A few facts and insights about immigration from this recent NBER Summer Institute talk by Gordon Hanson:

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"We still only have 3.3% of the world population living in a country other than in which they were born ...

but we have witnessed the largest increase in global labor flows in more than a century in the last twenty years."

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Impacts of immigration:

"Something we don't spend nearly enough time talking about is that immigration represents a form of insurance against very severe shocks related to famine, pestilence, and war"

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Impacts of immigration:

"any model is gonna give you quite substantial global welfare gains from immigration."

"the optimality of immigration ... depends very much on what tax systems look like"

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Migrants vastly outearn similar workers at home:

"For the typical country, moving from home to, say, the US, you increase income and therefore reflected productivity by somewhere between three and seven times"

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"A substantional share of those income gains are shared with members at home"

"what we see is a bunch of places where remittances are between ten en twenty percent of GDP"

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"Migrant workers are more responsive to local [employment] shocks"

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"Immigration plays a very important role in the global innovation process"

"A lot of that innovation happens in the United States and immigration plays a central role in that"

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Migration of inventors: "they overwhelmingly go to the United States"

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How do all these inventors get to the US?

"Many of them get here by virtue of the education system"

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"Emigration allows individuals to escape violence"

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Covid-19 threatens to undo these gains from international migration

end of thread, watch the full 10-minute video here:

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