Migration, But Better: March 2026
The challenge to birthright citizenship, the superiority of Japanese toilets as a policy design issue, and the AI revolution no one is talking about (in artificial insemination)
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 The main barrier is outdated plumbing and electric codes, and the fact that nobody in power has bothered to update regulations that would make installation easier and cheaper.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?
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 Alex Nowrasteh’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. Kelsey Piper and I co-authored “Why America Is So Much Better Than Europe at Immigration” at The Argument. 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.
Gil Guerra (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.
Cyril Hédoin 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.
Michael Wiebe 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.
Venkatesh V Ranjan 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.
Kyle Saunders 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?
Alexandre Afonso 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.
Abby ShalekBriski 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!
Yours truly may have contributed to that :)