. This is the bump that a lot of people have talked about.

22, 23 were years of particularly large immigration relative to the previous. But if you look at this bump in perspective, this doesn't look like a shocking bump, to tell you the truth. It looks like a little bit of a bump.

And here we will discuss it. But that. College educated instead since 2000 have increased a lot.

So immigrants in the US have always been quite a large number of college educated, but in the last 24 years, they have become predominantly college educated relative to the one who have lower education. Now, this is a fact and keep it in mind when we talk about the consequences. Keep in mind that other countries in the world have not been able to attract such a large group of college and highly educated, While many European countries, other countries have also attracted some laborer, many fewer have attracted the amount of brains that the U.S. has attracted.

I am simplifying here a little bit of high skill. In fact, if you look at the concentration of foreign born in groups that go from lower to higher educated. So as a share of the population, there are in the late 2010s, 14% of the U.S. population was foreign born. But 17% of the college graduate, 22% of people with a STEM degree.

And if you go among the PhD in science, master in science, one third to up to one third of the people are foreign born. So immigrants contribute to the whole spectrum of worker and skill in the U.S. But certainly the U.S. is able to attract a lot of highly skilled immigrants. So.

Then how do the immigrants do when they arrive in the U.S.? Are they integrating in the U.S. economy or not? These are graphs that show for the three biggest group of immigrants, Mexican, Chinese, and Indian.

And keep in mind, these groups in terms of education are very different. Mexican are predominantly low-educated immigrants. Chinese are intermediate. Indian are very high.

But this line shows you the employment rate of these immigrants. relative, we standardize the U.S. natives to zero. So we compare different cohort of immigrants that arrived recently or in the past, and we can track how their employment probability, so their employment rate, how many of them are employed relative to the population, fare relative to native.

One thing that you notice is that all groups, after 10 years they have been in the U.S., are at or above the employment rate of the U.S. So not only immigrants come from all groups, but they quickly integrate in the labor markets in the US. Again, this is not common in the world.

In Europe, the situation is quite different. Immigrants take longer to integrate in the US, and sometimes they don't fully. With these two facts, that a lot of immigrants come in with a lot of different skills, and they relatively quickly integrate in the US market, what is the effect of immigrants? So the way in which economists first approach this idea, would say is to look at how they affect the growth of U.S. GDP, the growth of income in the United States.

And the growth of income in the United States is made up of two parts. One is more workers you have in the economy, the more you produce. This clearly depends on how many body you have. And then how more productive these people are, either because they use more machine, computer equipment, they use more investment.

in physical capital, or because they have more productivity, innovation because of innovation, better efficiency, the more people produce. Now, immigration, you can think, and for long time, economists have been stuck on the idea that immigrants were bodies that increased the number of employed. And that's certainly true.

They increased the size of the American economy. And as we will see, they have. But immigrants also have contributed substantially to these two parts, to investment and to productivity growth. And let me give you the intuition. There is a ton of research and we can talk.

Investment because immigrants themselves are firm creator. They are entrepreneur. They start companies and they generate a faster rate of entrepreneurship and productivity growth.

Because if I told you a lot of them are scientists, engineer, people who work in technology, they have different type of skills than native. They come on with different idea. They generate no idea for new restaurant, new products.

And so both entrepreneur at the high end of technology and low end benefit in terms of productivity from this variety. So in fact, if I put up here a couple of numbers, recent estimates of the impact of immigrant in U.S. states. or across rich country, or ECDs are all the rich countries, is that 1% more immigrants means 0.27% more investment, on top of 1% more workers, obviously. They are workers, but they also stimulate investment.

And almost 1% more in growth in productivity. And in the other country outside of the world, maybe even a little bit more contribution to capital growth, and a little bit less to productivity. Productivity is where...

the innovative immigrant entrepreneurial immigrant that grow the variety and the quality of goods which are produced and the quality variety and quality of firms which are there so immigrant on average on average generated in the 20 years up to 2020 a growth of employment of of population employment by six percent in the u.s and in turn this six percent more employment generated another five six percent in larger productivity per worker which is the main determinant in the long run of wages per worker so you know on average they have really helped the us economy now one question is okay they have helped everybody but did they hurt somebody did they hurt the people who are less skilled less educated and this depends on two things one is how is the composition of immigrants how many skilled highly educated versus unskilled you have if you only have unskilled immigrant and there is only competition on the side of unskilled, maybe you have a stronger effect. I've already showed you that that's not quite the case, but that's important. And the other, which is an interesting thing, which is emerging more and more, is did these people take jobs, displaced jobs, or they helped fill vacancies? Meaning, did the US in this period generate more job potential than they have employed people for, or the other way around? They have a lot of employed people.

crowding a lot of job potentials so let me speak to these things for the last couple of minutes and then i'm done so the what is the distribution of immigrant that came in here in another way i'm showing what i've showed in the previous graph in the period 1980 to 2000 this is the net inflow of immigrant as percentage of non-college sorry non-high school some high school college and college plus and this is the contribution of immigrants in a percentage of the group in the post 2000 so already you see that already in the 80s up to 2000 there were a lot of college educated in there were also a lot of people with low education coming in but the distribution was balanced but in the recent period it has been even more concentrated among the high skills so the competition that immigrant have brought at the low end of the spectrum has not even been as strong as the as the inflow of highly skilled immigrant and because of that they didn't really depress wage they didn't they weren't really responsible for this for this effect but even more interestingly let's talk about the post 2020 the post 2020 and new things happens in the u.s labor force and this thing is that the u.s labor force for the first time in history starts shrinking this is the net number of million people which are added or subtracted to the labor force every year in the period 2010-14, 15-19, and 2023. You see that while the U.S. labor force was growing by one and a half million per year in the 80s and 90s and early 2000, recently has been growing much slower. But in the last four years, it has actually been shrinking. It has taken away 400,000 people in the last five years. Why?

Well, covid was one reason that people left but because the age structure of the population is the uf us is that we have huge cohort the baby boomer exiting and smaller cohort now what did foreign born do foreign born offset in part this decline of the population by in the last period this bump of immigrant has generated a little bit of an offset of this loss of native however if you look at the economy it does not offset enough because on the right hand side, I have the average number of unfilled jobs at the end of each month, on average, that the US economy has generated. This number has been steadily increasing over time in the last decade plus. In fact, in the 2020-2023 period was an extraordinary period in terms of number of unfilled vacancies, jobs which stay open month after month. This means 9 million... at the end of each month per there were 9 million of job opening which were not filled at the end of each month in the period 2020 2023. so this is interesting but i say even more interesting is to look at the composition of these jobs by college and non-college.

It's true that the U.S. labor force is not growing as fast. That is rate of growth have declined in the last period. But the college educated are still growing in the labor force. A little bit offset by foreign born. Is the non-college educated, which are disappearing fast from the U.S. labor force because the new generation are more educated than the old.

And immigrants, which are making up a little bit, because they are not that decline again as i said non-college educated immigrants in the last period bumped back a little bit are still not enough to fill the vacancies and i put here two cons two sector which are typically generating a lot of non-college job opening construction and leisure and hospitality and the opening the unfilled jobs in each one of this sector heavy in fact growing okay so i am over time so let me conclude I think that overall there is a strong evidence in the economic facts and data that immigrants have had a very strong positive impact on U.S. income per capita. College educators have had a very important role in this, but even non-college educated have found employment at very high rates and given that labor force is shrinking since 2020, non-college immigrant could be economically even more relevant to fill some of this job and This 2022-23 bump of immigrants maybe was a good news in economic terms, at least for sure. Then Ted will tell us what tragic consequences this had politically. But for now, let me stay economist.

And we don't find that it had a negative economic impact. Sorry, I went a bit long. That's it.

Thank you, Giovanni. That was tremendous. That's a model for how to convey a lot of important information very efficiently.

I actually have one question, one kind of comment question. I want the rest of you who are watching this to start teeing up your questions. Deanna will field those and get them to both of us. So two quick questions to you, Mani.

A country that I follow quite closely is Canada, which also has very high levels of immigration, has tried through its system to attract highly educated immigrants. and yet really struggles with productivity. And Canada has a major productivity challenge. And when you looked at the numbers you presented, sort of comparing the productivity bump in the U.S. from immigration compared to the OECD average, clearly for whatever reason, we are gaining more of a productivity boost here in the United States than most other countries.

What's the explanation for that? Is that a feature the immigrants were attracting? Or is it a feature of... the American labor market or the way we handle innovation?

Is it something about the way our economy is structured? So how would you explain that rather large discrepancy on the productivity gains coming from immigration between the United States and other OECD countries? A great question.

I would say there are three plausible contributors to this. Number one is the selection of immigrants who come to the United States. There is no doubt that the United States, because of this very high quality of its universities and of some of these companies attracting people from the world who are real genuinely talented innovative as smart and there is no doubt that wherever you are in europe in africa in asia when you think about oh where can be a top physicist the top chemist a top scientist the us come to mind so one selection of brilliant creative people two variety of brilliant and different people the us is not only the country that gets more in number it is almost the biggest number of country that contribute i mean people talk about this i put down just india mexico and china which are three very different countries they contribute a lot but the rest of latin america but europe but some countries of africa so people from all over there is a lot of research that says difference of country imply different of ideas different of different of skills and the third i would say that the us has a particularly good environment for thriving of in entrepreneurship and innovation. That's certainly a little bit the freer action activity of entrepreneurs, the friendly type of legislations that they have, and this variety of people and ideas.

So entrepreneurship, variety, and talent of immigrants contribute, and I agree with you, even more than Canada. Canada is the country that I take sometimes an example of smaller U.S. in terms of what they have done so far. Let me say one thing.

Canada is in a position that it can benefit a lot if the U.S. changed this drastically because they are the most similar in terms of number of people they have attracted talent. If the U.S. were to change direction and close, I think Canada will become the beneficiary of that. Excellent.

And one other follow-in, and I should have remind you, Deanna's put it up there in the chat. If you have a question, click the raise hand icon on your screen or on an iPad or tablet, click the more button to access the raised hand feature. And then she will prompt you to unmute when it comes to your question. The other one, and just to elaborate a little more on the 2022. 23 period, because it was obviously significant economically and also, as you hinted at, quite significant politically.

I mean, I think the way most of us look at that period is that there were two things going on. One was a sort of post-COVID bump. You had natural migration restricted in a variety of ways because of the COVID border closures and travel restrictions, the shutdown of immigration visa processing for many months.

in the United States. So some of that was a rebound from that period of restraint. But the other thing, of course, that went on was that the Biden administration was actively welcoming a lot of people, particularly from Latin America, from Haiti, from Cuba, from Nicaragua, from Venezuela, as part of its border control strategy. And that had political impacts that may well come up in the questions. But what I found really interesting about your presentation is that you seem to be suggesting that what happened in that period coincided with a sort of gradual, but then perhaps a little more sudden shrinking of the native labor force.

We have a crystal ball a little bit. As I say, I'm sure there are going to be questions that come up about the current administration's policies. But one of the things I think we do know is you're not going to see that kind of bump again.

And you may actually see some significant reduction. We've had the administration cancel temporary protected status programs and say that they're going to move to deport a lot of people who came in in that period under these parole programs. What is the likely economic impact of restrictions? And that fits more in your lower educated level, I think, on average.

There's certainly highly educated people coming in these streams, but on balance, I think, lower. So what is your opinion? analytical framework tell you about the likely consequences of the restrictions that we're already seeing and are going to see? Yes. So let me address both.

So you're absolutely right that the post-COVID bump of 2022-2023, in particular, as peak year, was in part some pent-up pressure that was blocked during COVID, in part these policies in which... a couple of things changed as you say a lot of temporary protected status for several uh groups uh allowing people to come in and claim asylum in uh apply for asylum and stay which was um also not done before so generated a larger inflow as you say this was happening at a time in which a lot of these people found employment because the labor market were tightening up after covid there was these two phenomena happening in the labor market. One, a group of aging people decided to retire. So retirement went up and a lot of people decided that it was very risky for them to do this in-person manual jobs in that in the remote type of job became more available. And a lot of Americans jumped on that.

And so a lot of these manual in-person job became hard to fill. And these people who arrived in that period actually did contribute to fill those. I want to say Politically or policy thinking clearly seemed a little odd.

There would have been, I think, an economic case to make, to say this is a period of tight labor market. Let's try to open up for some job or work visa to this type of immigrant, which that was not even tried. Of course, this would have needed some legislation.

All we are done with this special authority, temporary visa status. This, to me, speaks to the way in which the... immigration policies done in this country there is never a little bit of an economic planning we do need these people what i want to say that bump was very beneficial but the way in which it was done cows at the border a lot of people coming gave the impression that was a totally overwhelming experience i think that the same number of people coming with cleaner visa clearer situation would have found employment and being more effective going forward tightening deporting reducing i think it will in terms of trend, generate more tightening of the labor market with two results.

One, some sector will not be able to grow as they have grown in the past. Hospitality, food, construction, they rely a lot on this. So what will happen?

Well, it will be harder for them to fill the jobs. Therefore, they will not grow companies, hotels will not be open. Maybe the prices of some of these goods will go up somewhat, and this will reduce their growth. And so the economy in those sectors will not grow for the people who work and also for the connected as it could have.

And I think this will become at some point A real concern, I would say, for an administration that looks at the economic consequences of this. So we will see how much deportation really affects the number. So far, it seems to me very in your face, some of these cases, but maybe in terms of number, it has not been so huge.

But certainly there has been a reduction in the number of people coming in. So harder to fill position, slow down in growth, increase in prices. Those are the three things that I think we'll see.

for a little while. And then the question is, will that push a little bit more of changing of legal immigration policies for people who can come to work in the US? Thank you very much, Jan.

I watch the trade stuff very closely as well. And tariffs are also likely to be inflationary. So I think that's the theme we're going to be watching. Jan, it looks like we've got a series of questions that have come in. So I'll turn it over to you and let's get some of the other folks on the call involved.

We will take the raised hand from Mojubalu Alufonke Okome, who is a professor at Brooklyn College. Thank you very much. I think this immigration thing for me also has to do with the education sector, because decisions that are being made in the larger...

policy scenario is affecting some institutions such that they're not admitting PhD students from abroad. And so if innovation and brilliance is what gives America the bump, the productivity bump, isn't it, can't we just speculate and say that this is going to be affected? Also, you know, the whole variety of people, ideas and all that is being challenged because of this obsession about DEI being the problem. So how would this moving forward, how would this affect policies on immigration?

And then, you know, the favorable effects from this movement of people who. see the U.S. as a place where they could thrive? Thank you. This is a great question.

Giovanni, I'm just going to offer a slight addition to this. One of the striking things from some of the graphs you showed there is seemingly how immune a lot of these trends are to policy changes. I mean, I wrote a book about the post 9-11 immigration and temporary visa restrictions and others speculating that this could have a negative impact on.

on how attractive the United States was to immigrants didn't really seem to have any long-term effect. Questioner raises some real questions about the research enterprise here in the United States and if it's weakened. So what's your best guess of the effect some of these moves might have?

So one thing that I'm very clear, thank you for the question, is that universities in the US have been the gateway of a large part of these high skilled flows both admitting these people as undergraduate as master as phd allowing them to stay a little bit in here i just wrote the paper they came out on the importance of foreign master student as a creator of startup companies in the us almost half of the startup company in the us are created by this foreign master student who are only 15 20 percent and this is crucial now i really think and again maybe it's a little early to see But if there is a strong effect of some of the policies on the ability of university of attracting foreign students, high quality foreign students, this will have a long term impact. You're right that that graph shows that the growth of college educated has continued. However, if you look at the growth of the foreign visa students in the US, this foreign visa instead had a slowdown already during the first from 2017 to 2020. This visa peaked almost in 2017, then they slowed down, then during COVID they collapsed, then they bounced back significantly.

Those students who are visa are going to be in 10 years the people who are going to produce the high skills that are entrepreneurs, innovators, scientists. An environment that makes for universities harder to fund the student, to attract the student, to allow the student in, will create I think a significant effect. And the question on on the AI. Variety of ideas needs to be in there to be strong for science. And so we will see if we lose this freedom of diversity and differences, that can be an issue as well.

But certainly, I think the role the university will play is going to be very important. Great question. Thank you for the response.

Diana, next question. We will take a written question from Ray Kozlowski, who's professor and director of the Master of International Affairs program at SUNY Albany. He asks, What percentage of college-educated immigrants manage to secure jobs in their fields that enable them to fully utilize their education and skills?

What percentage, alternatively, are underemployed or unemployed, such as brain waste? Great question. Great to have you on the call here, Ray.

Greetings. We haven't talked in too long. Giovanni. Great question. Very important question.

So I actually would say the following. Again, we have a couple of recent papers that look at the career of... foreign who study in the US and what happens afterwards. So the number one thing, the number one brain not used, I don't know if it's waste for the US, is that a lot of these students who study in the US, leave the US when they have finished their study, because their visa by definition does not allow them. These are millions of visa student, 20% of them can stay and find a job.

One thing that helped a lot was the extension of the OPT, this optional practical training period in which students can find some job for three years. Then it bumped up this 20% to 25, but only 20% of them stay. I would say that you don't observe too much of this brain waste because people who stay, they need to stay on very specific, either H-1B or because they're hired or because they have a clear plan. So the waste is not, I would say that these people studying in the US and then are i don't know taxidermy drivers with all respect but or do something for which only but is there a lot of them greatest education would have a company that hired them would have a position but they cannot find a visa to stay in the us um with the h1b limitation so this is a lot a large kind of emerald and we were very surprised finding that even for a master student in spite of almost half of the master's students going back, the ones who remain are very likely to create companies and create high quality companies.

So I think these students who graduate do pretty well, but not so many stay. Yeah, if I can just add a little something here, Ray, you'll appreciate this because it's a US-Canada story, but there are real challenges in terms of the visa categories. I've been going to a chiropractor for the last little while. It's helped me a lot.

Way more freedom in my life. And the young man working on me is a Canadian who's been down here, studied here, went to four years of chiropractor school, is working here. But his permission is about to run out.

And he would like to be able to apply for what they call the NAFTA visa or the TN visa. It allows Canadians to work in the U.S. and Mexicans to work in the United States. Turns out that there's no category for chiropractors.

That's not a category that fits under this relatively easy to obtain North American visa. There's been discussions for years about updating that list. But immigration has become so controversial here in the U.S. that the Americans negotiate on it.

So he's looking at maybe an H-1B, but then you get into the lottery situation, right? Does his number come up? And so I think your point is a very important one. There's a lot of students who would like to stay, but they can't find a visa that allows them to stay.

And we haven't updated those categories in a long time. So the same type of issue arose with the OPT, which only were for STEM. And so we had to classify STEM.

So, for instance, economics was not considered STEM. And then when this passed, we reclassified the STEM to allow students to stay and take advantage of these years extra in the U.S. So it's a little crazy, the taxonomy there.

Yeah, absolutely. And complicated. And complicated. I'm talking to lots of migrants.

It dominates their lives in different ways. The choices that they're able to make in terms of career and family and other things are very strongly influenced by their status here in the United States, their visa status. Deanna, let's move on. We will take the raised hand from Ido Agbahonu, who is an assistant professor at Bethune-Cookman University. Good afternoon.

Thank you so much for this presentation. My name is Dr. Edo Adweonu, I teach at the Tunkuk University of Political Science and International Relations. I'm an African-born, and recently President Trump has issued some restrictions. on a visa, the DV visa, also known as lottery visa.

That's the visa that I came. I was part of that visa process. And he gave a red registration to some, meaning no visa to US at all, including Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia, and other. 20 or 19 other countries that have some restrictions.

But the DV visa was banned for all the 54 countries in Africa. But if you look at Africa, Africa is a continent that is rich in terms of resources. But I don't think, I don't know if they think about those resources before they are making this kind of immigration policy.

So they, you know. He's banning Africans to come to the United States. But what happened to their resources that all the great powers are fighting for? If you look at the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about 80% of the world's resources in cobalt are needed for the thieves and the battery and so on and so forth, both our computer and cell phone are there.

United States is fighting for, China is fighting there, Turkey and so on. All those great powers are fighting, but yet he doesn't want Africans to come to the United States, but wants African minerals. So what are the consequences that will lead? At the same time, he provided about 40 non-white countries, allowed those to the visa, the DV visa. to continue going on in those 40 non-white countries.

So it's a making Americans right again issue, not great issues. So those are the questions that I'm asking. That's a good set of questions. Giovanni, maybe I'll start just with some of that. Maybe you can talk a bit more about the diversity visa lottery, if there's research out there that you know about.

I mean, there is reporting, as far as I know, it has not been announced yet that President Trump is going to do a much broader travel ban than we saw in his first term. The New York Times has reported that it'll affect 43 countries, and a lot of those are in Africa. So that's going to have significant impacts on our relationships with Africa. We do know from the research, and I think just from history, we looked into this, you know, more than a decade ago when I worked with Jeb Bush and Matt McLarty on the CFR Immigration Policy Task Force. But immigrants coming to the United States, the ties they create here end up paying a lot of dividends down the road in terms of strengthening relationships with the countries that they come from.

And there is, as many of you on the call will know now, some significant competition over African resources. They're so important for electric vehicles and other technologies of the future. The Chinese are very active there.

So I think to the extent that we are cutting those personal ties. With Africans who want to come to the United States will be unable to come in. I think that's likely to harm us efforts in Africa to secure Resources that are going to be very important for her future.

Um, Giovanni, do you want to talk about any aspect of that? Yeah, I just want to add two things from an economist point of view here in particular So one is that it is well known that immigration network and links. So you're talking about Africa are also generating other economic links, more trade, more foreign investment, more technological flow. So the idea that by stopping the inflow of a group, you are punishing that group and you are helping yourself is for an economist so foreign because there are mutual gain to be done, gain from trade, gain from mobility. Again, so I agree, yes, with the question that it seems odd, this idea of generating that.

it seems that another part is that the immigrant of foreign scholar in the u.s seemed to me an incredible form of the soft power that the u.s had which is the u.s has educated a lot of people who have been world leaders through this they come to study and they go and by limiting this in countries so important as africa where for sure the resources in the future are but any other this will be also reduced and going in a world where the u.s does not play this important role, I think also, is going to come to a detriment to the US. Yeah, there have been some good pieces in Foreign Affairs and other publications about the Trump administration's very different approach when it comes to soft power. I think exactly administrations, Republican and Democratic, have recognized exactly what Giovanni is talking about. This administration, much more so, I think, even than in Trump's first term, has a very different view on the virtues of these very soft power tools. I mean, you look at the...

at the attempt to shut down the Voice of America and the other American radio broadcasts, which are classic. Right. Exactly. Let's move on. We will take a written question from John Eldon, who is a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

How many lower skill job opportunities will disappear with continuing automation in robotics? Yes. So that's a good question.

It is a question that everybody asks in the labor market. So robotics is going to play a role in the future, particularly in some of these jobs. However, it seems that there are a lot of jobs that we're still far from efficiently making robotics, that humans are still doing much better at a much lower cost, and in which I don't think that the research and the innovation will be. So there will be a massive robotics research for a lot of...

military goals, military replacing, these are high value, high cost. But in terms of replacing waiters who work in a restaurant or people who take care of the kids and the elderly, I think we are still not so close to do that. This means, I think, that maybe 50 years from now, robotics will play a very big role in this. In the transition to then, though, immigrants will provide in the next... decade many of these jobs will either be done by humans or probably be too expensive and some of them will not be done think about care of the elderly for instance they're likely in the next 10 years is that if we don't have enough people who do those jobs those jobs are done in the family by people who have to give up jobs and daughters and sons they're not going to be robots likely coming in such a short term so in the longer run if the shortage continues because the us is continue to be relatively closed.

I think you're right that the research and the pressure would be to replace some with robotics and technology in general and automation. But I think in the medium run, still there is going to be a lot of potential for jobs for immigrants. If that doesn't happen, the cost of those jobs will go up, the cost of the services and the availability will go down. Giovanni, just one thing I'm wondering, this is, I think, early still, but if you look at AI, My sense is a lot of the impacts there are actually more in language-based fields, so probably more likely to affect native-born workers than immigrants.

I think the shock we're going to see coming may affect native-born workers more than it would affect immigrant workers. It may be too early to tell, but... Absolutely, you're right.

So AI will also be another technology that has big effect. Maybe those would be even more consequential for highly educated type of jobs, what we consider. And there, as economists say, will really depend on how much AI technology replaces and complement which skills, right? Because you can think that some of that AI help people to write a better essay, but you still need the creativity of the essay. Otherwise, are you producing?

So maybe some people who are creative research helps, but if you were just the copy editor of that, that job is going to go. So we will see how that balance works. Yeah, I'm certainly encouraging my students to use it and get creative with it because they're going to need to know how to use AI in their work.

I'm not discouraging it at all among my students. I agree. We will take the raised hand from Luisa Blanco, who is a professor of public policy and economics at Pepperdine University. Hi, good afternoon.

Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for these. Good evening in Giovanni's case.

Yeah, exactly. I know we're all over. place, but I'm in California.

So, well, you know, thank you for giving me the opportunity to raise this question. So I think, you know, in the economics field, there's been a lot of conversation about the demographic cliff. There are, you know, statistics showing that, you know, the amount of population in the prime age, the working age is really going to be shrinking. And that is something we know for a fact, right?

It's not like, you know, whoever's going to be 25 years later has to be born now. Right. So we know for sure that this is happening. And one thing that I would like to hear more from from from the speaker on their expertise is why we are not having more conversations in thinking how immigration policy can be a useful tool to address the demographic cliff. I was hoping, you know, that during the elections, this will probably come up, but never did.

I am hoping, you know, that. We can have more conversations around this. Of course, it is. Because the demographic cliff is there. So I'm really curious to hear what are your thoughts on this and how we can move the conversation into that direction.

Giovanni, do you want to start and I can talk a little bit about it? Yeah. Well, so the question, why is this not the conversation? I really cannot answer because, let me say one thing.

So Luisa, you're right that this idea that a demographic... decline in aging is something that is happening at fast speed in Europe faster than in the US, in some Asian country even faster. So let me say one thing and then I leave it.

I think that the economic case for having more immigration in response to an aging society, not just to replace a worker, but also to do a lot of the jobs which are linked to the aging economy is clear to everybody. However... I think that you also see some countries which are more advanced than the US in the demographic decline and decided not to go for the way of immigration as a solution. Japan and South Korea are countries where the aging is even more advanced and they have more older elderly people and if you look at their immigration policies are definitely more restrictive. So I think here there is a tension between the economic case, the demographic case and the more cultural ideological case.

And maybe even with an aging population, some of the topics that make immigration a little culturally different or even a little kind of anxiety generating kind of have some impact. And so maybe we will live in a world in which countries will be aging, will need immigrants, will make an economic case. But from a cultural openness point of view, they will become less. open to accept them. And so the balance of these two things will determine what kind of policy the country will take.

I don't know how to make the economic case and the demographic case more central for people that instead argue about on other ground that immigration is scary, is different, is changing things. Yeah, I mean, it's a great answer. The only thing I would add, I think that that's about 75% of the reason here in the United States. The conversation around immigration is rarely about the economics of immigration. It's much more about security and the border, cultural issues, that whole set of issues.

But one thing I think people do need to be aware of is that this administration, and Stephen Miller is the figure who has most clearly articulated that, has adopted a very different view about the economics of immigration, his basic view. And it's belied by your research, Giovanni, and I think most of the other economic research out there, his view is very much. that immigrants are direct competition for American workers.

And one of the explanation for low wages in the United States, which, you know, by OECD standards, we have a lot more low wage workers than a lot of these countries, that immigrant competition is an explanation for that. And by reducing immigration, we will drive up those wages. I don't think experience has tended to play that out, but he's certainly very persuaded. And I think this administration is pretty good.

I agree. I agree with you. Sort of the administration, in particular, Stephen Miller, is somebody who will talk abundantly about this negative economic impact, which has really very little basis. And as soon as you think you see in reality that positivity, in a sense, is almost it seems to be almost more intellectually dishonest to go for the economic and then turn around the economic effect. One could say, look, maybe there are some benefits, but we're worried.

about our culture, worry about security, and base all the anti-immigration sentiment on this other topic on which we can disagree and it's hard for me to bring data facts. But on that, there are a lot of data facts that are a little bit denied in that. So I agree, we should become better in order at least to continue to debunk that part of the immigration claim and then kind of the policy debate, of course, we'll have the other 70%, as you say. Yeah, would make for a much more reasonable discussion.

Diana, next question. We will take a written question from Xochitl Bada, who is a professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. What do we know about the job competition between foreign-born workers who came without a high school degree and U.S.-born workers without a high school degree? Do we know to what extent those two groups fiercely compete for precarious low-wage jobs? A perfect question in light of this discussion.

And Giovanni, if you feel like it, maybe talk a little bit about George Borjas' research. Yeah, because I think he's been the most prominent economist arguing that there really is very direct competition. Yes. So, I mean. It's logical and also as a sound economic ideas that if you have a very large increase in 1 type of workers, so let's call the people without a high school degree.

And these workers are similar to the American workers. There is going to be competition. And this competition will potentially result either in some displacement of jobs or in depressing wage. Now, we have had someone different.

So this is a fact that if you let. a very large number of low-skilled doing jobs that are American, in general, the tendency will be that of depressing a little bit their wages. However, this worker will have a lot of other effects also on the economy.

They also demand goods, so they increase the demand. So some of this pure competition effect is not really only pure competition. And with Boris, we've had a lot of back and forth on arguing how similar immigrant and native were in doing certain jobs.

And I have a lot of research that shows that immigrants do job which are somewhat different even in the same sector even in the same occupation if you look at you know maybe construction worker the immigrants are more doing the you know building of the wall the native are more doing the interaction between the worker and the supervisor so because they have different language skill manual skill physical skill they tend to do different job and this is Comparative advantage and specialization specialization is good for the economy. If you have some worker doing one thing and another another. So, in a complex economy, like the United States, you cannot just say, oh, in this 1 job. If we have only immigration in this 1 job, say, construction brick wall builder, and then, of course, just adding worker with the private group. Yes.

But immigrants are not just this native move across occupation. This generate complementar. So the bottom line is that I think that looking at the number, although this competition effect exists, looking at number and looking at the fact that immigrants are somewhat different than native, they stimulate local demand. There are also high skill immigrants that generate other type of dynamics.

Immigration in the last 20 years in the US has not contributed almost anything to the decline in wages of the low skill. In fact, the effect on wages of low skill has been roughly zero. more as we say is minus one percent minus two percent if you look at these estimates which are negative they are not massive and they were much bigger when a lot of no skill came which was the 80s and 90s rather than the 2000. so here we disagree on detail but they are not the cause of this stagnation of wages which i think instead have some technological causes maybe a little bit of a trade and outsourcing causes also de-unionization also changing minimum wage immigration does not seem to be the reason why low-skilled have not done very well. And in fact, immigrants have filled some job and they've given some complementary tasks that have not hurt natives so much.

They have not helped them a lot. So that low-skill has not been helped very much by immigration. I agree.

But there's not been too much of this competition effect going on. That's a great question and a lovely, comprehensive answer. Thanks, Giovanni.

Diana, hopefully we got time for a couple more questions here. Who's next? We will take the raised hand from John Mathewson, who is a visiting lecturer at Cornell University.

Thank you very much. I'm an old-time international civil servant in addition to all of that. And migration is a fascinating thing because, to a certain extent, part of the rules-based order on which the United Nations was set up was based on migration.

We look at it right after World War II, there was a major refugee problem. And one of the ways you solve the long-term refugee problem was to deal with migration. And the International Organization for Migration was set up to do that.

And I know some of those have been put in there. On the other hand, there has been more concern with it. And in 2016, there was an international compact on migration that was adopted. by the General Assembly.

Now, I'm going to move now to the narrower thing of the current of our country. In terms of the IOM, the International Organization for Migration, the United States basically pushed it, and for most of its history, its heads were always from the United States. But now, there is some question about what's happening.

Secondly, when they adopted the compact on migration, Five countries voted against it, and the U.S. was one of them. So, in other words, there is an international rule system in which the U.S. is maybe not participating so much. And the question is, to what extent does the connection between the U.S. and its economy and the rest of this rule-based order important?

And I'll put one... thing on the table for that. Yesterday, the government of Florida began to try to deal with the problem.

They had a shortage of low-wage workers in undesirable jobs, and their solution would have been to loosen child labor laws, that you could allow 14 years old for voting. And the good news is they can get away with it. because the United States is the only country on the planet which never ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Over to you. Thanks. Thanks for the question, John. Actually, in the book I shamelessly hawked, we write some about the international compact on migration and other efforts to coordinate and regulate migration at more of an international level.

Unfortunately, it's not been terribly successful on the whole. The rules in that area have not been... been widely followed, not just by the United States, but by others.

But Giovanni, are there good examples of international cooperation that help improve labor market outcomes? Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question.

And it's hard to think. So, I mean, I would say that there are some countries which have had part of their immigration system designed the thinking of really solving some economic issues. You can think of course, of small country like Singapore being very open to immigration and attracting people and becoming a hub for innovation growth. In Europe, Luxembourg and Switzerland are countries which have the largest inflow of immigrants from the rest of Europe and other places where this has been the basis of their economic strength and economic growth. I would say that Canada and Australia have also some policies which are...

quite immigration friendly and they've been working relatively well for their economies but this problem that you say that immigration is a complicated issue a lot of european countries also are closing rather than opening when they are also aging and they will benefit from immigration is hard up to find a country which is a model for this or a larger country and in the past i would say that in some part of its history the us has been quite a beacon for some of the immigration policies, although not now for certain. And as you say, international cooperation sometimes has been problematic in many sides on this topic. Immigration seems to be an area in which nations protect their sovereignty quite jealously.

Very jealously. Of course, where they were willing to give up a fair bit of it. But as we're seeing today, even that is being clawed back.

True, true. Much more national. policies across the board. So I think we are just about at time.

So Giovanni, I just want to thank you so much for sharing your insights. I want to thank the group here for the excellent questions and contributions. I think this was a very rich discussion. Just looking ahead, the last Global Affairs Expert webinar of the Winter-Spring Series is going to take place, I guess, is next Wednesday, April 2nd at 1 p.m.

Eastern time. Jennifer, Nuzzo, who's a professor of epidemiology, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, is going to lead a conversation on complex public health emergencies, so COVID and beyond. In the meantime, I encourage you all to learn about the paid internships at CFR for students, fellowships for professors.

That's at cfr.org slash careers. And visit our various sites, cfr.org, foreignaffairs.com. I think globalhealth.org for research and analysis. And my students love the background, so I'll put a plug in there. So thanks again, everyone, for joining us.

Thank you, Giovanni, for staying up late. Thank you. Thank you. We'll see you all at our webinar next week.

Have a great day, everyone.

Transcript for:Webinar Insights on Migration and Economics

Transcript for:
Webinar Insights on Migration and Economics