First based on other income sharing agreement orgs, i think it’s very likely they will recover close to all the money so I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
A couple of comments/questions on this take here
“I think immigration may be one of the single greatest ways to increase human wellbeing, and (a hotter take) ultimately will be critical to maintaining the balance of power of democracies against autocracies”
Can you explain the pathway that immigration “may be one of the single greatest ways to increase human wellbeing”. I can see how it has the potential to do good in many cases but “one of the single greatest” is a big call.
Also this...”immigration ultimately will be critical to maintaining the balance of power of democracies against autocracies”. How would this work? my instinct would be in the other direction at the moment. I would say anti-immigration sentiment is one of the biggest drivers of the global trend towards autocracy around the world at the moment. The anti immigration sentiment has been a huge source of support for Trump, and in England/many European countries there’s a similar dynamic. Do you think that immigrants are more likely to vote against autocratic leaders? That seems less and less the case, naturalized immigrant voters seem to be about 50/,50 on Trump last election, and even if we assume immigrant voters generally favor less authoritarian candidates, I really doubt that would overcome the harm the anti—immigration sentiment is bringing.
Germany is a decent test case too, where after bringing in 1 million immigrants,(which i support for the record) anti immigration sentiment has soared and has given the AFD a foothold.
My impression in Uganda is that there is increasing support for authoritarian regimes. many of my friends are huge fans of the West African Coups, and Africans might be the strongest Trump supporting countries in the world. just a few months ago 79 percent of Nigerians had at least some confidence in Trump, which is pretty mind-blowing
I was secretly hoping you’d show up given your past comments about brain drain.
Can you explain the pathway that immigration “may be one of the single greatest ways to increase human wellbeing”. I can see how it has the potential to do good in many cases but “one of the single greatest” is a big call.
Right, this comes from Sam and I’s previous look into immigration. Based on this work, our working model is that immigrants adapt to the level of wellbeing (proxied by satisfaction) of the host country. If we take this seriously, then there’s no known intervention that is more powerful than immigration. We can imagine this is plausible because immigration is a super intervention where you are getting tens to hundreds of potentially positive economic, health and psychological interventions altogether. Now, I also take this as a bit of a puzzle. Is it really the case that immigrating from India to the USA is ~2x better than moving from moderate to minimal depression symptoms?
One further thing is that this depends on preferring measures of satisfaction to happiness / mood. In some ongoing work it seems like the Kenya / Nigeria are about as happy as the UK even though they’re less satisfied.
I’m curious what you think about this, since you’ve supposedly made the move down the ladder of life satisfaction by going from NZ to Uganda (but this is I assume a relatively smaller dip in terms of daily happiness).
Also this...”immigration ultimately will be critical to maintaining the balance of power of democracies against autocracies”. How would this work?
I could have spoken more precisely here—I meant that immigration is critical if we can do it right and not have it undermine our democracies (which is arguably what’s happened in the USA).
This topic is outside of my happiness wheelhouse, and involves putting on my much smaller hat of geopolitics dilettante. But I buy the argument that to compete economically and deter militarily autocracies like China the west will need to be constituted by much larger countries, or have tighter alliances. Both prospects seem bleak at the moment. This is of course assuming we don’t have an AI singularity and the world looks relatively normal by 20th century standards.
Do you think that immigrants are more likely to vote against autocratic leaders?
I’m not super familiar with the literature but I lean towards “yes”, but I imagine this could depend quite a bit on the country of origin and the filter (e.g., Cuban Americans tend to be very anti-communist and Republican).
There’s so much here to think about, which I think reflects the complexity of immigration as a topic, both as a debate about benefits/harms and the challenges measuring outcomes, especially if we throw wellbeing in there.
Immigration benefits/harms I think Immigration is unusual as a GHD intervention, because it has the almost unique situation where there are many potential benefits and potential harms. Most global health charities like AMF/New Incentives/ just don’t have this problem. An exception might be GiveDirectly where there were a lot of potential harms touted at first, but their research has put to bed a lot of the initial concerns about inflation/dependency/jealousy.
The main benefits of immigration are personal and measurable, whereas the potential harms are diffuse and hard to measure, although there have been attempts to model brain drain harms. I still think CEAs should at least discount a bit for these potential harms, but its tricky to be sure.
PotentialBenefits (Some Included in CEAs) - Improved Wellbeing of immigrant - Remittances - Migration opportunities for families (often not measured) - Immigrants who return to the country with improved skills (often not measured)
Potential Harms (I’ve never seen included in CEAs) - Loss of high impact country builders. The most talented, and motivated people who might go on to become politicians/innovators/business leaders and influence thousands of people are the ones leaving. These people aren’t necessarily replaceable like regular workers. Malengo might be taking some of these, as their pool includesthat passed senior 6 well, which is the top 5%-10% of Uganda’s talent - Negative psychological/emotional effect on migration on the population remaining. “Japa” syndrome in Nigeria has been well documented, I’m scared of Uganda becoming like Nigeria, with everyone’s eyes abroad, and people not investing in their own businesses/future in country but instead always thinking about/talking about/trying to leave. This would not make for a nice workplace! - Fueling support for authoritarian regimes (hard to argue against at this point) - Brain drain in general, which despite protestations does exist although it can be mitigated.
Scales and Surveys and Wellbeing “Now, I also take this as a bit of a puzzle. Is it really the case that immigrating from India to the USA is ~2x better than moving from moderate to minimal depression symptoms?”. Yeah this is either implausible or absurd. I wonder if you could find even one person who would consider this plausible. This incongruous issue should trigger a hard look into where the data problem is exactly. Different countries almost certainly have different scales, and that migrants will scale-adjust. This makes it hard/impossible to track wellbeing accurately when people move countries/. Also I wonder if you’ve considered that its more well off people who will generally be immigrating so they will on average be far happier than the average person before leaving. Its probably best to take the top quartile (or higher) of home country happiness statistics as baseline.
As I discussed in some of my first forays into the forum, going head to head with the mighty Michael, I have huge doubts about the veracity of before/after surveys in development. I straightforwardly buy point surveys of happiness/satisfaction surveys of the first order. But I don’t put a lot of trust in before/after satisfaction surveys in where you do an intervention first, then survey satisfaction later. This concern cuts across including GiveDirectly, StrongMinds and here. I think Malengo is doing the right thing in doing before/after surveys as it is standard practise, I just don’t buy it myself. I’m going to quote myself from 3 years ago
“Self reporting doesn’t work because poor people here in Northern Uganda at least are primed to give low marks when reporting how they feel before an intervention, and then high marks afterwards—whether the intervention did anything or not. I have seen it personally here a number of times with fairly useless aid projects. I even asked people one time after a terrible farming training, whether they really thought the training helped as much as they had reported on the piece of paper. A couple of people laughed and said something like “No of course it didn’t help, but if we give high grades we might get more and better help in future”. this is an intelligent and rational response by recipients of aid, as of course good reports of an intervention increase their chances of getting more stuff in future, useful or not...
You also said “Also, we’re comparing self-reports to other self-reports”, which doesn’t help the matter, because those who don’t get help are likely to keep scoring the survey lowly because they feel like they didn’t get help.
So Back to your question… “Our working model is that immigrants adapt to the level of wellbeing (proxied by satisfaction) of the host country. If we take this seriously, then there’s no known intervention that is more powerful than immigration.
I don’t think that immigrants adapt to the satisfaction level of the host country (survey/scaling issues make this almost impossible to measure), although I do think there will be improvement. Then I think you also don’t consider the potential harms which mitigate the power of immigration.
On my life... ”I’m curious what you think about this, since you’ve supposedly made the move down the ladder of life satisfaction by going from NZ to Uganda (but this is I assume a relatively smaller dip in terms of daily happiness). I’m afraid my case is too weird, I’m extremely happy and satisfied, but that won’t help this discussion at all :D
On the political question… “I could have spoken more precisely here—I meant that immigration is critical if we can do it right and not have it undermine our democracies (which is arguably what’s happened in the USA).” I agree with this in principle (And Richard’s link on how to make immigration more appealing to host countries), but when it comes to considering interventions we need to observe the evidence of what is actually happening, not what we hope to happen. Right now (see my previous links) I think immigration isn’t helping democracy, unfortunately...
On happiness vs. satisfaction I must confess I’m a bit confused here, but its super interesting. I struggle to understand why these measures would be so different after looking at the questions. I think the jury is still out and I await the final authoritative report from HLI ;).
First based on other income sharing agreement orgs, i think it’s very likely they will recover close to all the money so I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
A couple of comments/questions on this take here
“I think immigration may be one of the single greatest ways to increase human wellbeing, and (a hotter take) ultimately will be critical to maintaining the balance of power of democracies against autocracies”
Can you explain the pathway that immigration “may be one of the single greatest ways to increase human wellbeing”. I can see how it has the potential to do good in many cases but “one of the single greatest” is a big call.
Also this...”immigration ultimately will be critical to maintaining the balance of power of democracies against autocracies”. How would this work? my instinct would be in the other direction at the moment. I would say anti-immigration sentiment is one of the biggest drivers of the global trend towards autocracy around the world at the moment. The anti immigration sentiment has been a huge source of support for Trump, and in England/many European countries there’s a similar dynamic. Do you think that immigrants are more likely to vote against autocratic leaders? That seems less and less the case, naturalized immigrant voters seem to be about 50/,50 on Trump last election, and even if we assume immigrant voters generally favor less authoritarian candidates, I really doubt that would overcome the harm the anti—immigration sentiment is bringing.
https://www.cato.org/blog/naturalized-immigrants-probably-voted-republican-2024
Germany is a decent test case too, where after bringing in 1 million immigrants,(which i support for the record) anti immigration sentiment has soared and has given the AFD a foothold.
My impression in Uganda is that there is increasing support for authoritarian regimes. many of my friends are huge fans of the West African Coups, and Africans might be the strongest Trump supporting countries in the world. just a few months ago 79 percent of Nigerians had at least some confidence in Trump, which is pretty mind-blowing
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/06/11/confidence-in-trump/
I’m not an expert on this though and you might well have another mechanism for this statement.
Howdy Nick,
I was secretly hoping you’d show up given your past comments about brain drain.
Right, this comes from Sam and I’s previous look into immigration. Based on this work, our working model is that immigrants adapt to the level of wellbeing (proxied by satisfaction) of the host country. If we take this seriously, then there’s no known intervention that is more powerful than immigration. We can imagine this is plausible because immigration is a super intervention where you are getting tens to hundreds of potentially positive economic, health and psychological interventions altogether. Now, I also take this as a bit of a puzzle. Is it really the case that immigrating from India to the USA is ~2x better than moving from moderate to minimal depression symptoms?
One further thing is that this depends on preferring measures of satisfaction to happiness / mood. In some ongoing work it seems like the Kenya / Nigeria are about as happy as the UK even though they’re less satisfied.
I’m curious what you think about this, since you’ve supposedly made the move down the ladder of life satisfaction by going from NZ to Uganda (but this is I assume a relatively smaller dip in terms of daily happiness).
I could have spoken more precisely here—I meant that immigration is critical if we can do it right and not have it undermine our democracies (which is arguably what’s happened in the USA).
This topic is outside of my happiness wheelhouse, and involves putting on my much smaller hat of geopolitics dilettante. But I buy the argument that to compete economically and deter militarily autocracies like China the west will need to be constituted by much larger countries, or have tighter alliances. Both prospects seem bleak at the moment. This is of course assuming we don’t have an AI singularity and the world looks relatively normal by 20th century standards.
I’m not super familiar with the literature but I lean towards “yes”, but I imagine this could depend quite a bit on the country of origin and the filter (e.g., Cuban Americans tend to be very anti-communist and Republican).
Thanks @JoelMcGuire for that wonderful response.
There’s so much here to think about, which I think reflects the complexity of immigration as a topic, both as a debate about benefits/harms and the challenges measuring outcomes, especially if we throw wellbeing in there.
Immigration benefits/harms
I think Immigration is unusual as a GHD intervention, because it has the almost unique situation where there are many potential benefits and potential harms. Most global health charities like AMF/New Incentives/ just don’t have this problem. An exception might be GiveDirectly where there were a lot of potential harms touted at first, but their research has put to bed a lot of the initial concerns about inflation/dependency/jealousy.
The main benefits of immigration are personal and measurable, whereas the potential harms are diffuse and hard to measure, although there have been attempts to model brain drain harms. I still think CEAs should at least discount a bit for these potential harms, but its tricky to be sure.
Potential Benefits (Some Included in CEAs)
- Improved Wellbeing of immigrant
- Remittances
- Migration opportunities for families (often not measured)
- Immigrants who return to the country with improved skills (often not measured)
Potential Harms (I’ve never seen included in CEAs)
- Loss of high impact country builders. The most talented, and motivated people who might go on to become politicians/innovators/business leaders and influence thousands of people are the ones leaving. These people aren’t necessarily replaceable like regular workers. Malengo might be taking some of these, as their pool includesthat passed senior 6 well, which is the top 5%-10% of Uganda’s talent
- Negative psychological/emotional effect on migration on the population remaining. “Japa” syndrome in Nigeria has been well documented, I’m scared of Uganda becoming like Nigeria, with everyone’s eyes abroad, and people not investing in their own businesses/future in country but instead always thinking about/talking about/trying to leave. This would not make for a nice workplace!
- Fueling support for authoritarian regimes (hard to argue against at this point)
- Brain drain in general, which despite protestations does exist although it can be mitigated.
Scales and Surveys and Wellbeing
“Now, I also take this as a bit of a puzzle. Is it really the case that immigrating from India to the USA is ~2x better than moving from moderate to minimal depression symptoms?”. Yeah this is either implausible or absurd. I wonder if you could find even one person who would consider this plausible. This incongruous issue should trigger a hard look into where the data problem is exactly. Different countries almost certainly have different scales, and that migrants will scale-adjust. This makes it hard/impossible to track wellbeing accurately when people move countries/. Also I wonder if you’ve considered that its more well off people who will generally be immigrating so they will on average be far happier than the average person before leaving. Its probably best to take the top quartile (or higher) of home country happiness statistics as baseline.
As I discussed in some of my first forays into the forum, going head to head with the mighty Michael, I have huge doubts about the veracity of before/after surveys in development. I straightforwardly buy point surveys of happiness/satisfaction surveys of the first order. But I don’t put a lot of trust in before/after satisfaction surveys in where you do an intervention first, then survey satisfaction later. This concern cuts across including GiveDirectly, StrongMinds and here. I think Malengo is doing the right thing in doing before/after surveys as it is standard practise, I just don’t buy it myself. I’m going to quote myself from 3 years ago
“Self reporting doesn’t work because poor people here in Northern Uganda at least are primed to give low marks when reporting how they feel before an intervention, and then high marks afterwards—whether the intervention did anything or not. I have seen it personally here a number of times with fairly useless aid projects. I even asked people one time after a terrible farming training, whether they really thought the training helped as much as they had reported on the piece of paper. A couple of people laughed and said something like “No of course it didn’t help, but if we give high grades we might get more and better help in future”. this is an intelligent and rational response by recipients of aid, as of course good reports of an intervention increase their chances of getting more stuff in future, useful or not...
You also said “Also, we’re comparing self-reports to other self-reports”, which doesn’t help the matter, because those who don’t get help are likely to keep scoring the survey lowly because they feel like they didn’t get help.
So Back to your question…
“Our working model is that immigrants adapt to the level of wellbeing (proxied by satisfaction) of the host country. If we take this seriously, then there’s no known intervention that is more powerful than immigration.
I don’t think that immigrants adapt to the satisfaction level of the host country (survey/scaling issues make this almost impossible to measure), although I do think there will be improvement. Then I think you also don’t consider the potential harms which mitigate the power of immigration.
On my life...
”I’m curious what you think about this, since you’ve supposedly made the move down the ladder of life satisfaction by going from NZ to Uganda (but this is I assume a relatively smaller dip in terms of daily happiness). I’m afraid my case is too weird, I’m extremely happy and satisfied, but that won’t help this discussion at all :D
On the political question…
“I could have spoken more precisely here—I meant that immigration is critical if we can do it right and not have it undermine our democracies (which is arguably what’s happened in the USA).” I agree with this in principle (And Richard’s link on how to make immigration more appealing to host countries), but when it comes to considering interventions we need to observe the evidence of what is actually happening, not what we hope to happen. Right now (see my previous links) I think immigration isn’t helping democracy, unfortunately...
On happiness vs. satisfaction
I must confess I’m a bit confused here, but its super interesting. I struggle to understand why these measures would be so different after looking at the questions. I think the jury is still out and I await the final authoritative report from HLI ;).