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2. Maximizing the Shared Benefits of Legal Migration Pathways: Lessons from Germany’s Skills Partnerships
- Author:
- Michael Clemens, Helen Dempster, and Kate Gough
- Publication Date:
- 07-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- The world is experiencing significant demographic shifts. By 2100, Europe’s working-age population will have declined, and sub-Saharan Africa’s working-age population will have greatly increased. Many of these new labor market entrants will seek opportunities in Europe, plugging skill gaps and contributing to economies in their countries of destination. Germany is one country piloting and implementing projects that can help alleviate such demographic pressures and maximize the potential mutual benefits of legal labor migration. We discuss these projects, and highlight differences in their potential impact on development in the country of origin. We recommend that European governments build on, adapt, and pilot-test one of Germany’s approaches, also known as the Global Skill Partnership model: training potential migrants in their countries of origin before migration, along with non-migrants. Ideally, governments should pursue such pilot-tests with those countries that exhibit rising future migration pressure to Europe, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Neither the conclusion nor the results of this analysis reflect the opinion of the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) or Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).
- Topic:
- Migration, Labor Issues, Immigration, and Border Control
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Europe, Germany, and Sub-Saharan Africa
3. A Tool to Implement the Global Compact for Migration: Ten Key Steps for Building Global Skill Partnerships
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Kate Gough
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- The world needs better ways to manage international migration for this century. Those better ways finally have a roadmap: the Global Compact for Migration. Now begins the journey. National governments must lead in order to implement that Compact, and they need tools. One promising tool is Global Skill Partnerships. This brief explains what Global Skill Partnerships are and how to build them, based on related experiences around the world.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
4. The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Jennifer Hunt
- Publication Date:
- 05-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- An influential strand of research has tested for the effects of immigration on natives’ wages and employment using exogenous refugee supply shocks as natural experiments. Several studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the effects of noted refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami and post-Soviet refugees to Israel. We show that conflicting findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a sudden change in the race composition of the Current Population Survey extracts in 1980, specific to Miami but unrelated to the Boatlift. We also show that conflicting findings on the labor market effects of other important refugee waves can be produced by spurious correlation between the instrument and the endogenous variable introduced by applying a common divisor to both. As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small, and fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high school.
- Topic:
- Refugee Issues, Financial Markets, and Global Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5. Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion
- Author:
- Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis, and Hannah Postel
- Publication Date:
- 03-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- An important class of active labor market policy has received little rigorous impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to improve the terms of employment for domestic workers by deliberately shrinking the workforce. Recent advances in the theory of endogenous technical change suggest that such policies could have limited or even perverse labor market effects, but empirical tests are scarce. We study a natural experiment that excluded almost half a million Mexican ‘bracero’ seasonal agricultural workers from the United States, with the stated goal of raising wages and employment for domestic farm workers. We build a simple model to clarify how the labor market effects of bracero exclusion depend on assumptions about production technology, and test it by collecting novel archival data on the bracero program that allow us to measure state-level exposure to exclusion for the first time. We reject the wage effect of bracero exclusion required by the model in the absence of induced technical change, and fail to reject the hypothesis that exclusion had no eect on US agricultural wages or employment. Important mechanisms for this result include both adoption of less labor-intensive technologies and shifts in crop mix.
- Topic:
- Labor Issues, Immigration, and Financial Markets
- Political Geography:
- Mexico
6. Bounding the Price Equivalent of Migration Barriers
- Author:
- Michael Clemens, Claudio E. Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett
- Publication Date:
- 03-2016
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers, or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility. We use migrant selection theory and evidence to place lower bounds on the ad valorem equivalent of labor mobility barriers to the United States, with unique nationally-representative microdata on both U.S. immigrant workers and workers in their 42 home countries. The average price equivalent of migration barriers in this setting, for low-skill males, is greater than $13,700 per worker per year. Natural and policy barriers may each create annual global losses of trillions of dollars.
- Topic:
- Labor Issues, Immigration, Economy, and Borders
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
7. The New Economic Case for Migration Restrictions
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett
- Publication Date:
- 02-2016
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
- Abstract:
- For decades, migration economics has stressed the effects of migration restrictions on income distribution in the host country. Recently the literature has taken a new direction by estimating the costs of migration restrictions to global economic efficiency. In contrast, a new strand of research posits that migration restrictions could be not only desirably redistributive, but in fact globally efficient. This is the new economic case for migration restrictions. The case rests on the possibility that without tight restrictions on migration, migrants from poor countries could transmit low productivity ("A" or Total Factor Productivity) to rich countries—offsetting efficiency gains from the spatial reallocation of labor from low to high-productivity places. We provide a novel assessment, proposing a simple model of dynamically efficient migration under productivity transmission and calibrating it with new macro and micro data. In this model, the case for efficiency-enhancing migration barriers rests on three parameters: transmission, the degree to which origin-country total factor productivity is embodied in migrants; assimilation, the degree to which migrants’ productivity determinants become like natives’ over time in the host country; and congestion, the degree to which transmission and assimilation change at higher migrant stocks. On current evidence about the magnitudes of these parameters, dynamically efficient policy would not imply open borders but would imply relaxations on current restrictions. That is, the new efficiency case for some migration restrictions is empirically a case against the stringency of current restrictions.
- Topic:
- Economics, Migration, Labor Issues, and Economy
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
8. Shared Border, Shared Future: A Blueprint to Regulate US-Mexico Labor Mobility
- Author:
- Carlos Gutierrez, Ernesto Zedillo, and Michael Clemens
- Publication Date:
- 09-2016
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Mexico and the United States have lacked a bilateral agreement to regulate cross-border labor mobility since 1965. Since that time, unlawful migration from Mexico to the US has exploded. Almost half of the 11.7 million Mexican-born individuals living in the U.S. do not have legal authorization. This vast black market in labor has harmed both countries. These two neighboring countries, with an indisputably shared destiny, can come together to work out a better way. The time has come for a lasting, innovative, and cooperative solution. To address this challenge, the Center for Global Development assembled a group of leaders from both countries and with diverse political affiliations—from backgrounds in national security, labor unions, law, economics, business, and diplomacy—to recommend how to move forward. The result is a new blueprint for a bilateral agreement that is designed to end unlawful migration, promote the interests of U.S. and Mexican workers, and uphold the rule of law.
- Topic:
- International Political Economy, International Affairs, Labor Issues, and Border Control
- Political Geography:
- America and Mexico
9. Losing Our Minds? New Research Directions on Skilled Migration and Development
- Author:
- Michael Clemens
- Publication Date:
- 09-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- This paper critiques the last decade of research on the effects of high-skill emigration from developing countries, and proposes six new directions for fruitful research. Design/methodology/approach: The study singles out a core assumption underlying much of the recent literature, calling it the Lump of Learning model of human capital and development, and describes five ways that research has come to challenge that assumption. It assesses the usefulness of the Lump of Learning model in the face of accumulating evidence. The axioms of the Lump of Learning model have shaped research priorities in this literature, but many of those axioms do not have a clear empirical basis. Future research proceeding from established facts would set different priorities, and would devote more attention to measuring the effects of migration on skilled-migrant households, rigorously estimating human capital externalities, gathering microdata beyond censuses, and carefully considering optimal policy—among others. The recent literature has pursued a series of extensions to the Lump of Learning model: This study urges instead discarding that model, pointing toward a new paradigm for research on skilled migration and development.
- Topic:
- Migration, Refugee Issues, and Developing World
10. Migration as a Strategy for Household Finance: A Research Agenda on Remittances, Payments, and Development
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Timothy N. Ogden
- Publication Date:
- 02-2014
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- It is time to fundamentally reframe the research agenda on remittances, payments, and development. We describe many of the research questions that now dominate the literature and why they lead us to uninformative answers. We propose reasons why these questions dominate, the most important of which is that researchers tend to view remittances as states do (as windfall income) rather than as families do (as returns on investment). Migration is, among other things, a strategy for financial management in poor households: location is an asset, migration an investment. This shift of perspective leads to much more fruitful research questions that have been relatively neglected. We suggest 12 such questions.
- Topic:
- Economics, Migration, Political Economy, Poverty, Labor Issues, and Immigration
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