Michael Clemens
CGD
Washington, DC, United States
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Past articles by Michael:
The US-Mexico Wage Gap Has Grown, Not Shrunk, under NAFTA. Awkward.
The United States has an interest in a prosperous, secure Mexico—the second largest customer for American exporters. Is that interest adequately served by US policy? → Read More
There’s a Crack at the Heart of Global Negotiations on Migration. Here’s One Way to Move Forward.
The Global Compact on Migration (GCM) is an opportunity for all of us to make history. I join as an economist with the many other government, humanitarian, development, and international actors mobilized behind the GCM because I wish for the Compact to rise to that occasion. To do that, it must propose new mechanisms for substantial, additional, lawful, economic labor mobility. → Read More
Global Skill Partnerships: A Proposal for Technical Training in a Mobile World (brief)
Within a decade, Europe will require hundreds of thousands more nurses than it is likely to train. To meet the growing need, nurses will move in large numbers to Western Europe from other countries, including those in Eastern Europe. But Eastern Europe currently lacks nurses already relative to Western Europe, while Eastern European youths crave opportunities in skilled employment. How can… → Read More
Testing for Repugnance in Economic Transactions: Evidence from Guest Work in the Gulf
Workers from poor countries can find enormous economic opportunity by working temporarily in a rich country. But agencies that fight global poverty do little to facilitate guest work. This may be because guest workers are perceived to typically suffer negative side effects that outweigh the benefits. This paper uses a natural experiment to test several perceptions of harmful side-effects on… → Read More
The Real Economic Cost of Accepting Refugees
The arrival of more than a million refugees and migrants in Europe has brought widespread concern they will become an economic drain on the countries that welcome them. When economists have studied past influxes of refugees and migrants they have found the labor market effects, while varied, are very limited, and can in fact be positive. → Read More
The Real Economic Cost Of Accepting Refugees
Past waves of refugees had varied but limited effects on the jobs and income of workers in countries they moved to, finds Michael Clemens from the Center... → Read More
The Root Causes of Child Migration from Central America: Safety vs. Opportunity
In a new study on the root causes of child migration from Central America to the United States, I statistically link migration decisions to violence and employment conditions in the localities they come from. I find that the relative contributions of violence and economic drivers are roughly equal, and that every ten additional murders in the region caused six more children to migrate to the… → Read More
Violence, Development, and Migration Waves: Evidence from Central American Child Migrant Apprehensions
This paper studies the relationship between violence in the Northern Triangle and child migration to the United States. It finds that one additional homicide per year in the region, sustained over the six-year period of study—that is, a cumulative total of six additional homicides—caused a cumulative total of 3.7 additional unaccompanied child apprehensions in the United States. The explanatory… → Read More
The Economic Research Shows Drastic Cuts to Legal Immigration Are a Lose-Lose for the United States and the World
A report released recently suggests that two conservative senators are working on a plan to “dramatically scale back legal immigration,” reducing the one million immigrants who legally enter the country to about half that in ten years. Economic research time and again has shown that drastic cuts to legal immigration would be a lose-lose proposal for both the United States and global economy. → Read More
What Economists Can Learn from the Mariel Boatlift, Part Two: Answering Questions about Our Research
Last week I blogged about a research discovery. An influential study had found that a 1980 wave of Cuban refugees into Miami, known as the Mariel Boatlift, had caused the wages of workers there to fall dramatically. In a new paper co-released by CGD and the National Bureau of Economic Research, my co-author and I revealed that large shifts in the racial composition of the underlying survey data… → Read More
What the Mariel Boatlift of Cuban Refugees Can Teach Us about the Economics of Immigration: An Explainer and a Revelation
Do immigrants from poor countries hurt native workers? A study by an influential immigration economist at Harvard University recently found that a famous flood of Cuban immigrants into Miami dramatically reduced the wages of native workers. But there’s a problem. The Borjas study had a critical flaw that makes the finding spurious. → Read More
The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results
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. As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the… → Read More
Opinion: Don't despair, innovate — Now is the time to try new forms of development cooperation
As the global shift toward political populism brings foreign aid budgets under renewed and intense scrutiny, Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development outlines a new type of development cooperation: giving visas as aid. → Read More
The New Economic Case for Migration Restrictions: An Assessment
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 → Read More
The World Bank Is Turning 70. Do We Still Need It?
The World Bank opened in 1946 to finance a global economy just emerging from colonization and warfare and just embarking on the Cold War. Today the global development landscape is radically different, and capital circles the globe at volumes unthinkable back then. Why keep the World Bank now? → Read More
Remittance Economics 101 for Populist Politicians
Around 1900, many claimed that Italian immigrants were harming the US by sending money abroad. All the way back to 1728, Jonathan Swift believed that outflows of money hurt Ireland. The idea keeps coming back because, if you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. Money buys stuff, and if it buys Mexican stuff, it’s not buying American stuff. But if you think about it for one more minute,… → Read More
Think Development in Poor Countries Will Reduce Migration? The Numbers Say Otherwise
Our most common intuition about migration and development is just as clear: more development must cause less migration. Won’t economic growth in, say, Haiti mean that fewer Haitians want to leave? This seems as plain as the sun crossing the sky, but the data simply do not support it. → Read More
Washington’s Wave of Anti-Refugee Hysteria is Missing Something: Facts
In times of fear, men and women of reason have a responsibility to speak about facts. I understand fear. I narrowly escaped a terrorist bomb in Colombia as a young man. Fear can make you do things you regret when you learn the facts. And in the United States now, fact-checking has been replaced by fear-mongering, hard evidence by hysteria. → Read More
The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle
What's working against poverty? International labor mobility. → Read More
Modernizing US Migration Policy for Domestic and Development Gains
US development policy was built for a world that no longer exists. When the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was created in 1961, foreign aid was by far the most important flow of resources to developing countries. Today, aid is a relative sideshow. International migrants send roughly four times more money home to developing countries (close to $500 billion per year) than all… → Read More