Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
With rigorous economic research and practical policy solutions, we focus on the issues and institutions that are critical to global development. Explore our core themes and topics to learn more about our work.
In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.
CGD works to reduce global poverty and improve lives through innovative economic research that drives better policy and practice by the world’s top decision makers.
CGD experts offer ideas and analysis to improve international development policy. Also check out our Global Health blog and US Development Policy blog.
Migration out of poor countries will continue throughout this century. By wishing otherwise, and devoting all their attention to walling themselves in, politicians will miss a vast opportunity to shape that migration in ways that benefit all parties involved. That window of opportunity is open now. But it will not remain open long.
On August 2, the White House unveiled a plan to make drastic cuts to legal immigration. CGD experts have written and researched extensively on this hot topic, and have been quoted widely in recent media coverage. Spoiler alert: immigration has an overwhelmingly net positive effect on the US economy.
A report released recently suggests that two conservative senators are working on a plan to “dramatically scale back legal immigration,” reducing the one million immigrants who legally enter the country to about half that in ten years. Economic research time and again has shown that drastic cuts to legal immigration would be a lose-lose proposal for both the United States and global economy.
Last week I blogged about a research discovery. An influential study had found that a 1980 wave of Cuban refugees into Miami, known as the Mariel Boatlift, had caused the wages of workers there to fall dramatically. In a new paper co-released by CGD and the National Bureau of Economic Research, my co-author and I revealed that large shifts in the racial composition of the underlying survey data could explain most or all of the same fall in wages. The author of the previous study, George Borjas, raised two substantive questions about our research, which I answer briefly in this post.
Do immigrants from poor countries hurt native workers? A study by an influential immigration economist at Harvard University recently found that a famous flood of Cuban immigrants into Miami dramatically reduced the wages of native workers. But there’s a problem. The Borjas study had a critical flaw that makes the finding spurious.
Commentary Menu