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.
Jens Hainmüller is the Kimberly Glenn Professor in Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is the Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab that is focused on the design and evaluation of immigration and integration policies and programs.
His research interests include immigration, statistical methods, political economy, and political behaviour. He has published over 65 articles, many of them in top general science journals and top field journals in political science, statistics, economics, and business. He has also published three open source software packages and his research has received awards and funding from the Carnegie Corporation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Swiss SNF, the American Political Science Association, Schmidt Futures, the Society of Political Methodology, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Midwest Political Science Association.
Hainmüller received his PhD from Harvard University and also studied at the London School of Economics, Brown University, and the University of Tübingen. Before joining Stanford, he served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.