Michael Clemens
@mclem
Economist and professor at School of Government & Policy, Johns Hopkins University. Fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics, IZA, CReAM, CGD. Assoc. Editor JEP. Personal views only. Web: ORCID: 0000-0003-1354-0965
⚽ Related to today's final match ⚽ Does anyone know: Were superstar Lamine Yamal's parents and grandparents granted immigration status by Spain in its 1991/1996 regularizations? The family reunification he describes would have occurred in the early/mid-1990s. www.hellomagazine.com/us/913650/la...
Act 2: In March, my study found that Borjas's paper was filled with critical errors & undisclosed data imputation, generating the entire result. www.rfberlin.com/network-pape... I noted that Borjas's paper concealed his own involvement with creating the tax, working directly for the US President.
A story in three acts. Act 1: In February, George Borjas released a paper justifying the US President's $100,000 H-1B tax. www.nber.org/papers/w34793 Below is that version's mandatory @nber.org disclosure section, when it was released in February and revised in March.
More about the Administration's explicit, indisputable goals as it enacts these student-exclusion policies. This is the Director of USCIS, in his own words: www.breitbart.com/immigration/...
Yes, the Administration's policy of barring international students from staying to add value to the US economy is explicity and beyond dispute. In its own words. www.dhs.gov/news/2026/07...
Yesterday the US Administration supercharged its explicit effort to bar international students from staying in the US after graduation. All Americans should know: 1/3 of *all* STEM PhDs working in the US are immigrants who graduated from US universities, then stayed. www.piie.com/index%2Ephp/...
This is obviously a lie. A coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of our nation, with all its rich history and unique place in the world, would not be dominated by the portrait of one current politician. It serves a different project, a project that harms all Conservatives & all Liberals.
Indeed, courts said it was geography, not race, when people tried to get around the racial bar. But others ruled it was race, not geography, when people of the banned race tried to get around the geographic bar. In practice: a racial bar. www.archives.gov/publications...
Jevons Paradox in new study from Ramp/Revelio—> "Firms making the largest AI investments grow employment by roughly 10% following adoption, while low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change." ramp.com/data/ai-jobs... #EconSky
This morning. Yes, my city is STILL occupied by roving military fireteams, for no reason whatsoever. The fact that the president has personally ordered this occupation to continue indefinitely/permanently, and self-styled Conservatives say nothing, makes it more of a poisonous outrage—not less.
On this 250th anniversary of our founding, I think of the countless things I love about my country. One is the most potent symbol in DC: At the heart of our Capitol, a grand tomb, built for Washington…sits empty. Our institutions do not glorify one man. They’re ours, our treasure, our hope. 🇺🇸
If you believe that the Quayzorg Federation can launch thousands of Omega-Class space freighters loaded with pregnant silicon-based Jubrul worms to crash into fields near Abilene, Kansas, and the wormlets they deliver nanoseconds before impact are US citizens, you don't believe in nationhood at all.
In our new post at @piie.com, @ethan-lewis.bsky.social & I show how the substitution and scale effects play out at the average firm. www.piie.com/blogs/realti... Demand for US workers rises somewhat less than pure scale-up would imply. So the substitution channel is not zero. But scale dominates.
In our @aeajournals.bsky.social paper we measure the effect on firms' revenues, profits, and investment, and also on their US hiring. doi.org/10.1257/app.... Firms that win the lottery don't substitute away from US labor. If anything they hire more US workers, particularly in rural areas. Why?
We use the largest work visa in the United States for jobs that don't require a college degree, the H-2B visa, like these seafood packers in Maryland. Firms face a binding quota on the annual number of hires. At a key administrative step, the government allocates permission at random, for fairness.
The US Administration's radical, extreme cuts to science funding, student visas, and academic freedom are making foreign scientists prepare to depart. We are losing breakthroughs, cures, natsec technology. Conservative and Liberal Americans will suffer, permanently. www.nber.org/papers/w35330
And after you get off the plane, you’ll be forced to submit to pregnancy testing by Homeland Security officials after each separate time you engage in intercourse on United States territory.
Foreign monarchs’ corrupt ‘gift’ of that obscene luxury jet to the US President is illegal, barred by our Constitution in Article I §9. Staining the skies of Washington with that honking monument to lawlessness will pervert an anniversary that belongs to us, all Conservative and Liberal Americans.
The US Supreme Court just ruled that the President's order suspending birthright citizenship was illegal from day one. Here is the exact passage from our Constitution that, according to the President, does not apply to several million of *us*. Several million US citizens.
The great economist Alberto Alesina passed away unexpectedly six years ago. The next day, his former PhD student @sethsd.bsky.social posted an explanation for Alesina's incandescence as a scholar and mentor. I've thought about his words many times over the years. medium.com/@sethstephen...
These are three headlines, next to each other in the same (current) issue of The @economist.com
🗣️ Published today in @aeajournals.bsky.social. Ethan Lewis and I use a visa lottery, as a nationwide randomized experiment, to test the effects of foreign labor on US firms and workers. doi.org/10.1257/app.... A concise summary from @nber.org —> www.nber.org/digest/20221...
The Supreme Court has upheld the US Administration's termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans+Haitians—> www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p... 13 colleagues and I estimated the economic cost: $20bn/year lost to the US economy, and 360,000 US jobs: www.aclunorcal.org/sites/defaul...
An academic journal just directed me to delete the word ‘elderly’ from a manuscript. They consider it ‘dehumanizing’. I wish that people of good heart who care about harm in the world could focus their scarce resources on the vast material harms all around us, instead of bottomless purity-policing.
The White House has moved to ban almost all work authorization for asylum seekers, indefinitely. In my new note with the brilliant Natalia Rigol & Amy Nice, we assess White House claims that work authorization 1) harms US workers and 2) causes frivolous asylum claims. www.hbs.edu/faculty/Page...
No Liberal, no Conservative, no Democrat, and no Republican with total contempt for our Constitution belongs anywhere near public office. Frank Fukuyama reviews why an independent judiciary, and this rule of law, has been bedrock to Western prosperity —> www.persuasion.community/p/why-we-nee...
US tariffs are taxes on Americans. They are not "external revenue", they are not taxes "on other countries". They are taxes on every American who buys anything with any ingredient made overseas—that is, all of us. Every dollar of wine tariffs is paid by US consumers—> www.nber.org/202603/diges...
The $100,000 tax on H-1B workers was illegal from the first minute. The US president has no such power, as federal court just ruled. —> www.reuters.com/world/trumps... I wrote at @piie.com why White House economists' own justification for the tax was spurious—> www.piie.com/blogs/realti...