I’m excited that more people are looking into this area!
Flagging that I only read the intro and the conclusion, which might mean I missed something.
High-skilled immigration
From my current understanding, high-skilled immigration reform seems promising not so much because of the effects on the migrants (though they are positive) but mostly due to the effect on the destination country’s GDP and technological progress. The latter has sizeable positive spillover effects (that also accrue to poorer countries).
Advocacy for high-skilled immigration is less controversial and thus easier, which could make interventions in this area more valuable when compared to general immigration reform.
Then again, for the reasons above, more individuals are likely already working on improved high-skilled immigration.
Malengo
Also, have you chatted with Johannes Haushofer? He knows EA and recently started Malengo, which wants to facilitate educational migration from low-income countries. I’d assume he has thought about these topics a bunch.
I agree that advocacy for high skilled immigration is more likely to succeed, and that the benefits would probably come more from technological and material progress. The problem is we currently aren’t prepared to try and estimate the benefits of these society and world wide spillover effects.
Maybe we will return to this if (big if) we explore policies that may cost-effectively increase GDP growth (which some argue is = tech progress in the long run?), and through that subjective wellbeing [1] .
Regarding Malengo, I asked Johannes a few questions about it and I’m referencing that post whenever I cite Malengo numbers. I didn’t add it here because most of our work was already done when they wrote a post about it, and I was too lazy, and I didn’t think it looked particularly promising in my initial estimates. However, I now notice that in my previous calculations I didn’t consider remittances, which seems like an omission. As we discussed in the report, it’s unclear how remittances balance the negative effects of separation from the immigrant, but I think that separation pains are less of a concern if it’s a young adult leaving—as that’s pretty normal in many cultures.
So here’s a BOTEC with remittances considered.
As Johannes said, they expect that 64% of students will settle permanently in Germany (or a similar country) after graduating. I interpret this to imply an expected stay of 38.4 years, which if life-satisfaction difference between the countries closes slightly to 2 life-satisfaction points, will mean 2 * 38.4 = 78.8 WELLBYs per student sent. It costs $15,408 [2]to fund a student to matriculate in Germany.
If we’re only concerned with the student, this implies a cost-effectiveness of 76.8 / $15,408 = ~5 WELLBYs per $1000. Which is a bit less than 8 WELLBYs per $1k that I estimate come from GiveDirectly cash transfers. But this excludes remittances.
They expect Malengo participants to remit ~$2k a year. If assume a 1 to 1 equivalence between $1k of remittances and GiveDirectly cash transfers, and assume this continues for 20 years, this would imply a 40 * 8 = 320 additional WELLBYs generated by remittances. This boosts the cost-effectiveness of Malengo from ~0.6x GiveDirectly to ~3x GiveDirectly. However, I’m unsure that the equivalence assumption would be warranted, or how long we could expect remittances to continue[3]. One potential concern is that the families that can send students to university (regardless of cost) are going to be much wealthier, so remittances will matter relatively less.
Note that the relationship between GDP <> SWB is rather contested—see previous work from HLI on the topic that argues that maybe GDP doesn’t matter much for subjective wellbeing, and a reply post from Founder’s Pledge that argues against that point using the same evidence. In the latter post there’s also a quite interesting discussion Vadim and an author of one of the key papers (Kelsey O’Connor).
This question should be easy in principle, to gain traction on. We could use a survey that includes immigrants that asks about if they send remittances, and how long they’ve lived in the country they moved to.
First, at Malengo the students fully fund the next cohort via repaying the original donation in an ISA.
This means that funding 1 student will actually fund many students over time. Using the numbers above you get a rate of return around 6% annualized. So funding a student is sorta infinite students 0% discount rates. But that is unreasonable, so let’s just cap at the next 100 years and say 2% discount rate from inflation.
BOTEC for 1 funding pays 12.5 students or a student every 8 years.
That changes your calculation from 3x givedirectly to 37.5x.
Second, you also said the students are richer but that is factually incorrect, the program is means testing to ensure that students are well targeted.
Finally, there are other fudge factors, but they are all dwarfed by the development benefits of immigration.
I’m excited that more people are looking into this area!
Flagging that I only read the intro and the conclusion, which might mean I missed something.
High-skilled immigration
From my current understanding, high-skilled immigration reform seems promising not so much because of the effects on the migrants (though they are positive) but mostly due to the effect on the destination country’s GDP and technological progress. The latter has sizeable positive spillover effects (that also accrue to poorer countries).
Advocacy for high-skilled immigration is less controversial and thus easier, which could make interventions in this area more valuable when compared to general immigration reform.
Then again, for the reasons above, more individuals are likely already working on improved high-skilled immigration.
Malengo
Also, have you chatted with Johannes Haushofer? He knows EA and recently started Malengo, which wants to facilitate educational migration from low-income countries. I’d assume he has thought about these topics a bunch.
I agree that advocacy for high skilled immigration is more likely to succeed, and that the benefits would probably come more from technological and material progress. The problem is we currently aren’t prepared to try and estimate the benefits of these society and world wide spillover effects.
Maybe we will return to this if (big if) we explore policies that may cost-effectively increase GDP growth (which some argue is = tech progress in the long run?), and through that subjective wellbeing [1] .
Regarding Malengo, I asked Johannes a few questions about it and I’m referencing that post whenever I cite Malengo numbers. I didn’t add it here because most of our work was already done when they wrote a post about it, and I was too lazy, and I didn’t think it looked particularly promising in my initial estimates. However, I now notice that in my previous calculations I didn’t consider remittances, which seems like an omission. As we discussed in the report, it’s unclear how remittances balance the negative effects of separation from the immigrant, but I think that separation pains are less of a concern if it’s a young adult leaving—as that’s pretty normal in many cultures.
So here’s a BOTEC with remittances considered.
As Johannes said, they expect that 64% of students will settle permanently in Germany (or a similar country) after graduating. I interpret this to imply an expected stay of 38.4 years, which if life-satisfaction difference between the countries closes slightly to 2 life-satisfaction points, will mean 2 * 38.4 = 78.8 WELLBYs per student sent. It costs $15,408 [2]to fund a student to matriculate in Germany.
If we’re only concerned with the student, this implies a cost-effectiveness of 76.8 / $15,408 = ~5 WELLBYs per $1000. Which is a bit less than 8 WELLBYs per $1k that I estimate come from GiveDirectly cash transfers. But this excludes remittances.
They expect Malengo participants to remit ~$2k a year. If assume a 1 to 1 equivalence between $1k of remittances and GiveDirectly cash transfers, and assume this continues for 20 years, this would imply a 40 * 8 = 320 additional WELLBYs generated by remittances. This boosts the cost-effectiveness of Malengo from ~0.6x GiveDirectly to ~3x GiveDirectly. However, I’m unsure that the equivalence assumption would be warranted, or how long we could expect remittances to continue[3]. One potential concern is that the families that can send students to university (regardless of cost) are going to be much wealthier, so remittances will matter relatively less.
Note that the relationship between GDP <> SWB is rather contested—see previous work from HLI on the topic that argues that maybe GDP doesn’t matter much for subjective wellbeing, and a reply post from Founder’s Pledge that argues against that point using the same evidence. In the latter post there’s also a quite interesting discussion Vadim and an author of one of the key papers (Kelsey O’Connor).
Malengo costs 12k euros to send a student, and they hope to get overhead down to 20% once they scale. Converting this into dollars implies $15k.
This question should be easy in principle, to gain traction on. We could use a survey that includes immigrants that asks about if they send remittances, and how long they’ve lived in the country they moved to.
First, at Malengo the students fully fund the next cohort via repaying the original donation in an ISA.
This means that funding 1 student will actually fund many students over time. Using the numbers above you get a rate of return around 6% annualized. So funding a student is sorta infinite students 0% discount rates. But that is unreasonable, so let’s just cap at the next 100 years and say 2% discount rate from inflation.
BOTEC for 1 funding pays 12.5 students or a student every 8 years.
That changes your calculation from 3x givedirectly to 37.5x.
Second, you also said the students are richer but that is factually incorrect, the program is means testing to ensure that students are well targeted.
Finally, there are other fudge factors, but they are all dwarfed by the development benefits of immigration.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29862
This shows that nearly 80% of long-run income gains are accrued within sending countries across a wide variety of channels.
Hence, I think 37.5x GiveDirectly is a completely reasonable estimate.