Careers advocating for open borders (or helping more people migrate)?

By Amber Dawn @ 2023-11-17T15:18 (+13)

I'm interested in suggestions of jobs, career paths or projects that might help promote open borders or (more moderately) just help more people to be able to migrate, or help migrants and refugees.

For example, are there any job boards or newsletters that focus on this? Has anyone done cost-effectiveness analyses of particular organizations working in this area, or particular approaches?

I care a lot about this issue personally, and roles in this area could be highly impactful (e.g. 80k has immigration restrictions as a 'sometimes recommended' problem), but I haven't seen much EA discussion or advice around this.

I'm interested in suggestions even if they don't seem that highly-impactful in the grand scheme of things. (e.g., 'being an English tutor for refugees' is a job in this category, even though it's probably not highly impactful by EA metrics).
 

Luke Eure @ 2023-11-18T08:59 (+9)

I think this is a hugely important issue, and am excited someone else is thinking about it too! 

I did a bit of thinking on this last year, and tried for a few months in my spare time to take some action on high-skilled immigration specifically. Ultimately I wasn't able to find anything super tractable for me to work on since I currently live in Kenya (but I was more focused volunteer/part time things, not full time).

 I wrote up my conclusions in a blog post here.

In Germany there's this organization Malengo that you could potentially volunteer with. For full-time jobs, Formally  and the Institute for Progress seem great. But other than those, I couldn't find much. Institute for Progress has great articles on immigration reform in the US.

I also looked into bothering the US embassy in Kenya to increase their visa processing capacity - I wrote that up here.

I'm happy to chat if you want to talk more over what I saw when I looked into this, or if you find anything worth working on! I'm excited about the potential for progress in this space and am happy to collaborate.

Tym @ 2023-11-18T15:40 (+4)

Thanks Luke for the comment I think you might be one of the most qualified people around here for this question.

I just wanted to give the heads up that the Formally link is a dead end and the blog link doesn't link directly to the post.

I tried finding the specific post but I likely missed it.

Luke Eure @ 2023-11-19T04:52 (+2)

wow, very poor link-wrangling by me. thank you for catching - fixed now!

Amber Dawn @ 2023-11-21T14:31 (+2)

Thank you so much for this! I may get in touch to chat more about your experiences if I look into this further. The three organizations you mention are probably not a good fit for me because of location (I'm based in the UK), but maybe there are similar ones nearer me. 

I'm curious about why you focussed on high-skilled immigration. 

Luke Eure @ 2023-11-21T16:25 (+3)

For sure! Let me know if you want to chat.

On "why high skill immigration", I wrote another blog post on my decision to focus on it:

"I have a strong belief in the importance of immigrants to the US, both as a matter of fact (economically/ culturally/ scientifically) and as a matter of what the US should aspire to be.

Living in Kenya makes this especially salient - it was so easy for me to move here and I think I am doing good. There are so many people here who can’t move to the US, and I think that they would do good.

I think allowing immigration of skilled workers is pretty indisputably good for the US, those individuals, and (more disputably) for the world. This article captures arguments for high-skill immigration quite well.

...

I personally would be much more in favor of lots more immigration of all kinds - low-skill and refugee as well. But I’m focusing on high-skill immigration since those are politically much tougher issues, high-skill immigration is more important from a scientific / economic progress perspective, and the fact that it seems likely that increased high-skill immigration makes countries more receptive to immigration of all kinds.


A further clarification that I’m saying “immigration” here for simplicity, but I am including temporary residence status that enables people to work (e.g., H1B visas) in the scope of what I am working on."

MarcusAbramovitch @ 2023-11-17T16:31 (+3)

Politician and/or getting into the weeds of party politics and setting the agenda of a political party.

Public intellectual advocating for it.

I'm sure our friends at Progress Studies also have some ideas.

Amber Dawn @ 2023-11-21T14:32 (+2)

Thanks for the suggestions! 

Ives Parr @ 2023-12-02T17:20 (+3)

Just a thought, but Alex Nowrasteh is a public figure whose primary focus is immigration policy, and he is an advocate for Open Borders, I believe. While you may not want to work at CATO, he may have some good ideas about what you can do. https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh