My research agenda treats inequality as both a cause and a consequence of migration and its governance. As a cause, it works in more than one direction. Rising inequality between capital and labor closes the door to migrants where they compete with local workers and opens it where they are complements, because the firms capturing the gains want more labor. Resource rents allow autocratic governments to pay their own citizens to stay out of low-wage work and to import migrant labor instead. Wealthy destination states that prefer not to receive migrants rely on the IMF, the World Bank, the EU, and their own central banks to keep people in place. AI sharpens this last strategy. It makes remote monitoring cheaper, which lowers the cost of controlling movement far from the border, so wealthy states increasingly pay partner states to do the blocking rather than share responsibility at home. Authority over migration control then follows ownership of the data, software, and operations that make this possible, and shifts toward the international organizations, vendors, and partner states through which destination states act.
Newest Stream
Artificial Intelligence, Migration, and Divergence
For thirty years, developing economies caught up by selling what they had most of: manual labor. Workers crossed borders for seasonal jobs, factories and call centers moved to low-wage countries, investment followed them, and goods made by hand found rich markets. AI can now do much of that work, and it changes who governs the routes that remain. We build a measure of each country's exposure to AI substitution and track migration, offshoring, investment, and exports against it. We expect the routes to stay open while paying less. Some will narrow, as employers who buy machines stop asking for foreign workers and immigration tightens from the demand side rather than the ballot box. Others will keep growing while the returns collect wherever the computing power is owned. Control over movement follows the same logic. Destination states govern migration with biometric registration, automated screening, and remote sensing, but they seldom build or run these tools themselves, and authority follows ownership of data, software, and operations. As monitoring gets cheaper, paying partner states to block movement costs less than sharing responsibility at home. States act through international organizations, vendors, and partner states linked by shared data systems, an arrangement we call a proxy protocol. In both cases AI shifts the gains from labor to those who own the data, code, and computing power.
- In Progress
- Code of Construct: Artificial Intelligence and Real Divergence in the Global Economy, with Brendan J. Connell and Sung Eun Kim
- Proxy Protocols: Artificial Intelligence and the Externalization of Migration Control
- Design
- A country, industry, and year index of AI substitution exposure, projected onto developing-country employment and export baskets and estimated with shift-share instruments and event studies around the 2022 and 2023 semiconductor export controls, paired with a registry of AI-enabled monitoring systems that codes builder, data owner, and operator as state, IO, or vendor, linked to funding and outcome panels and estimated with a triple difference on the 2025 US funding contraction and event studies around the Entry/Exit System rollout
Newest Stream
What politicians say when the factories close
Deindustrialization does not only change how people vote. It changes the language elites use about the world economy, and about who belongs in it. With Sarah G. Hunter, I pair large-scale text data on what members of Congress actually say with shift-share designs that tie each state and district to the specific industries it lost. One paper asks how job losses move the rhetoric on globalization. The other asks why scapegoating an outgroup can function as outreach to a minority constituency rather than against it.
- Under Review
- Layoffs and Tradeoffs: How Deindustrialization Shifts Elite Rhetoric on Globalization, with Sarah G. Hunter
- Working Paper
- The Minority Card: Outgroup Scapegoating as Minority Outreach, with Sarah G. Hunter
Newest Stream
What migration does to the places people leave
Most work on migration studies the countries that receive people. A newer set of projects asks what happens at the other end. Returning migrants bring back money, organizing experience, and expectations, and those arrivals reshape institutions and labor politics at home. A fourth project turns the question around and asks who never gets to leave at all, when local patrons control who can move under climate stress.
- In Progress
- Capital Returns: Diaspora Investors and Institutional Change in the Homeland
- The Labor Force Awakens: Return Migration from West Germany and Labor Resurgence in Turkey, with Furkan Sumbul
- Brokered Immobility: Patronage, Climate Stress, and Migration in Coastal Bangladesh, with Taufiq E. Faruque
- See Also
- Return of the Ally, the Spanish case, in the thread below.
Spain as a laboratory
Two projects use Spain to ask old questions with new evidence. The first asks what infrastructure does to identity: which cities were connected to the high-speed network, when, and whether being an hour from Madrid strengthened regionalist politics or dissolved it. It combines survival models of construction timing, shift-share instruments, and thirty-two interviews across five autonomous communities (Fieldwork in 2023). The second goes back a century, reconstructing from port and provincial archives how migrants returning from Latin America carried collective action into Spanish provinces between 1880 and 1930 (Fieldwork in 2026).
- In Progress
- Need for Speed: High-Speed Rail and Identity Politics in Spain, with Alberto Burgos-Rivera, Sarah G. Hunter, and Pau Vall-Prat
- Return of the Ally: How Return Migration Shapes Collective Action at Home, with Nicolás Izquierdo
- Fieldsites
- A Coruña, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, and Oviedo
Migration and the world’s most powerful institutions
Why do the IMF, the World Bank, and the European Union favor some countries over others? The usual answer points to the strategic and commercial interests of major shareholders. This work adds a second one: those shareholders also want to avoid receiving migrants, so borrowers with large diasporas in the G5 draw larger disbursements and fewer conditions, and the EU pays its migrant-transit member states to hold people in place. The same pressure reaches further than aid. Lawmakers hostile to immigration back an international role for the Federal Reserve, and governments hosting a target country’s nationals resist sanctions on it.
- Papers
- IMF: International Migration Fund2023Fed Up2023Inside Job2021Migration and Economic Coercion2021
- Book
- Leveraging Migration: International Organizations and the Politics of Distribution, with Merih Angın and Albana Shehaj, Columbia University Press
Inequality, redistribution, and the partisan economy
Most work treats inequality as a measure of how much the poor can demand. I treat it as a measure of how much the rich can block. Rising inequality produces more redistributive tax policy only where left-leaning policymakers hold the pen, and mass conscription raises taxes on the rich only where elites lack the resources to stop it. The same asymmetry runs through immigration policy, where the firms capturing a larger share of the gains are the ones lobbying for more labor.
- Papers
- Inequality and Immigration Policy2023Inequality and the Partisan Political Economy2021War, Inequality, and Taxation2021Immigration and Right-Wing Populism2021
- In Progress
- Chipping Away: How Semiconductor Volatility Fuels Perceived Inequality and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
Borders in a pandemic
With Sung Eun Kim and Yujeong Yang, I built the COVID-19 TRAC dataset, a daily record of every travel restriction imposed during the pandemic. The finding is narrower than the obvious one. Not every Chinese migrant network predicted a border closing. Entry bans on travel from China came fastest where large numbers of temporary Chinese workers were clustered on contracted project sites, which points at the visibility of a particular kind of labor rather than diaspora size. The project was one of thirteen funded under the National Research Foundation of Korea’s rapid call for international research on COVID-19.
- Papers
- The Usual Suspects?2024Severing the Belt and Road2023
- In Progress
- A book on the causes and consequences of targeted and blanket travel restrictions, 2020 to 2022, and what they mean for economic security and supply chains in the Indo-Pacific.
Natural resources and the politics of immigration
Resource wealth reaches immigration policy by two different routes. In autocracies it is a redistribution story: rulers who can hand out rents pay their citizens out of low-wage work, then import migrants to do it, while rulers without rents must offer wages instead and close the border. In democracies it is a Dutch Disease story: an oil boom kills the labor-intensive tradable firms that were the only organized voice for open immigration, and policy closes once they are gone. Oil and gas do this. Metals and coal do not. This is where the program started.
- Papers
- Tyrants and Migrants2017Primary Resources, Secondary Labor2019
- Book
- Fueled Divergence, a manuscript on natural resources and migration in the world economy
