EA - Immigration reform: a shallow cause exploration by JoelMcGuire

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Immigration reform: a shallow cause exploration, published by JoelMcGuire on February 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This shallow investigation was commissioned by Founders Pledge.SummaryThis shallow cause area report explores the impact of immigration on subjective wellbeing (SWB). It was completed in two weeks. In this report, we start by reviewing the literature and modelling the impact of immigration on wellbeing. Then, we conduct back of the envelope calculations (BOTECs) of the cost-effectiveness of various interventions to increase immigration.The effect of immigration has been studied extensively. However, most of the studies we find are correlational and do not provide causal evidence. Additionally, most of the studies use life satisfaction as a measure of SWB, so it’s unclear whether immigration impacts life satisfaction and affective happiness (e.g. positive emotions on a daily basis) differently.Despite these limitations, we attempt to estimate the effect of immigration on wellbeing. We find that immigrating to countries with higher average SWB levels might produce large benefits to wellbeing, but we are very uncertain about the exact size of the effect. According to our model, when people move to a country with higher SWB, they will gain 77% of the SWB gap between the origin and destination country. We assume this benefit will be immediate and permanent, as there is little evidence to model how this benefit evolves over time, and existing evidence doesn’t suggest large deviations from this assumption.There are open questions about the spillover effects of immigration on the immigrant’s household as well as their original and destination communities. Immigrating likely benefits the whole family if they move together, but the impact on household members that stay behind is less clear, as the economic benefits of remittances are countered by the negative effects of separation. On balance, we estimate a small, non-significant benefit for households that stay behind when a member immigrates (+0.01 WELLBY per household member). We did not include spillovers on the origin community due to scarce evidence (only one study) that suggested small, null effects. For destination communities, we estimate that increasing the proportion of immigrants by 1% is associated with a small, non-significant, negative spillover for natives (-0.01 WELLBYs per native), although this is likely moderated by attitudes towards immigrants.We then conducted BOTECs of possible interventions to increase immigration. The most promising is policy advocacy, which we estimate is 11 times more cost-effective than GiveDirectly cash transfers. The other interventions we investigated are 2 to 6 times better than cash transfers. However, all of our BOTECs are speculative and exploratory in nature. These estimates are also limited because we’re unsure how to model the potential for immigration increasing interventions to foster anti-immigrant sentiment in the future. Plus, there might be non-trivial risks that a big push for immigration or other polarising topics by Effective Altruists could burn goodwill that might be used on other issues (e.g., biosecurity). Accordingly, we’re inclined towards treating these as upper-bound estimates and we expect that once these costs are taken into account immigration policy advocacy would no longer be promising.We recommend that future research assesses the costs, chances of success, and risk of backlash for potential policy-based interventions to increase immigration.NotesThis report focuses on the impact of immigration in terms of WELLBYs. One WELLBY is a 1 life satisfaction point change for one year (or any equivalent combination of change in life satisfaction and time). In some cases, we convert results in standard deviations of life sati...