Migration, But Better: October 2025 Links

Pragmatism from Silicon Valley to the Vatican, what went wrong on immigration during Biden, and why being mean to immigrants doesn't attract voters

I just came back from two extremely different back-to-back events presenting my book on making immigration popular: The Roots of Progress 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):

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

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

• Jacob Edenhofer 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 Phil Swatton’s earlier post on the topic.

• Andrea R. Flores talks about her experience in the Biden administration and what went wrong with immigration, responding to earlier posts by Matthew Yglesias and Josh Barro.

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

• The folks at IFP and Economic Innovation Group 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.

• Jason Wendle 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!

1. I should say that immigration was a surprisingly minor issue at the conference, even within the policy space (especially compared to things like housing, energy, and AI).