Topics:
Expertise
Migration and development, economic growth, aid effectiveness, economic history
Bio
Michael Clemens is director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he studies the economic effects and causes of migration around the world. He has published on migration, development, economic history, and impact evaluation, in peer-reviewed academic journals including the American Economic Review, and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society Prize. He also serves as a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany, and has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and World Development. He is the author of the book The Walls of Nations, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Previously, Clemens has been an Affiliated Associate Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a visiting scholar at New York University, and a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program. He has lived and worked in Colombia, Brazil, and Turkey. He received his PhD from the Department of Economics at Harvard University, specializing in economic development, public finance, and economic history.
Click here for full CV
More From Michael Clemens
May 2, 2014
Publication
Skilled workers emigrate from developing countries in rising numbers, raising fears of a drain on the human and financial resources of the countries they leave. This paper critiques existing policy proposals to address the development effects of skilled migration. It then proposes a new kind of policy tool to regulate skilled migration in a way that benefits origin countries, destination countries, and migrants. ‘Global skill partnerships’ are bilateral public-private agreements to link skill creation and skill mobility for mutual benefit. The paper describes how such an agreement might work in one profession (nursing) and one region (North Africa).
May 1, 2014
Publication
Skilled workers have a rising tendency to emigrate from developing countries, raising fears that their departure harms the poor. In response, researchers have proposed a variety of policies designed to tax or restrict high-skill migration. Those policies have been justified on grounds of efficiency—making migrants or destination countries liable for harm—as well as on grounds of equity or ethics. This paper challenges regulations of this kind, arguing that they are generally inefficient, inequitable, and unethical. It concludes by discussing a different class of policy intervention that, in contrast, has the potential to raise welfare.
April 22, 2014
Blog Post
When opportunities for corrupt earnings rise, is there more corruption? This fundamental question is the subject of new, frontier-pushing research by two young stars of development economics: CGD alumnus Sandip Sukhtankar and his co-author Paul Niehaus.
March 24, 2014
Blog Post
Our most common intuition about migration and development is just as clear: more development must cause less migration. Won’t economic growth in, say, Haiti mean that fewer Haitians want to leave? This seems as plain as the sun crossing the sky, but the data simply do not support it.
March 17, 2014
Blog Post
CGD studies the ways that the richest countries affect the rest of the world, far beyond foreign aid. And the US massively shapes economic development in its neighbors to the south. The 2,000 mile border between the United States and Mexico is an economic cliff, the largest GDP per capita differential found at any land border on earth. Across this fault line, the two nations continue a deep and centuries-old exchange of goods, services, investment, labor, culture, and ideas.
March 18, 2014
Publication
Basic economic theory suggests that as poor countries get richer, fewer people want to leave. This idea captivates policymakers in international aid and trade diplomacy. But a long research literature and recent data suggest something very different: Over the course of a “mobility transition”, emigration typically rises with economic development—at least until poor countries reach upper-middle income level, like Algeria or El Salvador. Emigration typically falls only as countries become even richer. This note measures the mobility transition in every decade since 1960, surveys 45 years of research on why it happens, and suggests five questions for further study.
Pages
October 17, 2012
Article
In the aftermath of devastating natural disasters in developing countries, the United States and the international community focus on delivering humanitarian aid, often at substantial expense—on average, about $5 billion per year. An additional, complementary, and less expensive way to help would be to allow a limited number of people hit by such disasters seek a better life elsewhere. Expanding international migration for disaster-affected populations is potentially a hugely powerful and very low-cost addition to traditional post-disaster assistance.
In the aftermath of the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, CGD began to explore the ways in which migration policy could augment US disaster recovery assistance in Haiti. Royce Murray and Sarah Williamson published a CGD commissioned paper Migration as a Tool for Disaster Recovery: A Case Study on U.S. Policy Options for Post-Earthquake Haiti, which explored the possibility of including temporary or permanent migration in response to natural disasters, such as the Haitian earthquake of 2010. Murray and Williamson found that while migration could play a critical role in assisting with disaster recovery in developing countries, the United States had no institutional mechanism to leverage this tool. Using post-quake Haiti as a case study, they showed the dearth of legal channels available to Haitians to enter the United States and identified multiple separate administrative and legislative policy changes that the government could make. These included: allowing Haitians to become eligible for temporary low-skill seasonal work visas (H2-A and H-2B visas); granting family reunification parole to Haitians who have already qualified for family reunification visas, but who continue to wait years for a visa outside of the US; allowing Haitians to participate in the Diversity Visa Lottery; and establishing a new visa or refugee category for people affected by natural disasters. In fact, Murray and Williamson revealed that U.S. law recognized those “uprooted by catastrophic natural calamity” as refugees for 28 years before the Refugee Act of 1980 was written.
Michael Clemens and Tejaswi Velayudhan followed up with a policy brief Migration as a Tool for Disaster Recovery: US Policy Options in the Case of Haiti based on this working paper, which highlighted four key US policy options in Haiti.
Allow Haitians to be eligible for H-2A/H-2B low-skill temporary work visas.
Create a Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program.
Modify the Diversity Visa Lottery Program.
Modify the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
Through the process of conducting this research and speaking with key policy makers, CGD decided to focus outreach energy on adding Haiti to the list of H-2A/H-2B eligible countreis.
In a CGD Fact Sheet, Clemens explains the potential economic benefits of the H-2A/H-2B program for Haitians.
If only 1,000–1,500 Haitians had the ability to enter the US through an existing temporary low-skill visa program, over a ten-year period, the result would be $200 million of new income directly to Haitian workers and their families. The large majority of this would be spent in Haiti.
1,000 Haitians on H-2 visas would represent about one percent of the total H-2 visas given annually. Despite these potential gains, until January 2012 Haiti was effectively banned from receiving any H-2 visas. (to learn more about the potential economic benefits of migration for Haiti click here).
April 9, 2015
Blog Post
In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sabina and Franz are doomed lovers. Kundera traces their demise of their relationship to a disagreement about what words mean. Sabina and Franz never realize that they mean different things when they say simple words—like “woman” and “truth.”
December 4, 2017
Publication
From his keynote speech in Mexico City, Michael Clemens writes:
Mexico and the United States need a bilateral agreement to regulate the labor migration flows between these two neighboring countries. They have needed such an agreement my entire life.
October 12, 2010
Blog Post
In development, it's good to try new, innovative ideas-- but even better to know whether or not they work.
March 20, 2012
Blog Post
September 13, 2017
Publication
From 2011 to 2016, about 179,000 unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were apprehended entering the United States. While the crisis received ample media attention, limited data has meant little rigorous analysis of what made those children move. Using unprecedented data on each apprehension, we measure how violence in these children’s hometowns shaped their migration. In the average municipality the children came from, 10 additional homicides caused about six additional apprehensions.
February 8, 2017
Blog Post
A small pilot project between the US and Haiti showed that the US could directly and effectively assist Haitian families to earn dignified livelihoods—at negative cost to US taxpayers. That is, the two countries could cooperate for development in a way that actually adds value to the US economy. It did this with short-term work visas.
August 13, 2015
Blog Post
Spoiler alert: this is not a blog post about #DumpTrump. However, the 2016 U.S.
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