Originally published in Foreign Affairs.  On May 29, 2013, British immigration officers raided the Alternative Tuck Shop, a café just down the road from Oxford University’s economics department, where South Asian and Middle Eastern employees serve tea, scones, and sandwiches. The ...

In this paper, Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes discuss how a new transparency is changing the debate about what works.

Labor migration to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has massive effects on the GCC, the countries migrants come from, and the migrants themselves and their families. Yet existing research on the effects of Gulf migration is marked by its extreme scarcity, reliance on descriptive anecdote, an...

Using data collected by the North Carolina Growers’ Association (NCGA), the leading employer of workers with H-2 visas, Michael Clemens shows that foreign workers have almost no direct effect on the employment prospects of US workers in H-2 occupations. Instead, they actually a large and positive in...

A temporary-worker program that allows Filipinos to work in South Korea sets up unusually good circumstances for measuring the effects of migration. Michael Clemens and Erwin Tiongson take advantage the natural experiment to find that affected households spend more, borrow less, and invest more in t...

Michael Clemens’s “Foreign Workers Benefit Massively from Guest Work Opportunities” was entered into the Congressional Record by Chairman Tim Walberg, House Education and the Workforce Committee, Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, at a March 14, 2013, hearing, “Examining the Role of Lower-Skille...