A few facts and insights about immigration from this recent NBER Summer Institute talk by Gordon Hanson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJSqQU6buhs&t=189s

thread">https://www.youtube.com/watch... (1/n)
"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."

(2/n)
Impacts of immigration:

"Something we don& #39;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"

(3/n)
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"

(4/n)
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"

(5/n)
"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"

(6/n)
"Migrant workers are more responsive to local [employment] shocks"

(7/n)
"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"

(8/n)
Migration of inventors: "they overwhelmingly go to the United States"

(9/n)
How do all these inventors get to the US?

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

(10/n)
"Emigration allows individuals to escape violence"

(11/n)
Covid-19 threatens to undo these gains from international migration

end of thread, watch the full 10-minute video here: https://youtu.be/sJSqQU6buhs 

(12/12)">https://youtu.be/sJSqQU6bu...
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