Lin Manuel Miranda video on immigrants

Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of the musical Hamilton, has a music video called Immigrants (We Get the Job Done) that might be fun to show in class to stimulate discussion or to assign students to watch outside of class. Here's the YouTube link to the 6-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_35a7sn6ds. And here's an article in Migration Studies analyzing the video: https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnx071.

World Migration Report 2020

The International Organization for Migration's comprehensive World Migration Report 2020 is now out, available at https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/wmr_2020.pdf. The report has lots of stylized facts about migration flows worldwide, by region, by group (labor migrants, refugees, stateless persons, etc.) and is a terrific source for recent statistics, particularly about non-Western regions.

The Venezuelan exodus

Out-migration from Venezuela continues. Estimates are that 20 percent of the country's population, or some 6 million people, will have left by the end of 2020. Here's a terrific piece on where they are going and what restrictions they face in destination countries. And here's another, from the Council on Foreign Relations. This exodus provides a good example of the economic and political causes of out-migration and how bad economic policies can have horrific effects.

Recent report on the fiscal impacts of immigrants

Measuring the fiscal impacts of immigrants is complicated and there are very few studies that have attempted to do this. A 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides an up-to-date analysis of the fiscal impact of immigrants at the local, state and national level. The report is comprehensive but very long. An executive summary can be found here. Pia Orennius of the Dallas Fed also published a nice article in 2017 that highlights the key findings:"New Findings on the Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the United States." 

Remittance flows around the world

The Financial Times compared remittances to the flow of foreign direct investment, foreign aid and private capital flows. Remittances is now larger then the flows of FDI around the world and is three times larger than foreign aid. The FT also produced a cool graphic showing where remittances originate and where they go, using recent World Bank data.
https://ig.ft.com/remittances-capital-flow-emerging-markets/

Blog at Colgate University

Students in Professor Simpson's Economics of Immigration course at Colgate University have created their own blog, documenting their class work, travels and experiences. Follow their posts here:
http://nsimpson.colgate.domains/econ233/

South-South migration flows

The book discusses migration to poor countries, or South-South migration (SSM), a phenomenon that may be surprising to many students. The OECD has a good post discussing this terminology and trends in "SSM" at https://oecd-development-matters.org/2018/12/17/understanding-south-south-migration/.

Migration and refugee data now in FRED

FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, now has migration and refugee data in their database. FRED has more then 400 data series from the World Development Indicators. Data can be easily download, plotted and mapped using GeoFRED.

https://news.research.stlouisfed.org/2019/09/new-to-fred-international-data-on-refugee-and-migrant-populations/

Cool graphics on global migration flows from Bloomberg

Bloomberg News has some very nifty graphics on global migration flows, created using UN data: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-how-migration-is-changing-our-world

It's particularly interesting to see how large the flows are within Europe

Pew mini-course on US immigration

The Pew Research Center has a mini-course on US immigration that is a great entryway for students to learn about patterns and trends in US immigration. Sign up to get access at https://mailchi.mp/pewresearch.org/u-s-immigration-mini-course

Pew is also a fabulous resource for students and researchers looking for unbiased, factual information about US immigration, particularly Hispanic immigration