Migration, But Better: December 2025 Wrap-up

From the worst policies and best visualization tips to survey experiments, agentic AI, and the new dawn of hot takes on pro-immigration misinformation and beyond

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:

• Good Authority 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.

• Lauren Gilbert 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.

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

• Let’s talk about LLMs for a sec. Andy Masley 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.

  • Tom Stafford talks about new studies on LLM persuasion, and Ben Tappin 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 Matthew Yglesias’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.

• Adam Bonica 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.

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

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

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

• Saloni Dattani 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 Phoebe Arslanagić-Little at Works in Progress.

• I remember Virginia Postrel 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.” Musa al-Gharbi 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.

• Laurenz Guenther 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 Cyrus Samii 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!