• So why is it that in lower-income countries, richer people emigrate more? What does that mean about the effects of immigration?

    @MariapiaMendola and I went all-out to find answers, using survey data on 653,613 people in 99 countries.

    Start with the facts. This shows 120,000+ people in low-income countries (Malawi, Laos,…). The orange bell-curve is the distribution of income (0=average). The blue line (with confidence interval) is the probability that people at each income are actively preparing to emigrate:

    This is not actual migration, but people who report that their intent to migrate has recently culminated in a very costly action, like purchasing international travel or applying for a visa.

    We show in the data that relatively richer people, as you would expect, are better able to turn their migration wishes and plans into reality than poorer people. So the line for actual migration, by income, should be even steeper than the blue line above.

    That has two remarkable implications. First, when poorer people get more money, they often invest it in… migration.

    This has been found in specific settings around the world. @SamuelBazzi rigorously showed this happening in rural Indonesia:

    https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20150548

    The second implication is about what happens to immigration on the other end.

    It means that the “additional” migrants caused by rising income in the origin country are likely to possess more & more of the things that make workers earn more, like education or work ethic.

    In the cold, hard economic terms used in the literature, it means that rising incomes in developing countries mean 1) higher propensity to emigrate from the origin and 2) more “positive selection” of immigrant workers at the destination.

    https://www.cgdev.org/publication/migration-developing-countries-selection-income-elasticity-and-simpsons-parad

    What’s going on here? Is it that richer people have an easier time paying to migrate? Is it that richer people invest more in things that facilitate migration, like schooling? Is it demographic change accompanying rising incomes?

    The literature posits all of these and others.

    And why is it so difficult for people, especially many smart people in the policy world, to accept these facts?

    I want to address all these with two pictures from the paper.

    First, pool all the surveyed people in 99 countries into one graph. As people begin to earn the (price-adjusted) equivalent of thousands of dollars a year, they are more & more likely to be preparing to emigrate. For the richest people, that reverses.

    Now just split exactly the same data by education level. In green, that’s people with secondary education or more. In red, people with primary education or less.

    The dashed line (right-hand vertical axis) shows the fraction of people in the green (secondary education+) group.

    That inverse-U shape, the #EmigrationLifeCycle at the household level, is greatly diminished. The emigration propensity barely rises with income within each group.

    This is informative about the origins of the life-cycle. A lot of it comes from rising investment in education, which both motivates and facilitates emigration.

    It confirms what Dao, Docquier, @ParsonsEcon, and Peri find in cross-country data:
    https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S030438781730113X

    It also explains a lot about why the Life Cycle is so counterintuitive. For any given kind of person—like a person with a certain level of education—emigration either doesn’t rise or actually falls with higher income.

    But the process of economic development means that people are shifting between those groups. In the last picture above, you can see people moving from the low-emigration group (low education) to the high-emigration group, as incomes rise.

    If this seems like a brain twister, you’re not alone. This counterintuitive “flip” in correlations is such a common pitfall of reasoning that it has a name: #Simpson's_Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

    Notice that the “groups” in Simpson’s Paradox can be any size. They can even be individual people! That is, it could both be true that 1) any given person would be less likely to emigrate if they had more income AND 2) more people emigrate if the whole country gets richer.

    There’s no contradiction there. I have sat across the table in Brussels from a brilliant development expert who said, “But people tell me personally they’re moving to earn more money. Do you think they’re lying to me?”

    They are not lying. It’s just that the relationship conditional on individual traits can be the opposite of the relationship across all individuals, because economic development brings shifts in those traits. That’s Simpson’s Paradox.

    There’s a long-read blog that goes into more depth, and links to the papers, here:
    https://www.cgdev.org/blog/emigration-rises-along-economic-development-aid-agencies-should-face-not-fear

    https://twitter.com/m_clem/status/1295735909564981249

    –—

    voir aussi le fil de discussion: “Does Development Reduce Migration ?”
    https://seenthis.net/messages/526083

    ping @rhoumour @_kg_ @karine4 @isskein

  • Four Reasons to Keep Developing Legal Migration Pathways During COVID-19 | Center For Global Development
    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#Monde#politique_migratoire

    https://www.cgdev.org/blog/four-reasons-keep-developing-legal-migration-pathways-during-covid-19

    In that seemingly brief window between the 2015 refugee crisis and the outbreak of COVID-19, much progress was being made in the field of legal migration pathways.

  • The President Has Mostly Wiped out US Refugee Resettlement. Other Countries Aren’t Picking up the Slack.

    The lead White House official for immigration policy, Stephen Miller, is quoted as seeking to end all refugee resettlement in the United States. This has caused an uproar. But few appear to realize that the U.S. President, at Miller’s direction, is already most of the way there—and that this policy in the US has big implications for the rest of the world, especially if other countries fail to step up and fill the growing gap.

    A look at the UN Refugee Agency’s data shows:

    The current Administration has already eliminated three quarters of refugee arrivals

    Due to the President’s policy, so far there are about 87,000 refugees “missing” from the US.

    Other countries are not resettling more refugees to substantially offset the US decline

    The US Administration has eliminated almost half of the world’s total resettlement spots for refugees

    Here is how I arrive at those rough estimates. First, I need a way of approximately estimating how many refugees would have been resettled in the US if not for the current administration. After all, if refugee arrivals fell, that could be because fewer people needed resettlement.

    To do that, I use refugee resettlement to the rest of the world, after 2016, to build an estimate of how many refugees would have arrived in the US after 2016 if it had continued to receive refugees as it had before. In the years 2008–2016, refugee arrivals in the US moved in tandem with arrivals in other countries: A year-to-year change of 1 in the number of resettled refugees arriving in a non-US country was associated with a year-to-year change of 1.82 refugees arriving in the U.S. in that year. And the number of refugees being resettled by non-US countries did fall somewhat after 2016. If the US numbers had fallen in tandem, according to the pre-2016 pattern, US refugee resettlement would have fallen even without a change in US policy.

    This graph shows the actual number of resettled refugees to the US, in solid red, and to all other countries in solid green, in UN data. Between 2016 and 2018, refugee resettlement to the US fell by 61,648, and resettlement to other countries fell by 8,948. The dotted red line shows how much US resettlement would have fallen if its decline after 2016 had been proportionate to the non-US decline, following the pre-2016 pattern. US resettlement would only have fallen by 16,264.

    This allows some back-of-the-envelope calculations of the magnitude of the US Administration’s change in policy. First, this means that in 2018, US refugee resettlement was down 73% from what it might have been if the US Administration had not sharply changed policy. That is a great deal of progress toward Miller’s reported goal of eliminating the program. In 2017 the difference between the solid red and dotted red lines was 41,515 refugees, and in 2018 the difference was an additional 45,384. Bottom line: By the end of 2018, there were a total of 86,899 refugees “missing” from the United States: people who would have received protection in America if the US Administration had not closed its doors.

    Second, it means that other countries are not stepping in to resettle refugees who have been barred from the United States by the current Administration. It is possible that they are doing so in some measure: In the above graph, it is possible that the green line would have fallen even further if the US had not sharply changed policy. But what is clear is that the large majority of those barred from resettlement to the US are not being resettled elsewhere. They simply aren’t being resettled at all.

    Third, this back-of-the-envelope estimate implies that the US change in policy is singlehandedly responsible for eliminating about half of the world’s refugee resettlement spots. Combining the total actual resettlement by non-US countries with the hypothetical resettlement by the US, total resettlement by the whole world is down 45% from what it would have been if not for the US Administration’s sharp change in policy. The US has singlehandedly eliminated about half of the annual refugee resettlement slots on earth.

    Something to watch for in 2019: How will the rest of the world respond? Will it accept the de-facto elimination of most refugee resettlement, or pressure the US to alter its course, or increase its own resettlement in response?

    https://www.cgdev.org/blog/president-has-mostly-wiped-out-us-refugee-resettlement-other-countries-arent-
    #resettlement #réinstallation #asile migrations #réfugiés #USA #Etats-Unis #chiffres #statistiques #Trump

  • The U.S. Is Not Being Invaded: Fact-Checking the Common Immigration Myths

    Myth #1: Immigrants cost the U.S. “billions and billions” of dollars each year.

    Immigration puts much more money into U.S. public coffers via taxes than it takes out via benefits, as determined last year by a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission of leading immigration economists, across the political spectrum, convened by the National Academy of Sciences. It found that the average immigrant to the U.S., reflecting the country-and-skill composition of recent U.S. immigrants, makes a net positive fiscal contribution of $259,000 in net present value across all levels of government: federal, state, and local (see page 434 at the link).

    Myth #2: The U.S. is being “violently overrun” by immigrants.

    Immigrants to the United States, whether or not they have legal authorization, commit violent crimes at much lower rates than U.S. natives do. That is why violent crime is way down in the places where unauthorized immigrants go. For example, since 1990 the population of unauthorized immigrants in New York City has roughly tripled, from about 400,000 to 1.2 million, while during the same period the number of homicides in New York City collapsed from 2,262 (in 1990) to 292 (in 2017).
    Myth #3: The U.S. has the “most expansive immigration program anywhere on the planet.”

    In both Canada and Australia, some of the most prosperous and secure countries in the world and in all of history, immigrants are more than 20% of the population. That is far higher than the United States, where immigrants are 14% of the population.
    Myth #4: Immigrants are moving to the U.S. because it has the “hottest economy anywhere in the world.”

    Violence is a massive driver of undocumented immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Data provided to us by the Department of Homeland Security showed that from 2011 to 2016, unaccompanied child migrants apprehended at the U.S. border moved from Central America due to a roughly equal mix of economic conditions and violence in their communities. The violence is significant. Every 10 additional homicides in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras caused more than six additional unaccompanied child minor apprehensions.
    Myth #5: A “strong border” will cause immigrants to “turn away and they won’t bother” trying to migrate.

    Enforcement alone is not an effective migration deterrent. To be effective, it must be paired with enhanced legal pathways for migration. People will move if they have to and because of dire situations in their origin communities, they will be more willing to accept the risks of apprehension. There are interrelated migration pressures that drive people to move---including violence in the home country, economic conditions at home, and demographic realities. In Central America, these factors are interacting in complex ways and are driving much of the migration we see at the U.S. border. More protection at the border isn’t a deterrent without addressing the push factors that drive migration and providing sufficient legal channels for migration.

    https://www.cgdev.org/blog/us-not-being-invaded-fact-checking-immigration-myths
    #préjugés #mythe #invasion #coût #afflux #migrations #asile #réfugiés #USA #Etats-Unis #pull-factors #pull_factors #facteurs_push #push-pull_factors #facteurs_pull #fermeture_des_frontières #dissuasion

  • Can Lawful Migration Channels Suppress Unlawful Migration ? How US Experience Can Inform European Dilemmas

    We find:

    Lawful migration channels are often suggested as a tool to reduce unlawful migration, but often without much evidence that they work.

    There is evidence that lawful channels for migration between Mexico and the United States have suppressed unlawful migration, but only when combined with robust enforcement efforts.

    Massive demographic pressures for migration between Africa and Europe will continue to resemble past pressures between Mexico and United States. The evidence from the US suggests that regular migration channels could be one critical tool for Europe, alongside enforcement, to suppress irregular migration.

    https://www.cgdev.org/blog/can-lawful-migration-channels-suppress-unlawful-migration-how-us-experience-c


    #voies_légales #visa #asile #migrations #réfugiés #statistiques #chiffres #frontières #USA #Mexique (mais évidemment, cela vaut aussi pour l’Europe...)
    #ressources_pédagogiques (pour montrer que le nombre de traversées « illégales » de la frontière dépend du nombre de visa délivrés : relation inversement proportionnelle)
    cc @reka @isskein

    • Can Regular Migration Channels Reduce Irregular Migration? Lessons for Europe from the United States

      KEY TAKEAWAYS
      • Lawful migration channels are often suggested as a tool to reduce unlawful migration, but often
      without much evidence that they work.
      • There is evidence that lawful channels for migration between Mexico and the United States have
      suppressed unlawful migration, but only when combined with robust enforcement efforts.
      • Massive demographic pressures for migration between Africa and Europe will continue to resemble
      past pressures between Mexico and United States. The evidence from the US suggests that lawful
      channels could be a critical tool for Europe, alongside enforcement to suppress unlawful migration.

      https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/can-regular-migration-channels-reduce-irregular-migration.pdf
      #visas