Michael Clemens released a groundbreaking (pun intended) new CGD working paper today titled The Effect of Foreign Labor on Native Employment: A Job-Specific Approach and Application to North Carolina Farms. Too busy to wade through the research methodology?
This post is originally appeared on Owen Abroad: Thoughts from Owen in Africa.
President Obama spoke yesterday on overhauling U.S. immigration. He went straight to the thorniest issue, what to do about the millions of unauthorized migrants already here. Obama wants a third path between the extremes of blanket amnesty and mass deportation.
That compromise approach, he goes on to sketch, would be a combination of sending troops to the border, cracking down on employers, and obliging unauthorized immigrants to:
The spotlight in Washington on Sunday was on health care reform. But something else big happened here that day: Tens of thousands marched on the National Mall to ask for reform of U.S.
Eldis, the online aggregator of development policy, practice and research at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, is conducting a survey to identify "the most significant new piece of development research of 2008." This strikes me as having roughly the same statistical validity as American Idol does for when it comes to finding new singing talent. Still, as with Idol and other talent shows, the entertainment value of a popularity contest is hard to dispute!
John Gibson, CGD visiting fellow, has been given the prestigious Economics Award of the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research.
Most economists who saw it no doubt reacted with skepticism to the recent assertion (by an organization pushing for stricter enforcement of migration restrictions) that undocumented workers are leaving the United States in record numbers because of increased Citizenship and Immigration Services enforcement. A far more likely cause is the housing market debacle and the resulting decline of jobs in construction and other housing-related sectors, where immigrant jobs are concentrated.
Harvard professor and CGD colleague Lant Pritchett has given a stunning interview to Reason magazine that will be a revelation if you haven't yet been exposed to Pritchett's incandescent ideas on migration and development. Below are selected quotations from Pritchett in the interview.
On aid and migration:
The BBC reports that European donors have unveiled a US$6 billion aid package for West Africa to "help halt the emigration of young people from the region," by creating "a Francophone West African bloc so prosperous no one will want to leave."
Yesterday the New York Times profiled Lant Pritchett and sketched his proposal to create 16 million guest-worker jobs in rich countries for people from poor countries. His goal is to help people from very poor places make their lives better.