Immigrant Economists Enable Restriction

When immigrant‑born social scientists publicly support immigration limits and join policymaking teams, their biographies are used both as moral cover and as intellectual justification for restrictive measures. That dynamic changes the political optics of exclusionary policy and makes empirical expertise a central lever in debates over visas, labor markets and racial effects. — Tracking when and how immigrant experts are recruited into government policymaking matters because it alters the persuasive ecology around immigration rules and affects race, labor, and enforcement tradeoffs at national scale.