• IMMIGRANTS & INNOVATIONThe Contribution of High‐Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States

    By Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Beatriz Pousada, and Timothy McQuade

    Innovation and technological progress are key determinants of economic growth. There is growing evidence that immigrants play a key role in U.S. innovation. Based on a 2003 survey, U.S. immigrants with a four‐year college degree were twice as likely to have a patent than U.S.-born college graduates.

  • IMMIGRATIONFortune 500 Companies with Immigrant Roots Generated More Money Than the GDP of Most Western Nations

    By Steven Hubbard

    When Fortune released this year’s Fortune 500 list—the magazine’s iconic ranking of the year’s top-grossing American companies—one fact remained unchanged from previous years: the profound role that immigrants and their children have played in establishing many of the U.S. most successful and influential companies.

  • IMMIGRATIONImmigration Restrictions Are Affirmative Action for Natives

    By Alex Nowrasteh

    U.S. immigration restrictions are the most anti‐meritocratic policies today, and they are intended as affirmative action for native‐born Americans. When people think of anti‐meritocratic policies, they rightly jump to quotas, race‐based affirmative action, or class‐based affirmative action. It’s true; those are all anti‐meritocratic and likely wouldn’t exist in a free market outside of a handful of organizations in the non‐profit sector. But U.S. immigration restrictions are worse. Those who truly favor meritocracy and oppose affirmative action on principle should reject the anti‐meritocratic affirmative action of American immigration laws.

  • IMMIGRATIONWhy Some Wisconsin Lawmakers and Local Officials Have Changed Their Minds About Letting Undocumented Immigrants Drive

    By Melissa Sanchez

    “If we suddenly kicked out all of the people here, the undocumented, our dairy farms would collapse,” one lawmaker said. “We have to come up with a solution.”

  • ASYLUMSharp Increase in Application for Asylum to EU Countries

    EU+ countries received around 996,000 asylum applications in 2022, a 53 percent increase over 2021. Around 70 percent of applications in 2022 were lodged in five receiving countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Italy. As in previous years, the top countries of origin were Syria and Afghanistan, followed by Turkey, Venezuela and Colombia.

  • IMMIGRATIONGermany Reforms Immigration Law to Attract and Retain Skilled Workers

    By Lisa Hänel and Andrea Grunau

    From healthcare to IT, carpenters to technicians, Germany’s “help wanted” sign is blinking red. Germany has two million jobs to fill, and it needs 400,000 foreign workers to make up the shortfall every year. When the baby boomers retire en masse, the problem will only get worse. Now Germany is reforming its immigration laws to help close the gap, and bring in, and keep, foreign talent.

  • PROFESSIONALS’ MIGRATIONWhere Professionals Want to Migrate within the European Union

    As a driving force of economic, demographic, social, and political change, migration is a top priority for policymakers, but studies were often hampered by incomplete statistics and outdated data. A new study assessing migration interest found that fewer professionals from countries in Northern, Southern, and Western Europe want to move east. But Eastern Europe’s appeal might change in the coming years.

  • BORDER SECURITYTexas House Republicans Revive Border Policing Unit in Early-Morning Vote

    By James Barragán and Alexa Ura

    The proposed unit would let those who are not law officers arrest or detain suspected undocumented immigrants in border-region counties.

  • IMMIGRATIONU.S. Immigration Has Become an Elaborate Bait and Switch

    By Edward Alden

    The United States is relying on its engineering and science talent to stay ahead of China in what has become an existential struggle to lead in the industries of the future. At U.S. universities, international students make up 74 percent of graduate electrical engineering students, 72 percent of computer and information science students, and half or more students in pharmaceutical sciences, mathematics, and statistics. Yet, the U.S. Congress has not revised immigration quotas since 1965, when the U.S. population was almost 140 million people smaller. Nor has Congress revisited the rules for highly educated immigrants since 1990—which was before the U.S. information technology sector created millions of new jobs in technical fields that have attracted so many immigrant scientists and engineers.

  • IMMIGRATIONProcessing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: The Scale of the Problem

    By David J. Bier

    Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. immigration system is broken – but the issue is not who should be admitted legally, for how long, and what about their families. Rather, a defining way in which the system is broken is that the current system is unable to implement the policies that Congress and the administration have already chosen. This article summarizes the basic facts about the immigration backlogs, which comprise roughly 24 million cases across the U.S. government.

  • H-2B VISASWill DHS Again Leave H‑2B Winter Industries Short Workers?

    By David J. Bier

    The H 2B program allows employers to hire foreign workers for seasonal or temporary nonfarm jobs. USCIS recently announced that employers had already reached the H 2B cap of 33,000 visas for the winter months before the start of the season. The H 2B program is filling jobs in relatively niche areas or positions where the shortages are most severe. DHS should immediately raise the cap to allow more H 2B workers to enter these positions.

  • IMMIGRATION & INNOVATIONTo Out-Innovate Global Competitors, the United States Should Embrace Immigrant Talent

    By Laura Taylor-Kale

    Immigration barriers for entrepreneurs and U.S.-educated STEM graduates hurt American innovation.

  • IMMIGRATIONLegal Work-Related Immigration Has Fallen by a Third Since 2020, Contributing to U.S. Labor Shortages

    By Jose Ivan Rodriguez-Sanchez

    The gap between the demand for labor and its supply was already forming in 2017. By July 2022, as the pandemic’s effects on the workplace were easing, the U.S. had 11.2 million job openings but only 5.7 million unemployed workers who might fill them. The trend that’s driving labor shortages: declining numbers of immigrants allowed to legally work in the U.S.

  • IMMIGRATIONHow Have Attitudes Towards U.S. Immigration Changed?

    By Edmund L. Andrews

    Hostility to immigrants isn’t new to the United States. From the Know Nothings in the 1850s, to Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1890s, to Donald Trump, there were political movements and leaders who demonized immigrants. Are the Know Nothings, Cabot Lodge, or Trump representative of the broader opinion of their times? A new study that uses artificial intelligence to chart the tone of more than 200,000 congressional and presidential speeches on immigration since 1880 provides a surprising historical perspective.

  • IMMIGRATIONDebunking Defining Myths About Immigration in American History

    A new book traces millions of immigrant lives to understand how they – and their children – thrived in the United States.