Second edition of the Economics of Immigration coming in late 2020!

Professor Bansak, Zavodny and Simpson just finished the second edition of the Economics of Immigration! The new edition is scheduled to come out in late 2020. The second edition puts more emphasis on refugees and asylum seekers since those groups swelled in number over the 2010s. The second edition also puts more emphasis on European immigration, environmental migration, political outcomes of migration and immigrant innovation. Stay tuned!

Students at Colgate blogging about the Economics of Immigration

Students in Professor Simpson's Economics of Immigration course in Spring 2020 at Colgate University update their blog, documenting recent events around the world related to the course. Follow their posts here: http://nsimpson.colgate.domains/econ233/

As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants

Since the coronavirus pandemic started to spread at the end of March, there has been a significant decline in migratory traffic from South America, Central America, and Mexico to the United States. A migrant shelter in southern Mexico that serves as a way station for migrants saw around 2,000 travelers last year. In the past weeks, COVID-19 slowed down migration from Mexico on an unprecedented scale. The shelter has seen less than 100 migrants pass through.

Farms in western Europe are seeing labor shortages as a result of travel bans. Thousands of Venezuelans who had been working in Colombia have been heading back to Venezuela, as have Afghans from Iran and Pakistan, and Haitians from the Dominican Republic. Gillian Triggs, the assistant high commissioner for protection at the United Nations Refugee Agency, notes in in a recent NY Times article that “Many of those [immigrants] who are returning barely had a toehold in the informal labor sector in their adopted countries, and were denied access to social safety nets.”

The Trump administration tightened border restrictions in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19. As a result, however, the processing of undocumented migrants and blocking access for asylum seekers has halted. Governments are closing their borders to refugees not only in the United States but around the world as well. More than 120 countries have ordered some form of the border closure. 30 of these countries are giving separate consideration to asylum seekers. Hundreds of Rohingya refugees on boats have been turned away in Malaysian ports by authorities citing pandemic restrictions. Stranded migrants are not able to practice social distancing, putting them at a more prominent risk of exposure to the virus.

Post written by Isabel Wang, Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: Semple, Kirk. “As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants,” The New York Times. May 4, 2020.

Two great new articles about refugees

The Winter 2020 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives includes two terrific articles about refugees, a timely and important topic in both the US and Europe. Timothy Hatton writes about Asylum Migration to the Developed World, and Courtney Brell, Christian Dustmann and Ian Preston write about the Labor Market Integration of Refugee Migrants in High-Income Countries. Both articles are open access and should be accessible to students.

Short video on immigrants and urban renewal

Here's a link to a short (11 minute) video on immigrants and urban renewal in the US that might be a good way to open a class discussion on effects of immigration: https://youtu.be/oY19epoOqLw. Perhaps have students make a list of the pro-immigration arguments made in the video as they watch it, and then how opponents would respond to each of those arguments.

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.