Migration, But Better: May 2026
Guest posts, a rare good workshop, legal immigration fights, and future fertility
Some good news first. I am opening Popular by Design to occasional guest contributors, with formal guidelines coming soon. The first two posts were a perfect reminder of why this is worth doing: Gil Guerra asked whether intervention would cause a migration crisis in Cuba, and Hanno Hilbig explained why mainstream parties seem to lose either way when they accommodate the far right. Gil’s piece asks what a Cuba intervention debate misses when it treats migration as an afterthought. Hanno’s piece asks what mainstream parties actually gain or lose when they borrow far-right immigration positions. Both pieces say something new and practical about the problems facing our politics.
May was a lighter month for my own writing after the April sprint, which was probably healthy. I still managed to publish my Washington Post op-ed on why high-skilled immigration is a winning policy that needs a champion, plus a Popular by Design essay on why LinkedIn is doing what Bluesky was supposed to do. I also recently spent two days in DC at the Teaching Progress workshop, hosted by The Roots of Progress at the JHU Bloomberg Center, where faculty reworked syllabi around the question of how to teach about progress, especially now in the era of AI. I went in with my migration and conflict courses and came out with a clearer understanding of what I need to change. After a stretch of academic conferences that felt more draining than useful, this one felt like a breath of fresh air. I actually learned something new and met interesting people in a cool setting.
Here are the May links (linking does not imply endorsement):
Laurenz Guenther argues that Trump closed the representation gap on immigration. I agree with the broad thrust that Trump’s immigration politics are more popular than many smart people want to admit. My main criticism is that the usual Gallup increase/decrease item is a shaky way to diagnose representation: it mixes what people want from immigration, what politicians in power and opposition are doing, and thermostatic reactions to current events. I would also separate Trump’s popular moves on asylum and border security from his much less popular moves against legal immigration, green cards, travel, and high-skilled migration. Bundling all of that as “Trump’s immigration policy” hides too much of the real politics.
David J. Bier at Cato reports on the DHS quitting granting green cards almost entirely. USCIS now says adjustment of status should be granted only in “extraordinary circumstances” and that most applicants should use consular processing abroad. It is still unclear if the memo will be implemented as written, including forcing many people with pending green-card applications to leave the United States and apply abroad. But crazy stuff nonetheless.
Tara Watson, Matthew Wich, and Johnny Willing at Brookings give the broader talent-pipeline version of the same concern in a long report on how the Trump administration is eroding high-skilled immigration. They project a 29% decline in new F-1 student visa issuances in 2025 and estimate a green-card backlog of roughly 1.2 million. Their useful point is that the pipeline is sequential: international students become OPT workers, some become H-1B workers, and some eventually become permanent residents. Breaking one step does not stay confined to that step.
The American Immigration Council released “Restoring Credibility and Humanity”, an enforcement framework built around compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability. As I have been saying before, there is very little programmatic work on enforcement from the left, so this is exactly the kind of thing the pro-immigration side needs more of: a concrete alternative to the mass deportation agenda that doesn’t just brush off prevalent people’s concern about legality and order.
Lant Pritchett uses recent CBO projections to show that aging is in the future for the United States too. In his zero-net-migration scenario, the 20-64 population falls by 20.5 million by 2056 while the 65-plus population rises by 21.9 million, and the ratio of working-age adults to people over 65 falls from 3.1 to 2.1. This is the immigration-demography link in its least sentimental form: even countries that avoid near-term depopulation still age, and aging changes what labor, care, and growth require.
Lyman Stone pushes back on a too-simple fertility narrative in “The (Fake) Long Decline of Fertility”. His target is the viral story that fertility has just been sliding down the same long trend line for centuries. Instead, he separates long-run forces like child mortality, norms, and the cost of children from the more recent post-2007 decline, where he emphasizes partnership, sex, contraception, and digital technology.
As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics (or now if you want to write something yourself!), let me know. And if you came across something I missed this month, send it my way.