MW Keynote Lecture with Jens Hainmüller, June 2023

How Can Democracies Facilitate the Integration of Newcomers?
Building an Evidence and Innovation Agenda for Applied Migration Research
Migration is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, with many countries experiencing stark increases in the size and diversity of their immigrant and refugee populations. Reeling and reactive, governments are struggling to facilitate their successful integration. Much is at stake in this process. With the right approach, governments can set up immigrants for success, thereby strengthening the economy and enriching civil society. Policies that block integration can pave the way for societal ills that may persist for generations, including inequality, health disparities, increasing costs of social services, and economic stagnation. Policymakers responding to the integration challenge often don’t know what policies work best, and there’s a paucity of rigorous evidence to guide them. It’s all too easy to leave immigration to ideological knuckle fights rather than collaborative problem-solving and scientific inquiry. In this keynote, I will describe some of the efforts that my research group at the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) has undertaken to make headway against these obstacles. This involves our collaborative efforts to build an evidence base for what works and what doesn’t, by studying the impacts of immigration policies and programs. It also involves embracing experimentation, by building partnerships with governments and nonprofits to co-design and test new approaches. I will focus on our studies that aim to quantify the causal impacts of citizenship and our efforts to develop and implement human-centered AI to optimize the placement policies for refugees and asylum seekers.