Migration, But Better: January 2026

How Mr. Miller transformed immigration without Congress, the meaning of ICE polling, new research on populism, the coming peer review crisis, and more

New year, new logo?

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 The Roots of Progress 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 Andy Hall, Kevin Munger, Tom Pepinsky, and scott cunningham, 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 Good Authority, 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?

• G. Elliott Morris, 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).

• Michael Baharaeen 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.

• Kevin Munger 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.

• Noah Smith 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.

• Laurenz Guenther 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, Luis Garicano 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!