Quick personal news before we get to the links. As this newsletter goes out, I'll be on my way to the Borders and Belonging conference at IAST in Toulouse, one of the more exciting migration gatherings in Europe this year. If you're there, come say hi. On the way, I've been trying to visit every Notre Dame cathedral I can reach, on the theory that this is what most of my non-American friends assume my employer looks like anyway.

At the actual University of Notre Dame, we just hosted the 2026 Midwest Migration Conference using a new workshop-format without presentation slides, gathering the new and existing work on the botched reception of Venezuelan asylum seekers in Chicago, the effects of anti-immigration policies, and the difference between various Chinese communities in Paris. Let me know if you want to participate next year.

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Looking further out, I’ll be speaking at the Progress Conference 2026 in Berkeley on October 8-10 about immigration as a key progress issue. It’s one of my favorite conferences out there, both because the attendees are unusually thoughtful and motivated to make things better despite their disagreements, and because it’s one of the few places where people treat policy design as a genuine problem to be solved rather than an afterthought. If you’re going, come find me. And if you don’t, try to sign up and come anyway.

April was busy. At Migration Policy Institute, Caitlyn Yates and I traced 15 years of UK immigration policy swings and the salience cycles that drive them: salience rises, labor visas get cut, shortages follow, and visas quietly reopen. At The Atlantic, I published “How the Left Accidentally Bolstered the Nativist Right” (their title, not mine), on what we lost when the “I only oppose illegal immigration” norm collapsed. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, I explained why the German migration debate has gone off the rails, specifically how “well-intentioned disinformation” from the center-left feeds the far right. I released a Keough School policy brief, “To Protect Humanitarian Immigration, Build Public Trust First”, on how the sequential logic of my case applies to refugee and asylum policy.1 And, thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education, I now have “AI Is a Better Researcher Than You” as a headline attached to my name forever.

OK, let’s move on to something a bit awkward. After two rounds of online pile-ons this spring, I’ve received some earnest private feedback from colleagues, with some worried about my mental health and some others worried about me becoming a “right-wing crank” for lack of a better word, all suggesting I should dial back how much I post on social media (I’m talking about short-form takes rather than long-form essays). I want to take that feedback seriously, so I’d like to also hear from the people actually reading this newsletter and following me on social media. Conditional on being factually accurate (which I still strive for believe it or not):

Here are the April links (linking does not imply endorsement):

• launched In Development this month, a new magazine on what works and what doesn’t in global development. If you liked her job market papers roundup and her thinking on evidence-based policy, this is the natural next step. The inaugural piece, a guest essay by GiveDirectly co-founder Paul Niehaus on how evidence supported the organization’s journey to delivering $1 billion in unconditional cash transfers, is worth reading in full. Immigration is a huge part of global development, so I’m glad Lauren is doing this. There is also a rumor that their next piece will be exactly on immigration.

• Amy Nice and Paola Sapienza have a new Hoover Institution conversation on “Unlocking Global Talent: The J-1 and O-1A Visas”. It’s the clearest thing I’ve seen on the practical alternatives to the H-1B lottery for companies trying to hire international STEM talent. Amy is one of the sharpest practitioners working on legal immigration in Washington, and she’s unusually good at explaining the mechanics to non-specialists.

• at No Idle Sitting argues Trump’s H-1B lottery policy kind of works. The $100,000 fee is clumsy and imprecise, but it does effectively raise the bar on employer-sponsored immigration in roughly the direction selection-based systems should go. Take our wins where we can get them.

• We had some minor disagreements with lately, but when he’s right, he’s right. His new piece on the “culture crutch” is a banger. The problem with “culture” as an explanation is that it’s the most conceptually overstretched term still allowed in polite scholarly society. Whenever it’s actually useful, more precise concepts (norms, institutions, prices) usually do the work better.

• on selection, not origin, driving immigrant welfare use. When you control for pathway type, country-of-origin effects go away. The policy lever worth pulling is how people come (i.e., for needed work), not where they come from.

• My friends and co-authors James Dennison and Andrew Geddes have a new book forthcoming soon, What Europeans Think about Immigration and Why It Matters (Oxford). It maps decades of European survey data and offers a proper framework for why immigration becomes politically salient when it does. I pre-ordered mine. Anyone serious about European immigration politics should.

• at The Argument on whether a liberal society can do affirmative action, makes a point that generalizes well beyond DEI. As I’ve been beating this drum on immigration, the problem with unpopular policies isn’t usually that they’re sold poorly. It’s often that the policies themselves need to be different. Reframing only gets you so far when the underlying design is the thing voters are rejecting.

• at Stanford has a must-read piece on how AI is already 10x-ing academic research. His line I keep repeating: “stop waiting for permission. The tools are here.”

• at New Instruments asks who actually answered this survey in a world where people routinely delegate tasks to AI. Survey research has to shift from detecting AI-generated responses to redesigning instruments that make authentic participation easier than delegation. Yamil was creatively using AI in polls before it was cool, and he’s worth following if you want to make sense of where public opinion research is headed.

• Besides the aforementioned Progress Conference 2026, is still taking applications for the BBI fellowship (deadline: June 1). I’ll be advising and speaking on the human talent and potential track there. Highly recommended for any academic (or non-academic writer for that matter) seeking more serious public engagement.

As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics, let me know. Or if you agree that I should stay away from social media for some time before I turn into a complete crank, this is your chance to speak up, too :)

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Originally published in September 2025, this was the first long-form essay I wrote for Popular by Design, and the one that jump-started it. I only had a few hundred subscribers at the time. I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve written, since getting humanitarian immigration right is especially hard. I hope you enjoy it.

Despite all its supposed potential, immigration is deeply unpopular today. Refugee and asylum immigration is even more so, because humanitarian appeals don’t resonate much with voters. Most want to see clear benefits for their own country, not just compassion for strangers abroad. That’s why expanding refugee admissions is politically much harder than skilled or labor migration.1

The premise of this newsletter is that making meaningful progress on immigration requires more than just better messaging—it requires better policy. So I wanted to begin with one of the hardest cases and write about a possible solution for making humanitarian immigration more popular and sustainable. What I learned while working on this piece is that one doesn’t have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to support refugees.

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Enter programs for private or community sponsorship of refugees for permanent resettlement. The model was first launched in Canada in 1979 and is now being considered or piloted in other countries, including the United States. This policy innovation directly addresses a common skeptical retort in political debates about immigration and humanitarian obligations: “Why don’t you house them yourself?” This question, often used by skeptics to imply hypocrisy among pro-immigration advocates, points to the real and perceived costs of resettlement borne by taxpayers.

But the simple truth is that many people would gladly help refugees with their own money and resources—they just cannot legally do so. Outside of Canada, in most countries around the world—rich or poor, democracies or autocracies—only governments decide who gets to immigrate or resettle there and how, regardless of how generous their populations may be. This issue cuts across ideology—orthodox congregations can’t bring in culturally similar believers, while humanitarians can’t help families in danger even if they want to do it on their own dime.

Community sponsorship aims to change that. It gives willing individuals and private organizations a legal way to act on their motivations to help migrants, share the financial and social costs of resettlement, and show tangible benefits of migration to their communities. Just as importantly, unlike other pro-immigration policies, it creates a durable constituency of both conservative and liberal citizens with a direct stake in immigration and refugee protection. While this is a hard counterfactual to prove, I’m increasingly convinced that had Canada not pioneered sponsorship 45 years ago, it would have resettled far fewer refugees, and its immigration politics would be far more contentious.

There are many good overviews of what community sponsorship is, along with case studies and policy assessments. What I want to do here, in the spirit of Popular by Design’s mission, is something I haven’t seen anyone do yet: assess the potential of sponsorship to generate a more pro-immigration political consensus, both in theory and in practice, and with an open mind for its possible limits. Below, I outline the longest-standing Canadian PSR program, what we can learn from its successes and shortcomings, why it hasn’t spread more widely, the major criticisms, and the available polls on how this idea is received globally. I conclude with a discussion of America’s short-lived Welcome Corps sponsorship program (launched in 2023 but abruptly halted by the second Trump administration), and how better policy design could set it up for greater success if or (hopefully) when it resumes.

What is community sponsorship, and how does it operate?

Community sponsorship is a set of policies that let individuals, community groups, and nonprofit organizations sponsor specific refugees for resettlement in their country, in addition to or otherwise independently of traditional government resettlement. Sponsors cover housing and basic needs, provide social connections, and help with integration, for a defined period, typically twelve months after arrival.

Canada runs the longest-standing and most developed system. Since 1979, hundreds of thousands of regular Canadians have helped resettle around 400,000 privately sponsored refugees with the help of more than 200 local and faith-based groups, all in addition to government-assisted arrivals. In recent years, a slight majority of resettled refugees have come via private sponsorship, and federal targets now plan for more private than government-assisted admissions. Here is the basic breakdown of the current version of Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program:

• Who can sponsor: Small groups of five or more Canadian citizens or permanent residents (“G5s”), Community Sponsors (local organizations such as cultural associations, schools, or municipalities), and Sponsorship Agreement Holders (“SAHs”) which are established charities, faith-based communities, or nonprofits previously approved by the government. SAHs also educate and support sponsors and the sponsored, and help resolve issues that arise.

• Who can be sponsored: Canadian sponsors may “name” a person abroad who meets Canada’s refugee definition. For sponsorships by G5s or Community Sponsors (but not SAHs), the person must also generally already be recognized as a refugee by UNHCR or a foreign state.2 Because global resettlement slots are scarce (UNHCR projects about 2.5 million refugees in need of resettlement in 2026, a fraction of the 30+ million recognized refugees worldwide), the eligible pool is rather constrained. In practice, the vast majority of named cases are distant relatives or close friends of people in Canada.

• What’s required from sponsors: Sponsors commit to 12 months of support: start-up funds, income support, housing, and hands-on help with school, work, and language. Government guidance suggests budgeting about 26,700 CAD for a family of three (minimum, varies by location and in-kind support).

• What happens to those sponsored: Resettled refugees arrive as permanent residents, receive federally funded interim health coverage, and after the sponsorship year, can access regular provincial benefits like all other residents.

• What the government still does: It sets and manages annual admissions targets (currently 21,000–26,000 for 2025, with new PSR applications paused until December 2025 to reduce backlogs), vets applications, conducts security and medical screening, issues visas and permanent residence, and monitors compliance across all resettlement streams. The federal and provincial governments are responsible for healthcare coverage from the time of arrival and for other benefits that accrue to permanent residents.

The system is now considered a global model that has inspired adaptations in at least 14 other countries while securing financial and other support pledges from dozens of organizations. In 2016, together with UNHCR and a range of non-profit partners, the Government of Canada launched the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative to promote community sponsorship as a complementary pathway for resettlement around the world. Since 2013, Canada has also been running a “mixed” stream, the Blended Visa Office-Referred (BVOR) program, where sponsors are matched to UNHCR-referred (rather than named) refugees and costs are shared with the government. Many countries have modeled their sponsorship schemes on either this matching approach or the traditional naming approach, with varying parameters.

In Australia, for example, the sponsorship programs can involve business support, but are explicitly counted within the same annual Humanitarian Program quota. In the United States, the Welcome Corps sponsors only provide the first 90 days of core services with arrivals entering as refugees and applying for permanent residency after one year. In Italy, the “Humanitarian Corridors” program allows only organizations (not individuals) to sponsor people on humanitarian visas, so there is no guaranteed permanent residency on arrival.

Why community sponsorship wins more support than resettlement or asylum

Although Canada’s program has occasionally been criticized over sponsor–refugee matching, long wait times, and tension with government quotas, it has not caused any significant right-wing backlash. The same is not true of humanitarian immigration generally—and asylum in particular—which often raises concerns about border chaos, arguably a major driver of recent populist resurgence worldwide. Even in Canada, the right of foreigners to claim asylum at the border is much more controversial than either government-assisted or privately sponsored resettlement or foreign aid.

The political promise of community sponsorship lies exactly in how it channels citizens’ both altruistic and somewhat parochial impulses—helping people you can identify with—into a structured way to resettle vulnerable populations from abroad while maximizing integration success and minimizing the concerns of skeptics. By providing individuals and organizations with a legal and effective way to help, community sponsorship makes larger refugee resettlement more politically durable in otherwise hostile anti-immigration environments.

First, it allows willing citizens to act upon their humanitarian beliefs beyond helping migrants who are already here or voting for a preferred party and leaving refugee protection solely to politicians and bureaucrats. The act of communal sponsorship builds lasting civic networks and constituencies of people invested in resettlement and immigrant success more generally. Research from Canada and other countries shows that sponsors overwhelmingly report positive experiences and stronger ties to their communities.

Second, it appeals to people’s conservative intuitions of localism, faith, and control, especially when “naming” the sponsored refugees is allowed. It is not a coincidence that Canada’s private sponsorship program roots lie in church-based aid and local civic voluntarism. Faith communities were already running settlement ministries and pressing the state to share responsibility, and then stepped in as enthusiastic yet “reluctant partners” during the late-1970s resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees. According to a recent survey of sponsorship organizations in Canada, 60% of them still belong to a religious organization, while 22% focus on another particular non-religious ethnic community or group.

Third, community sponsorship explicitly addresses common public fears. Because sponsors shoulder much of the cost and responsibility, perceived fiscal burdens are lower. Because sponsorship groups tend to be deeply involved in helping refugees they sponsor—finding housing, connecting newcomers to schools and jobs—social cohesion and integration outcomes should be stronger. While no randomized trials exist, observational studies generally find better integration outcomes in employment and income for privately sponsored individuals compared to government-assisted refugees, which is only partly explained by selection bias. A recent study by the Canadian government found that after one year 75% of privately sponsored refugees had employment earnings vs 37% of government-assisted, and social assistance receipt was 16% vs 93%, with advantages persisting over several years.

To my surprise, however, despite nearly half a century of Canada’s private sponsorship program and its recent global proliferation, direct public opinion evidence on the topic is scant. The only report I was able to find on public attitudes and sponsorship found high support but mostly relied on indirect or qualitative evidence (e.g., more positive general immigration attitudes among people who have participated or live in high-sponsorship areas). After further investigation, which took me much longer than I care to admit, I was able to locate a few relevant surveys that straightforwardly ask people about their support for sponsorship programs.

Here are the key reports and their highlights:

• In Canada, a vast majority are aware of the private resettlement program (which is impressive given the generally low political knowledge in public opinion). A clear majority—especially those who are aware—view it favorably. According to the 2018 and 2021 Environics surveys, about 3-7% say they have been directly involved, 15–25% say they personally know a sponsor, and about the same share say they would like to participate in the future. A 2017 McGill survey, which explicitly asked whether private sponsorship or government resettlement works better, found that significantly more respondents chose the former (41% vs. 6%, with the rest unsure).

• A 2021 Environics poll found that, among the small minority who view private sponsorship negatively (13-16%), reasons cluster around how the program is administered (taxpayer burden, insufficient resources) or unfavorable views of refugees (concerns about integration or competition for resources). Although these skeptics were not asked about other policies, it is reasonable to assume they have similar or stronger concerns about traditional government resettlement.

• In Germany, a 2016 More in Common survey conducted during the Syrian crisis found 45% in favor of introducing a sponsorship program, with about one-third opposed. These levels exceeded general positivity toward “refugees” at the time. Forty percent also reported donating or volunteering to help refugees, and 22% said they would be willing to participate in a sponsorship program.

• In the United Kingdom, a 2021 More in Common survey found 48% support and 34% opposition to accepting more (Afghan) refugees via community sponsorship. Net support was 14 points higher than for general resettlement, driven mainly by lower opposition among socially conservative and anti-immigration segments of the population.

• In Poland, a 2024 CMR Ipsos survey found 31-39% support for introducing a sponsorship program—the only case I saw where opposition exceeded support somewhat. Even so, community sponsorship was more popular than traditional government-led resettlement. An earlier survey from May 2022, fielded shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine by the same research team, reported much higher support numbers.

• In the United States, a 2023 YouGov survey at the launch of Welcome Corps showed 60% overall support, including 76% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans. Given heightened border salience and a thermostatic cooling on immigration during the Biden administration, these are notable figures. About one in four Americans also expressed interest in personally sponsoring a refugee in the coming years.

Bottom line: Community sponsorship is broadly popular—either absolute majorities or strong pluralities support it across various contexts—and it tends to outscore government-only resettlement and many other humanitarian policies.

Why hasn’t it caught on more? The major bottlenecks and limits of sponsorship

If community sponsorship works so well, why hasn’t it spread more widely? Despite my constant reminder to immigration advocates that humanitarian intentions are rarer than they assume, my sense is that the answer is probably not a lack of willing citizens. The Canadian surveys I described earlier show that a small but meaningful share of the public already participated (about 3-7%), or would like to participate (another 5–15%) if given the chance. This aligns well with my own surveys and incentivized experiments: while most people understandably prioritize their own or their country’s well-being, at least 10% in rich democracies display pronounced humanitarian motivations and are willing to benefit foreigners even at a personal cost. Even if we take a very conservative cap of 5% of the working-age population as the potential pool of sponsors, that is still a large number. Extrapolated to the United States and other rich democracies, this implies millions of potential sponsors. In short, public enthusiasm seems sufficient.

The bottleneck is the government’s resolve and capacity. Policy innovation in immigration is slow, especially when leaders want clear proof of success before scaling. Even Canada’s famous points-based skilled migration system took years to become a global practice. And sponsorship requires more than goodwill—it demands real administrative capacity.

Governments must vet sponsors, screen refugees, issue visas, arrange travel, monitor cases, and step in if failures occur. Many countries lack the bureaucratic infrastructure or trust in civil society to manage this. The start-up costs of building sponsor networks, training groups, and supporting them through the process are significant. Philanthropic seed funding has increased recently but remains modest, and officials rarely see enough upside to overcome inertia.

Even if some of these bottlenecks ease, community sponsorship is clearly not going to solve the world’s displacement crises alone. There are over 35 million refugees worldwide, with 2–3 million designated as urgent resettlement cases, and each year, only a fraction are resettled anywhere. If every wealthy nation decided to adopt the Canadian sponsorship model tomorrow, total numbers would still be in the hundreds of thousands per year, not millions.

Moreover, community sponsorship does not address the messy, politically toxic issue of spontaneous border crossings and asylum claims. Sponsorship is simply not designed for these scenarios—it is orderly and selective, which is the opposite of chaotic inflows. Some development economists—and now even The Economist—argue the asylum system is outdated and should be rebuilt around protection and legal work in proximate host countries, fewer camps, and more legal pathways with regional processing to deter dangerous journeys. In that reimagined setup, community sponsorship could serve as one of the channels to redirect some of the would-be asylum seekers into managed programs supported by citizens. But realizing this would require policy shifts far beyond sponsorship itself.

Interlude: the successful, yet short-lived, case of U.S. Welcome Corps

The recent two-year U.S. sponsorship experience illustrates both the appeal and fragility of sponsorship. The Welcome Corps, launched in 2023 as a pilot within the federal refugee admissions program, invited Americans to form groups and directly sponsor refugees for the first time. Several observers even called it a “revolution” in the U.S. refugee admissions or even immigration policy in general. The response was remarkable: more than 160,000 people across every state registered interest within two years. The most engaged states ranged from Minnesota and California to Texas and Indiana, showing geographic and political diversity.

Public opinion matched this enthusiasm. A YouGov poll found 60% of Americans supported the idea, including 76% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans. For a pro-immigration policy initiated by a Democratic administration to secure majority Republican support in 2023 was striking.

At the same time, the program did not generate any evident backlash. Some anti-immigration groups raised alarms about potential fraud and weaker vetting (which they do about pretty much all immigration programs), but a review by the Niskanen Center found those concerns unsubstantiated. Refugees underwent the same security screening as in other resettlement channels, and sponsors themselves were background-checked and trained. No major scandals occurred: refugees were vetted, sponsors were supported by intermediary nonprofits, and cases proceeded smoothly.

The U.S. case demonstrates the political potential of sponsorship: grassroots enthusiasm, broad partisan reach, and no visible backlash. It is not proof of long-term success, but it shows how strongly the model resonates with American civic culture. The Welcome Corps ended only because refugee admissions overall were paused by the second Trump administration in early 2025—not because of any explicit opposition to the program itself. If and when revived, it would likely continue to draw bipartisan interest.

Learning from Canada, the U.S. pilot, and other countries, we can try to identify some key design principles that make a community sponsorship program both more sustainable and scalable, from rigorous participant vetting to well-funded administration. I will write about these, as well as possible extensions to the program, in a separate post in the future. For now, I want to highlight two features that I find especially important for the program’s political success (notably absent in the initial version of the U.S. Welcome Corps program): naming and additionality.

Naming and additionality: the key sponsorship principles and the debates around them

As with any reasonable policy compromise, community sponsorship programs and their key principles have also been debated and criticized on both the left and the right. Let’s start with the aforementioned naming principle, which essentially allows sponsors in Canada to pick specific refugees (at least among those who qualify for resettlement by law). This principle raises obvious fairness questions: Are those refugees the neediest, or just the best connected? These concerns have led some left-leaning analysts to criticize the naming feature of private sponsorship as inequitable, since it tends to prioritize refugees who have family or friends abroad.

Although I have found relatively little explicit criticism from the Canadian right focused on the program itself, the concerns I did find are almost a mirror image. In particular, some worry that private sponsorship could become a sneaky backdoor for increasing lower-skilled immigration, in relative or absolute terms. Because sponsors usually name their relatives or co-ethnic friends, the program might be used to bring in people who would not qualify under stricter points-based streams. The most troubling aspect for these critics is that sponsorship leads to permanent resettlement, meaning those brought in—and their descendants—may draw on taxpayer-funded benefits if they contribute less in taxes than they consume. Given Sweden’s disappointing experience in improving fiscal outcomes for humanitarian migrants and their families despite strong integration efforts, this critique should not be easily dismissed.

As some rightly argue, however, one of the Canadian program’s strengths compared to its many offshoots is precisely that sponsors are allowed (though not required) to nominate specific refugees. Equity and human capital concerns aside, naming taps into the strongest motivations people have to sponsor in the first place. Individuals and groups are more committed when the person they welcome is not a stranger, but someone they already know, or someone with whom they feel a direct cultural or religious connection. Prior relationships often bring shared language and customs, which can ease integration. Besides, sponsors can also nominate people they do not already know, enabling creative uses such as campus sponsorship for refugee students or partnerships focused on sexual and gender minority refugees.

At the same time, matching-only streams like the aforementioned BVOR program have struggled to mobilize and retain large numbers of sponsors. After completing a matched case, many groups end up seeking channels that let them name specific people to help their relatives or friends. The U.S. Welcome Corps, for example, saw faster uptake after adding a possibility for naming in the second phase of the program, underscoring how the ability to nominate specific people can drive participation. In short, naming makes the program work politically by sustaining civic engagement over decades, even if it may complicate the purist ideals of impartial humanitarian protection or skill selection.

But the most serious structural critique of the program relates to the additionality principle or the lack thereof. Does sponsorship actually increase protection for vulnerable people, or does it substitute for government action? In 1979, when the program started during the Indochinese resettlement, the federal government made an explicit one-for-one pledge (one government-assisted admission for each privately sponsored case). The pledge was discontinued soon after as backlogs grew. Today, the government sets separate targets for government-assisted and privately sponsored streams, and allocations can shift between them from year to year.

This raises the familiar “crowd-out” concern: if volunteers sponsor 10,000 refugees, a cost-conscious government might reduce its own intake by a similar amount, yielding no net increase. The risk is debated and hard to prove, but in some years PSR admissions have exceeded GARs, which sponsors cited as contradicting their additionality expectations—even though additionality is not part of the PSR official program theory anymore.

From a political perspective, however, even a pure substitution arguably can have an upside: if taxpayers see that enthusiastic citizens are handling more refugees, it might reduce backlash and keep overall support higher than if the government tried to do it all. It also effectively addresses the most salient conservative critiques of the program. Still, for community sponsorship to reach its full potential, it ideally needs to complement, even imperfectly, not fully supplement, government resettlement.

Clear government commitments can prevent this—whether through pledges that private sponsorship will not reduce overall quotas, or even through formulas that increase official resettlement proportionally. Transparency is also essential: if citizens can see that their efforts genuinely expand the total number of refugees welcomed, more will step up. Creative mechanisms could reinforce this link, such as tying sponsor contributions directly to funding additional government-assisted arrivals. However it is achieved, additionality, even when it is only partial, is the key to unlocking sponsorship’s promise: mobilizing private compassion to help vulnerable populations beyond voting or charitable donations.

So, how can sponsorship make our immigration politics better?

Despite current challenges and limits, I believe that community sponsorship of refugees has a bright future. Its track record in Canada shows it can make refugee resettlement more popular and politically sustainable, even where traditional humanitarian policies face hostility. Programs that empower citizens to welcome refugees consistently score higher approval than almost any other immigration initiative. They harness grassroots goodwill that would otherwise go untapped. And they tangibly benefit not only refugees, who get a chance at a new life in a supportive environment, but also hosts, who often find new purpose and social ties, and their communities, which gain integrated workers amid population decline.

In an age of polarized politics, community sponsorship uniquely appeals to a broad demographic and manages to bring unlikely allies together—church groups and LGBT nonprofits, veteran groups and humanitarian agencies, liberals and conservatives, small towns and big cities. This coalition-building effect is invaluable for the long-term sustainability of refugee protection. It is much harder to demonize “refugees” in the abstract when your neighbors, co-workers, or your parents’ church are personally helping someone settle nearby.

In the more immediate future, we are likely to see continued scaling up country by country. The new Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative has been advising governments, and roughly 14 countries have launched some version since 2016. Most remain pilot-sized and have resettled only a few thousand families, though separate family-reunion pathways for Ukrainians brought in tens of thousands under a similar sponsorship principle.

The real game-changer would be the U.S. fully embracing community sponsorship with naming alongside its government program. If the U.S. activated hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of willing sponsors, or even reached Canadian-level per capita rates, we could be talking about hundreds of thousands of refugees resettled annually via private means. Even if those numbers are aspirational, they illustrate significant untapped capacity. High-income countries collectively host only a small fraction of the world’s refugees today, but by empowering their own citizens to sponsor refugees, they could increase that share in a politically sustainable way.

Community sponsorship will not solve the refugee crisis on its own, and it will not replace the need for robust government action and international cooperation. But it will give tens of thousands of people a safe new home who would not have had one otherwise. In a world where so much of the immigration debate is abstract and mistrustful, community sponsorship offers a concrete and intuitively positive story: regular people working together on something compassionate and constructive, with visible results that many can admire even if they choose not to participate. That is a useful antidote to cynicism and a reason to think that, while community sponsorship may not transform global numbers overnight, it can improve our immigration politics over the long run, making it more open and humane by design.

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Many thanks to Gabriella D’Avino, Ania Kwadrans, Biftu Yousuf, and BBI fellows for their help and comments on this piece.

Select bibliography

• Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative

• Fratzke, S., Kainz, L., Beirens, H., Dorst, E., & Bolter, J. (2019). Refugee sponsorship programmes: A global state of play and opportunities for investment. Migration Policy Institute.

• Labman, S., & Cameron, G. (Eds.). (2020). Strangers to neighbours: Refugee sponsorship in context (Vol. 3). McGill-Queen’s Press.

• Cameron, G. (2021). Send them here: Religion, politics, and refugee resettlement in North America (Vol. 5). McGill-Queen’s Press.

• Kaida, L., Hou, F., & Stick, M. (2020). The long-term economic integration of resettled refugees in Canada: A comparison of privately sponsored refugees and government-assisted refugees. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(9), 1687-1708.

• Labman, S. (2016). Private sponsorship: Complementary or conflicting interests?. Refuge, 32, 67.

• Manks, M., Monsef, M., & Wagner, D. (2022). Sponsorship in the Context of Complementary Pathways. Knowledge Briefs.

• Sustainable Practices of Integration (SPRING) podcast about Canada’s sponsorship.

• Private Refugee Sponsorship in Canada - 2021 Market Study, Environics Institute.

• Orth, T. (2023). Most Americans support “Welcome Corps,” Biden’s new refugee sponsorship program. YouGov.

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Here’s where I think the argument turns:

Many of my academic colleagues felt differently, however. To them, “I just oppose illegal immigration” was a socially acceptable way to express opposition to foreigners in general—xenophobia dressed in procedural language. I have been guilty of dismissing popular attitudes myself; when giving lectures about, say, the H-1B visa backlog or refugee processing times, I have found myself exasperated by audience members who stand up to ask why I haven’t gone out of my way to condemn illegal immigration.

Over the years, many scholars and advocates thus came to see the distinction as illegitimate. For some, the American immigration system is already so unfair and restrictive—fewer than 1 percent of people who want to immigrate can do so legally—that saying “Just follow the rules” can feel cruel. Others go further: Unauthorized border crossing is a victimless regulatory violation, they argue, and any law restricting people’s free movement is unjust.

I now think this dismissal was a mistake. The norm was imperfect and often insincere—but it was holding something together. Now that it’s gone, I’ll try to be a little less annoyed the next time someone in my audience stands up to ask why I haven’t condemned illegal immigration. Turns out that was the good version of the conversation after all. Read the full piece here (archive link).

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Some personal news first. I finally bought a Japanese toilet. A TOTO Nexus WASHLET+ S7A, to be specific. If you read my piece on Japan last year, you know I came back radicalized about how the Japanese make familiar things work better. The toilet is one of them. Heated seat, genuinely life-improving in ways it’s not possible to describe in polite company. It’s also arguably a progress and a policy design issue just like the shower heads: the technology has existed for decades, it’s demonstrably beneficial, and most Americans would love it if they tried it. The main barrier is outdated plumbing and electric codes, and the fact that nobody in power has bothered to update regulations that would make installation easier and cheaper. Sound familiar?

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Despite spending too much time on social media and receiving a fair share of death threats for my hot AI takes (I had to deactivate my Bluesky account), March was, by a wide margin, the most productive month in my entire academic career. Somehow, thanks to delegating grunt work to Claude Code, I’ve now actually been able to write more and better artisanal, hand-crafted human prose than ever before. Here is everything I published this month:

• On Popular by Design, I wrote “Academics Need to Wake Up on AI” and Part II (with Part III coming soon), “The Gay Marriage Playbook Won’t Work for Immigration”, “Public Engagement Is Good for Your Research”, and “What Is Populism Actually Good For?” (with Yaoyao Dai).

• I published guest posts on ’s Substack: “Spread the Word: Legal Immigration Is Incredibly Difficult” (with Michelangelo Landgrave). Marc Helbling and I wrote “How We Miscategorize the Categorizers” for Futures of Difference. and I co-authored “Why America Is So Much Better Than Europe at Immigration” at . Check those out if you haven’t yet.

• If you’re into the audio format, I also appeared on three podcasts (one still forthcoming): Opinion Science with Andy Luttrell and Money & Macro Talks, with more to come soon.

• And lest anyone wonder whether all this public writing comes at the expense of “real” research: I also published two peer-reviewed pre-registration reports: one with Yaoyao Dai, “What is Populism Good for?” in Research & Politics, on the mobilization effects of populism, and another (still in progress) on “Preventing Backlash by Shifting Issue Priorities: Immigration and Depopulation in Japan” in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (with Akira Igarashi, Rieko Kage, and Seiki Tanaka).

Before we get to the links, two quick questions for you all.

Drop your answers in the poll or the comments. The ideology question was inspired by interesting conversations I’ve been having with readers who assume very different things about where I sit politically. The branching-out question is genuine: some of my most popular posts this month were not about immigration at all, and I want to know whether that reflects what you actually want more of.

Here are the March links (linking does not imply endorsement):

• The Supreme Court will hear Trump v. Barbara this spring, challenging the executive order that would strip birthright citizenship from children whose parents lack permanent legal status. My colleague Amy Hsin at Notre Dame’s Keough School co-authored an amicus brief laying out the social science evidence against it. Among the numbers: Phillip Connor, Matt Hall, and Francesc Ortega estimate that birthright citizenship beneficiaries will contribute $7.7 trillion to the U.S. economy between 1975 and 2074. Revoking it could deny citizenship to 4.8 million U.S.-born children by 2045.

  • My other Notre Dame colleague Ashley Sanchez at The Conversation has a useful explainer on the Trump administration’s new interpretation of refugee detention rules. Legal refugees who haven’t yet received green cards now face prolonged detention under a reinterpreted DHS statute. Another case of the administration using administrative tools to restrict legal pathways without passing new legislation.

• (follow him!) at the Niskanen Center has a great piece in City Journal on assimilation. He looks at areas of the country with the best assimilation outcomes a century ago (measured by second-generation out-marriage) and asks what that tells us about the challenges we face today.

• My friend Hannah Postel (who should absolutely start a Substack) at Duke Sanford has new work in the Journal of Economic Perspectives on how U.S. immigration law shaped a century of Asian American immigration. Exclusion laws kept the Asian population below 1% of the U.S. total for nearly a hundred years. After the 1965 act abolished national-origin quotas, the Asia-born population grew by roughly 2,700%. The characteristics often attributed to Asian American "culture" like high educational achievement trace back to which entry pathways policy made available. A powerful case that policy design determines not just how many people come, but who comes.

• has a thoughtful piece on identity politics and the case for making identities broader in liberal democracies. Connects to the immigration debate in ways he doesn’t fully spell out but that readers of this newsletter will recognize: narrow identities are what make immigration politically toxic, and policies that encourage broader identification can defuse that.

• The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung published a brief on progressive immigration policy in Germany and the U.S., authored by Hannah Tyler, Stephanie von Meien, and Cristobal Ramon. I disagree with some of their points, but the general framing is close to what I’ve been arguing: humane and flexible policies that serve the national interest are good or at least better than the status quo. Restoring public confidence in the immigration system should be among the top priorities.

• tested whether AI can detect known errors in published papers. GPT (5.4) scored 5.9 out of 10 on errors in Moretti (2021), an AER paper with a huge number of identifiable problems. Human reviewers missed all of them the first time around. If journals adopted systematic AI checks, even an imperfect system would catch mistakes that currently sail through review.

• at WYSR has a piece comparing nanotech hype in the 2000s to AI hype today. The comparison is instructive. Nanotech was supposed to change everything, attracted massive federal funding, and produced genuine scientific advances that quietly found their way into useful products. But the transformative revolution didn’t arrive on the timeline the boosters promised.

• on the credential as a democratic institution. An argument about why expertise and credentials still matter in a populist moment. Connects to a question I keep coming back to: if populism is partly a rebellion against credentialed gatekeepers, how do you defend the value of expertise without sounding like you’re defending your own guild?

• has a new paper forthcoming in International Migration Review testing whether high skills insulate immigrants from ethnic bias. In a pre-registered experiment with British respondents, a Black South African doctor was rated less welcome than an identical White one (but not in the case of fast food workers). It's a well-designed study, but, with all due respect to Alexandre and his work, I worry this is also a common case of missing the forest for the trees.

  • The detected racial penalty is about 0.3 points on a 10-point scale, with race explaining less than 1% of variance. The skill premium, by contrast, is at least 7 times larger (2.3 points), explaining >20% of variance. If anything, this paper shows how remarkably little ethnicity moves the needle once you hold other factors constant. As I keep beating this drum, skilled immigration is popular regardless of ethnicity, and we never lose sight of that.

• at Field Notes on Progress has the best headline of the month: “The AI Revolution No One’s Talking About.”1 It’s about artificial insemination transforming dairy and beef farming. Really fascinating read, especially if you haven’t thought about the politics of cattle and dairy before.

• Published today: Madeleine Sumption's What Is Immigration Policy For? (Bristol University Press). I simply can’t recommend the book enough. Sumption directs the Migration Observatory at Oxford and knows more about what actually happens when immigration policies meet reality than almost anyone alive. The book explains why so many governments struggle to design immigration policies that people trust, and why many find current arrangements unsatisfying. The essential guide I wish every policymaker, advocate, and journalist would read before entering the immigration debate. Exactly in line with the spirit of Popular by Design, the book won't tell you what to think, but it will change how you think.

As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics, let me know!

We hit 1,000 subscribers this month! Thank you for reading, sharing, and arguing with me in the comments. I started Popular by Design because I think the immigration debate deserves more honesty and less tribalism—and it turns out at least 1,000 of you agree (or at least enjoy disagreeing).

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A few updates: I’m hiring a postdoctoral researcher to join me at Notre Dame’s Keough School to work on politically sustainable immigration. If you know someone working on immigration, public opinion, or policy design who might be a good fit, please send them my way. Immigration folks with a PhD (an unfortunate formal requirement by the admin) are more than welcome to apply. I’m also starting as an associate editor at the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS)—one of the top journals in the field. Excited to help shape what kind of research gets published and how we evaluate it (at least before AI will change it all).

Since joining ’s ABI fellowship, this month I published more pieces than ever before. Hopefully, I will be able to continue the streak at least until the end of my sabbatical. First, “Reflections on the Uncomfortable Truths about Immigration”—my attempt to address the most frequently asked questions about my earlier “Uncomfortable Truths” post. Second, “Student Migration Is Popular... Until It Isn’t”, on what went wrong in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere when universities started selling immigration status instead of education. Third, “Western Countries Do Not Need Immigration”—a deliberately provocative title for an argument that cuts in a surprising direction.

Before we get to the links, I have a favor to ask. I’m curious who’s actually reading this newsletter. We’re now roughly at the population of a small medieval village, which seems appropriate for some basic ideological census:

OK, here are the February links (linking does not imply endorsement):

• I normally don’t follow the Olympics, but the restrictionists’ reaction to Alysa Liu has been fascinating to watch. Liberals thought MAGA celebrating her Olympic gold was a gotcha, but it’s actually a concession I’m happy to accept: no country needs immigration, but the countries that choose it wisely end up stronger. An American daughter of a Chinese dissident draped in the flag on the Olympic podium while the authoritarian government that persecuted her father watches—that’s a recruitment ad for every talented person in the world.

• has a thoughtful piece on what a liberal immigration enforcement regime might look like. Most voters aren’t categorical restrictionists—they can support freer immigration if they believe the system is orderly and serves the national interest. The uncomfortable truth for many liberals: public opinion does support deporting most undocumented immigrants, not just criminals.

  • also compiled a great selection of the latest immigration enforcement research—my reading list is now complete.

  • I often disagree with on how to interpret public opinion on immigration, but his work this month on asking people concrete questions about enforcement is valuable. Abstract attitudes are one thing; specific policy preferences are another.

  • But here’s the uncomfortable truth for conservatives. published new polling on immigration attitudes among Trump voters. Some of their findings surprised even me: 90% of Trump voters agree that “properly controlled immigration can be good for America,” and 70% want it to be easier to immigrate legally (but harder to come illegally). More room for agreement than usually assumed.

• has a fascinating conversation with Ruud Koopmans on the differences between immigrant integration in Europe and the US. I’ve been beating this drum for a while: immigration is not one thing that has uniform effects—policies and contexts matter enormously.

  • makes a related argument I’ve been pushing for years: you can’t just import conclusions from European immigration debates to the US, or vice versa. Showing a Danish crime chart says nothing about how well America integrates migrants.

• explains how Trump botched immigration. What we’re seeing is textbook thermostatic reaction to government overreach—voters still support deportation in the abstract but strongly disapprove of how it’s actually being carried out.

  • Case in point: the administration tried suspending TSA PreCheck and Global Entry, then caved within 24 hours after backlash. It’s honestly a bit funny, if not sad, that the trusted traveler programs are the thing that finally breaks it for normal folks who happened to vote Republican.

• has several related pieces worth reading. First, shares new data on the trans rights backlash—I haven’t seen much from social scientists on what’s driving it. Is it thermostatic? Elite cue-taking? Something else? One of the most dramatic opinion shifts in recent memory, and the field has sat it out.

  • Second, on why thoughtless moderation is a mistake—voters aren’t dumb or unnecessarily cruel. Being thoughtlessly harsh on trans rights or immigration doesn’t win elections.

  • has a great conversation at The Argument about the end of conservatism. His point on immigration: the current conundrums have nothing to do with big ideological debates about what we owe each other and foreigners. Trump’s “own, concrete choices, not just the spirit of nationalism, have led his administration to become very unpopular.”

• has a beautiful piece on Tokyo as a megacity at human scale. The “city of doorways, not vistas” framing is great. After living there, I came away with a similar sense that the intimacy is mostly about zoning and land use, not some mysterious cultural essence. Where I’d push further is toward what happens when demographics undermine that vibrancy—outside greater Tokyo, depopulation is devastating.

• has a sobering piece on why comparativists should speak up. As someone who ended up studying US politics from a comparative perspective, I’m struck by how often the “it can’t happen here” instinct comes from people who simply haven’t looked at how things have unfolded elsewhere.

• came out against white culture. It’s kinda funny since this is pretty much exactly what the critical studies people have been saying all along, just without the unnecessary jargon. But well…sometimes it takes a different messenger.

• pushes back on the idea that immigration will fix fiscal problems. at Cato responds with a different set of assumptions that flip the results dramatically. My sense is that fiscal impacts are genuinely hard to estimate, and reasonable people can disagree on assumptions. But I’ve definitely learned from both Cato’s and Manhattan Institute’s work on this, and I wish more of our immigration debates were this technical rather than vibes-based.

• and at EIG found major data errors in George Borjas’s paper making the case for a $100,000 H-1B fee. Ozimek’s broader point is one I keep returning to: you have to do the policy right. Many people who think they understand high-skilled immigration actually don’t understand the economics or the mechanism design.

• won his tariff case at the Supreme Court—a 6-3 decision challenging presidential tariff power. A Soviet-born constitutional scholar turning ideas into action by defending limits on executive authority. Worth reading his initial thoughts at Reason and his inspirational profile at IHS.

• has a new paper using survey evidence with a conjoint experiment to test how state-level immigrant integration policy features affect perceptions of fairness and support. Important new evidence that US attitudes are much more inclusive than conventional debates suggest—but this support is conditional on policy design. People are more supportive of integration when it includes social support and clear eligibility criteria, which they view as fair. Another reminder that how you design and implement policies probably matters more than how you talk about it.

As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics, let me know!

Happy 2026, everyone. I’ve been slower than usual this month—moving to an old house in Indiana from a new house in Carolina in the middle of winter turns out to be every bit as painful as people warned me. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, including the leaking roof and pipes, but I’ll spare you the details. But, on the bright side, I’m now fully settled, excited to be starting at Notre Dame’s Keough School, and ready to pick up the pace.

I don’t teach until August, which gives me a real runway for writing. And to make sure I use it, I got into Audience-Building Intensive—a five-month fellowship where I’ve committed to producing at least two original posts per month. So more takes are coming, folks. You now have permission to shame me in the comments if I slack off.

Speaking of takes: “The Uncomfortable Truths About Immigration” generated an overwhelming response—far more comments, positive approval, and media inquiries than I could have possibly expected. As expected, however, it also did annoy quite a few people on every side. My next post will highlight and reflect on the most frequently asked questions and concerns, and attempt to answer them honestly. Think of it as a FAQ for the piece that needed its own piece.

Here are the January links (linking does not imply endorsement):

• Thanks to folks like , , , and , I also joined the Claude Code train, using agentic AI tools for my writing and research workflow. The tech works wonders—literature searches, data formatting, organizing research notes, things that used to eat entire afternoons (even with regular chatbot AIs). I’m starting to wonder whether not using these tools as a university professor isn’t just a missed opportunity but outright malpractice—the equivalent of doing regressions by hand when Stata became available, or drawing charts with a ruler when you could use Excel.

• This month’s 6th annual Borders & Migration workshop in New Orleans was a blast—nothing beats the energy of sharp grad students and cutting-edge research even amidst all the doom and gloom. We’re keeping the no-slides format going and bringing in great data and policy folks from all around the place. As a successful side quest, we also convinced at least a few more academics to join Substack. If you missed this one, mark your calendars—our 7th annual event in St. Pete next year is gonna be big. Want to be on the program? DM me.

• I wrote a new policy brief for EUI’s Migration Policy Centre on why pro-immigration information campaigns keep failing. The short version: attitudes are remarkably stable, voters reasonably prioritize their fellow citizens first, and the solution isn’t better messaging—it’s better policy design.

• I also have a new paper with Yaoyao Dai (and my first published registered report) on why populists keep winning if their rhetoric isn’t actually persuasive. The answer may be mobilization rather than persuasion—though policy positions still matter far more for voting than populist framing (see the summary of our previous research on the matter).

• Together with Eric Gonzalez Juenke for , we trace how Trump and Stephen Miller transformed immigration policy in year one—largely bypassing Congress and any guardrails. Basically, how did we get from widespread and legitimate concerns about immigration among moderates in 2024 to federal agents shooting American citizens in Minneapolis?

• , among many others, makes the case that ICE is a 70-30 issue against Trump. I would note that the fact that voters now understandably dislike ICE and the chaos it brings does not mean “abolish ICE” is politically a good idea, or that voters are bound to trust Democrats more on immigration in general. The thermostat is correcting for overreach, but people’s absolute preferences on ideal immigration policy are likely unchanged. I wish more survey folks would not overinterpret the ongoing changes in people’s opinions and test beyond "Abolish ICE" (which tells us nothing about what people actually want from enforcement).

• at The Liberal Patriot argues that liberals should try harder to understand their opponents on immigration. I agree that understanding opponents is essential—most people really aren’t extremists. I’d just add: understanding is the starting point, but someone also needs to design enforcement policies that actually work—targeting real threats, minimizing civilian harm, providing due process.

• Will Allen, Mariña Fernández-Reino, and Isabel Ruiz have a new piece in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy that echoes what I’ve been arguing: immigration impacts vary by context and group, involve real trade-offs, and ultimately demand better policies rather than blanket claims in either direction. Self-recommending for academics and policy folks.

• has two pieces worth reading this month. First, on what awaits peer review in the near future—I agree that discouraging AI use is a losing gamble, while submission fees and mandatory computational reproducibility are a must. Second, a broader piece on why things will have to change in academia and media.

  • Academic jobs and promotions are premised on the fact that publishing is slow and hard—with agentic AI tools, that is about to change. Many of us have been focused on what AI does to teaching, but publishing may be the bigger stress test. The question is what norms and infrastructure we build around that reality. Provisional fixes for the coming academic publishing crunch: charge a submission fee and use it to pay reviewers, rely more on reputation by shifting toward post-publication review and non-blind reviews, and use an in-house LLM to co-read submissions and run the code as R2.

• has a good primer on why fertility decline is alarming, plus a list of research questions for everyone from PhD students to funders. If you’ve read my Japan pieces, you know this is a topic I’ll keep coming back to.

• RBC Economics, Canada’s largest bank, warns that the country may be cutting immigration too aggressively. International student applications are plummeting, and the new system is “clunky and cumbersome.” A fascinating case of the thermostatic pendulum swinging too far in the restrictive direction—the mirror image of what happened in 2022-2023.

• Peter Chai offers a useful corrective for anyone who covered Japan as a case study in anti-immigrant attitudes (myself included, to some degree). The public opinion picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest—which matters for a country that just announced a comprehensive new “orderly coexistence” framework for foreign national policy.

• has a working paper showing that attitudes toward asylum seekers predict voting for populist anti-immigration parties far better than attitudes toward other immigrant groups. Most survey research lumps all “immigrants” together—masking the variation that actually drives politics.

• And finally, at Silicon Continent has some good advice for young people and academics on navigating career choices in the age of AI.

As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics, let me know!

Happy holidays, everyone. Or should I say Merry Christmas?! Either way, I’m grateful to all of you who subscribed and commented. It’s only been a couple of months, and we’re already very close to hitting 500 readers. Your feedback, shares, and thoughtful pushback make this newsletter… better.

Some personal news first: I got tenure, and in a couple of days I’m starting as an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. Let me tell you, it’s not fun moving from sunny North Carolina to Indiana in December. But it should be totally worth it. Next semester I’ll be on sabbatical, continuing the book tour, hiring a postdoc and research assistants, and building a new initiative focused on identifying better and more politically sustainable immigration policies. If you’d like to invite me for a talk, collaborate, or hear more about the initiative, please reach out. If you want to visit and give a talk at Notre Dame yourself, I’m all ears. And if you want to fund parts of the initiative, even better ;)

Since I’ll have a permanent position and won’t teach until August, I’ll try to live up to the idea of academic tenure, with probably the most free speech rights in human history. And actually write more frequent and potentially controversial pieces that I personally believe in but might have been hesitant to voice before, or too busy due to the publish-or-perish mode, to be frank. Last month, we did a small experiment asking what folks want to read next, and the answer was pretty unambiguously spicy. Well, you asked. I delivered. Here’s a preview of what you’ll see here soon:

And here are the December links and updates:

• has announced a call for its 2026-2027 fellowship (deadline: January 9). Highly recommended for any academic or social scientist interested in politics and public writing. I wouldn’t have been able to launch this newsletter without that fellowship and the GA community.

• is accepting pitches for the new “In Development” magazine. My fellow comparativists and historical political economists, this is your time to shine. Write under 4,000 words to tell the world about your nerdy topic and make $2,000.

• launched the new Update substack, covering important social and political trends.

• Let’s talk about LLMs for a sec. has a provocative take arguing that they can absolutely create new knowledge, but probably not new “concepts.” I personally think current LLMs can create both new knowledge and concepts that don’t exist yet. The question is whether that knowledge and those concepts will be useful. Humans struggle with this too.

  • talks about new studies on LLM persuasion, and explains why exposure matters more than persuasiveness.

  • There’s an intriguing new paper proposing the idea of “LLM-hacking” (similar to old-school p-hacking). The basic point is that it’s very easy for researchers to come up with a prompt that classifies things in line with their hypothesis, deliberately or not.

  • The fact that many of my academic colleagues are still deliberating over whether LLMs can be useful in their work (I’m looking at you, Bluesky), while people I know in industry have already moved to agentic tools like Claude Code is pretty wild. But agentic tools are slowly moving into the mainstream.

  • I can personally attest that it almost feels like forbidden knowledge. I’ve been playing around with Codex to automate the tedious parts of my research and writing workflow, and it’s kind of absurd how well it works, probably better than an actual RA. I haven’t been this excited about tech in a long time.

• I didn’t expect my book to be quoted in ’s piece making the liberal case against land acknowledgements and tying that debate to Stephen Miller’s assault on immigration. But it all makes sense somehow: if we want progress in immigration policy and other areas, we need to talk about tangible national interests, not just symbolism.

• writes clearly about the actual role of money in politics. It is not what you think. Also, check out his recent post on NIMBY and how regulation by litigation strangled American abundance.

• has a fascinating post listing worst policies in the developed world.

• Toward a Positive Vision for Immigration Policy in 2026 - talks to on what a credible pro-immigration agenda could look like.

• My friend has a hot new take about fixing the primary care doctor shortage. Check it out and make sure to subscribe!

• shares her best practices of data visualization. A must-read for anyone already practicing or just interested in data visualization. I'd absolutely assign it to all my students in an intro data science class — and you should too!

• "Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them." Probably one of the best pieces on the depopulation crisis I’ve seen by at .

• I remember talked about the role of movies and TV shows in promoting the progress mindset. I nominate Vince Gilligan’s new Pluribus show. Apart from being a near-perfect testament to the necessity of individual creativity and freedom, one thing I appreciate about it is that it genuinely educates people about things. Like how difficult migration is across the Darién Gap.

• Most readers have probably heard about CECOT and the whole Bari Weiss and CBS affair by now. I personally don’t care about what Bari Weiss was thinking, but as someone who moved from Russia to America for freedom, I didn't have "passing around a pulled 60 Minutes segment like Soviet-era samizdat" in 2025 on my bingo card. Anyway: watch what our government is doing, and share it widely.

• “UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men.” offers probably one of the best, nuanced takes on the recent discussion about the role of age and affirmative action in academia and beyond, sparked by Jacob Savage’s Lost Generation piece.

• has another great piece outlining why most of the immigration research may be ideologically biased. Don’t get me wrong — setting policy based on even biased immigration research is still much better than doing it based on vibes or group animus, but this certainly means we need more conservative and moderate folks doing careful immigration research. The same goes for sociology as a discipline and other social sciences.

• A word of wisdom from regarding the credibility revolution and survey experiments: your conjoint or list experiment is not a policy intervention with real causal effects — it’s a measurement tool. A lot of smart folks are still confused about it for some reason! Also see my recent piece on why immigration is not just one single thing that has effects.

If you joined recently, here are my top three Popular by Design highlights from 2025:

1. Probably my most important post to date on private refugee sponsorship:

2. The surprising logic behind broad support for skilled migration:

3. I also wrote a slightly more technical post about what the research says (and doesn’t say) about public views on humanitarian vs. economic migration:

As an honorable mention, also check out a highly updated list I created to gather all migration-related newsletter in one place:

That is it for now. See you all next year!

It’s been several months since I launched this newsletter, and the response has been far greater than I expected. I’m grateful for the support, especially given how niche some of these discussions can be. As a newcomer on Substack, I’ve spent time mapping the broader immigration space to see where my work might add something, so I thought I’d share the accounts I identified publicly.

I’ve seen similar lists on Twitter/X and Bluesky, so a centralized Substack version could be useful too. To build the list, I started with basic searches for Substack accounts mentioning “immigration,” then followed their recommendations and cross-checked with what I already knew. I tried to branch out as much as possible and include lesser-known accounts, but given my own background this list may tilt somewhat toward US and European politics writers.1

For clarity, I divided the list into three rough categories: (1) economics and policy analysis; (2) legal reporting and advocacy; (3) and generalists who write about immigration. The list is by no means comprehensive (yet), the boundaries are blurry, and inclusion here is not an endorsement of any particular view. What unites these accounts is that they offer informative views on immigration from various ideological perspectives that are worth knowing even if you disagree. Here is the list in no particular order:

Economics, politics, and policy analysis

• ’s newsletter: commentary on US immigration law and policy.

• ’s newsletter: data-driven analysis of public opinion and populism.

• ’s Zekrets: “Evidence-based opinion on global economic issues, with a dollop of life wisdom.”

• ’s Guns, Guards, and Governance: Border militarization, self-governance, and political economy.

• ’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science newsletter: “Challenging progressive orthodoxies in academia, advancing post-progressive social science research, and critically studying left-wing ideology.”

• ’s Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer: empirical work on US immigration economics and policy.

• ’s We Wanted Workers: UK-focused policy analysis and research-based commentary.

• ’s Americas Migration Brief: concise weekly roundups of policy and research across the Americas tagged by topic and country for quick scanning.

• ’s Involuntary Departure: commentary on US immigration law and policy from a scholar-practitioner perspective.

• ’s Moving Climate: commentary on the intersection of climate and migration.

• ’s America’s Promise: “This newsletter is for anyone who wants to understand why Washington keeps failing on immigration and learn about solutions for the future.”

• ’s Popular by Design: a newsletter highlighting politically sustainable immigration policies and research behind these policies.

• ’s Immigration Law Unhinged: analysis of immigration law and policy with a focus on statutory changes and implementation.

• ’s Behind the Border: “An immigration law professor at the frontlines” with accessible explainers and case-driven insights.

• ’s Lit & Border News: immigration detention, reading recommendations.

• ’s Points of Entry: “Original research on how immigration shapes who we are, how we compete, and how we stay safe.”

• ’s Lauren Policy: accessible reviews and links to most recent immigration research with a focus on development.

Legal news, original reporting, and advocacy

• The Border Chronicle: border policy, detention, and politics with on-the-ground reporting.

• : an immigration attorney’s on-the-ground dispatches from the U.S. system: concise, case-driven explainers on courts, detention, and policy changes.

• BORDER/LINES: weekly newsletter with original US immigration reporting.

• ’s Writing on the Wall: “Essays, reporting, criticism, and interviews on the polycrisis in América and beyond.”

• ’s Beyond the Border: human stories about the US immigration system.

• ’s Substack: “Discussions of immigration policy from an immigration lawyer and person of faith.”

• ’s Tales of Humanity: “shining the light on strategies for resistance in text and podcast formats; celebrating individuals on the frontlines, who show us, every day, that there is a better way -- that we can welcome newcomers.”

• ’s Migrant Insider: “a hard news startup to cover immigration beat.”

• ’s Distributed Progress: “Exploring how science, talent, and mobility shape progress in a world transformed by AI” with frequent data and analysis on US international students.

• La Cuenta: tallying costs faced by undocumented residents, policy-relevant stories.

• ’s Border Humanity: humanitarian perspectives from the border.

• ’s US Border News: reporting on “border security (including combating drug & human smuggling), immigration issues, and life along the US Southern Border with Mexico.”

• ’s From Her Beacon Hand: “defending America’s founding ideals and self-interest by advocating for the legal and safe immigration of peaceful people.”

• Save Resettlement: tracking US refugee-resettlement capacity and funding.

• Immigration Hub: bi-monthly guide to the latest campaign, messaging, and policy immigration news.

• The Migration Opportunity: newsletter of the Talent Mobility Fund, covering various promising pilot programs and policies.

• ’s Agglomerations: new data and analysis of immigration and related issues from the perspective of growth.

• (Institute for Progress) newsletter: analysis of immigration and related issues from the perspective of progress.

• Eyes On Immigration Court: newsletter about NYC’s federal immigration courts.

• ’s newsletter: “Short essays on all sorts, personal and political” with a focus on UK immigration and asylum.

• ’s Notes from the Beautiful Periphery: “Reimagining the US-Mexico Borderlands and Edges Everywhere.”

As honorable mentions, there are also a few generalists who have substantial content on immigration. This is probably the most controversial category since many other bigger and smaller accounts could be added.

Generalists who write about immigration

• Good Authority: data and analysis from political scientists but accessible, including on immigration.

• ’s Slow Boring: pragmatic policy and politics, frequent immigration analysis.

• ’s Noahpinion: economics and politics with recurring focus on immigration and Japan.

• ’s Political Calculus: UK politics and analysis with a focus on public opinion and populism.

• ’s Talk Data to Me: UK statistics and current affairs, explaining official data and measures.

• ’s Bet on It: economics and immigration from a libertarian perspective.

• ’s The Argument: original reporting and data analysis on US politics and contentious issues from a center-left perspective.

• The UnPopulist: “a publication committed to defending free and open societies.”

• The Liberal Patriot: “Political and policy analysis from the vital center.”

• ’s newsletter: US politics and foreign policy from a right-libertarian perspective.

• ’s American Pursuit: “a newsletter on policy, politics, and building what’s next.”

• ’s Political Economy, Stats, and Society: short research-informed posts on societal issues.

I expect to update this post over time, so if I missed someone, let me know in the comments (self-promotion welcome).

I just came back from two extremely different back-to-back events presenting my book on making immigration popular: Conference in San Francisco and “Migration, a Pilgrimage of Hope” in the Vatican. It was interesting to observe the obvious differences, such as the progress movement’s understandable focus on skilled immigration for the sake of innovation1 and the Christian focus on helping vulnerable migrants. But I also found striking commonalities: a deep sense of optimism and the desire to compromise for the sake of making progress on highly contentious issues, shared among both high-up people in Silicon Valley and the Catholic Church. Take it for what you will, but I learned a lot from folks at both events and also found that some ideas like private refugee sponsorship, for instance, resonate equally well with both venture capitalists and priests alike, despite their obvious differences in views and priorities.

Someone in the Vatican or San Francisco also asked me if this newsletter will actually be doing newsletter stuff like sharing links, so I figured I’d start doing it on a monthly basis with a focus on important, and somewhat more positive than usual, things of interest to the readers of Popular by Design that I haven’t seen shared in other newsletters or social media accounts. Here’s what we have for this time (linking does not imply endorsement):

• summarizes the evidence on return migration. Self-recommending.

• wonders why the EU is not more proactive in promoting the Blue Card initiative to attract skilled immigrants.

• writes about the limits of moderate accommodation of populist parties (think of Labour adopting Reform’s positions to gain voters in the UK), reflecting on ’s earlier post on the topic.

• talks about her experience in the Biden administration and what went wrong with immigration, responding to earlier posts by and .

• has a new report on the fiscal impact of US immigration, with breakdowns by legal status, education, age, race, and origin.

• The folks at and have been doing great work explaining the new H-1B rules to the public and proposing better alternatives.

• The Institute for Progress is now also hiring a new (senior) fellow for their high-skilled immigration policy team with a particular focus on policy design (Deadline: November 23). I recently had a chance to meet with the entire IFP immigration team at the Progress Conference, so I can’t recommend this enough for folks from academia and beyond looking to do something productive on immigration in this country.

• reflects on the importance of Malengo in the “immigration startup” space. Malengo just secured a multi-year investment commitment to expand its work on facilitating international student migration for more countries and refugees. I fully agree that we need more new ideas and initiatives that use existing (however imperfect) legal pathways to better leverage migration opportunities for the benefit of all.

• Germany’s Konrad Foundation released a new iteration of its great “migration debates” series with yours truly as one of the contributors (available in English and German here).

• The Center for Global Development just updated its Global Skill Parterships website, featuring a host of new, actually existing migration programs designed to benefit receiving and sending countries by filling specific shortages in receiving countries and providing targeted training in countries of origin (while helping some of the trainees move).

As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics, let me know!

Still, there is broad agreement on attracting skilled immigrants and on what I call “demonstrably beneficial” immigration more generally. So I also offer a more concrete set of metrics where agreement already exists, whether explicit or not:

The good news is that there appears to be a workable overlap on what “getting it right” looks like in practice across at least three distinct areas: higher administrative capacity that moves cases quickly and accurately, better immigrant outcomes that also make immigrants’ own contributions to the U.S. visible, and more predictable enforcement that make our border more secure and enforcement encounters lawful without chaos.

In the piece, I go into each of these categories in more detail, with a particular focus on state capacity, since it enables most other goals that voters and experts may share, regardless of their current stance on immigration. This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, though, and I’d love to hear from readers—what other overlooked areas do you think could win broad agreement and move the immigration debate forward?

I also want to say it was refreshing to work with a libertarian publication on trade-offs that may feel uncomfortable to even mention among some pro-immigration or freedom advocates. I appreciated Reason’s willingness to adjust tone and framing in the spirit of the essay itself. There’s a growing appetite across the political spectrum for pragmatic compromise, and I hope more people start to see it as the path forward, regardless of their current convictions on any particular issue. As I mention in the end:

[T]he politics of compromise is not about abandoning principles, teaming up with the enemy, or blindly following cost-benefit analysis. It is about devising and passing policies that improve lives in ways that most people, regardless of where they come from politically, can recognize as good.

Make sure to read the full piece!

One common concern I hear is that making better policy is futile in a world where populists can demonize immigrants and spread misinformation. I don’t think that’s right, so I address it in the piece:

Some politicians will always seek to exploit immigration anxieties, exaggerate problems, and spread misinformation. But it is easier to do in Sweden than in Canada. This isn’t because Canadians are more tolerant, nor is it because their leaders have found the perfect communication strategy to sway the population. Rather, it’s because voters can see that Canadian immigration policies work. The more that democratic governments take public concerns seriously and craft immigration policies that clearly benefit society in ways people can understand, the less space there is for xenophobic populists to claim that only they have the country’s interests at heart.

Responsible democratic governments serious about making immigration politically viable must also be willing to compromise. Immigration debates are often framed in binary terms—open versus closed, pro-immigration versus anti-immigration, nationalist versus cosmopolitan. But real solutions lie in which types of immigration policies countries pursue. Work-oriented policies, rather than humanitarian-based ones, are more likely to command broad support. Sweden has finally begun moving in this direction by introducing more selective immigration criteria. Inspired by Canada, Germany has also adopted its own version of a points-based immigration system; in 2024, the country issued ten percent more skilled worker visas than the year prior.

I had a great experience working with my editor at Foreign Affairs, but we did have to cut quite a bit, including references and links (which they no longer include as a matter of policy). I’ll post an expanded, fully sourced version here soon. In the meantime, please check out the whole piece and stay tuned for more!