ImmigrationLab

The Immigration Lab's new book, "Global Pathways to Becoming New Americans" is out! This is the most in-depth look at some of the people who came escaping conflict and seeking asylum mainly from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Latin America & the Caribbean since the pandemic. More about this on the works.

An interview about my recent research on how immigration enforcement affects the child care industry.

The artist behind this painting, Criselda Vasquez, painted this portrait of her parents in 2017. The man in this painting, her father, was recently taken by ICE. He has lived in the United States for forty years. This loss has made it hard for the family to support themselves. If you want to support them, you can go to their GoFundMe here: gofund.me/456d8a193

Monstrous behavior by ICE and Alabama police, who blamed a Honduran mother for "abandoning" her child when they arrested & deported her without him. The son, Orlin, a US citizen, was then murdered by abusive relative and Trump admin wont let her return to bury him. Nightmarish.

OUTRAGEOUS. The husband of this US citizen did literally nothing wrong. He submitted his renewal to @USCIS five months before his status was set to expire. Then the government just sat on his paperwork and did nothing, and his protections expired.

The newest ICE data drop distinguishes 'targeted' arrests from 'collateral' arrests - people who weren't the subject of an operation but were encountered during one. Since August 2025, about 1 in 4 arrests have been collateral. Over 60% of the arrests have no criminal record.

Fourteen years ago, our nation made a promise: that young people brought here as children — through no decision of their own — could come out of the shadows and be protected in the only country most of them have ever truly known.    It's up to us to keep that promise.    Dreamers have grown up here. This is their home. They are American in every way that truly matters. And it’s long past time that Congress provides them a pathway to citizenship by finally passing the Dream Act.

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT. He knows his time is running out. So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour. He died 5 months later. This is that lecture. The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇 Bookmark it for later

Convocan a marcha en Chicago el 1 de mayo Organizaciones a favor de los inmigrantes están haciendo un llamado a la comunidad para que se unan a la marcha del 1 de mayo. telemundochicago.com/video/noticias…

Asylum seekers may lose work permits, making things harder for them and the US economy. stateline.org/2026/04/23/asy…

Trump's immigration approval is underwater. ICE favorability is 50/50. Most Democrats and independents oppose current tactics. Yet some elected Democrats still say Trump "won the immigration debate." Ernesto Castañeda explains why that's wrong and what the data actually shows.

New from the CLALS Working Paper Series! 📘 No. 55 — "The Latinos of New York: New Immigrants Maintaining the City" by Ernesto Castañeda 👉 To read: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

New from the CLALS Working Paper Series! 📘 No. 57 — "Family-Propelled Migration and the Appearance of Social Networks" by Ernesto Castañeda & Daniel Jenks 👉 To read: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank. It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5 trillion dollars more in taxes than they received in government benefits. Every single year. For thirty years. Without exception. The country was lied to. Here is what the study found.🧵

@JBlunt1018 @Immigration_Lab We benefit from foreign students even after they leave. ¾ of R&D takes place outside America now. While the numbers are rising, not many US-born scientists and engineers go abroad. The people we educate help connect us to research labs all over the world.

International students brought $43.8 BILLION into the U.S. economy in one year and supported 378,000+ American jobs. And here’s the part many miss: roughly 63% do not remain in the U.S. long term. We educate them, benefit from their spending, then many take their skills elsewhere. For the senator from Missouri who seems clueless on basic economics: International students likely generate around $950 million to $1 billion+ annually in Missouri economic activity based on enrollment and national averages. That is in the neighborhood of a major Missouri state budget category, including public higher education support. America is one of the few countries lucky enough to have talented people pay us to study here. Only fools treat that like a problem.

The winner of the 2025 JRS Early Career Researcher Prize is Dr Abreek-Zubiedat, for "Technologies of life-making in the British refugee camps of the Southern Levant"! This is a remarkable piece of scholarship. Congratulations! 🎉 Read for free here: doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fe…

More than 13,000 people were living legally in the United States, waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they received deportation orders to countries they had never been to and had no ties to. An Afghan man who fled the Taliban was told he would be sent to Uganda. A Cuban woman working at a Texas Chick-fil-A was arrested after a minor traffic accident and told she was going to Ecuador. A Mauritanian man in Michigan - Uganda. A Venezuelan mother in Ohio - Ecuador. Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and others ordered to Honduras. A Guatemalan woman who had been held captive, repeatedly sexually assaulted, and arrived at the border with her four-year-old daughter - pregnant from a rape - sat in a San Francisco immigration courtroom and heard an ICE attorney say she would be sent to Ecuador, Honduras, or Uganda. She had never heard of Ecuador or Uganda. The diplomatic agreement with Honduras allows a maximum of 10 such deportees per month. Thousands have been ordered to Honduras. The Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs confirmed to the AP that none of the people ordered to Uganda have actually arrived. In March, ICE legal officials quietly emailed field attorneys to stop filing new motions for third-country deportations. No explanation. Not publicly released. The earlier orders are still in effect. These 13,000 people have lost their work authorization. They cannot pursue their asylum claims. They cannot find out if they will be put on a plane to a country they have never seen. A senior attorney at the National Immigration Law Center told the AP directly: the goal is to instill fear. To drive people to abandon their cases and leave on their own. That is a documented assessment of the purpose. The limbo is the policy.

Shame on us. I think of the brave Afghans that stood alongside us against the Taliban, especially those I worked with personally during my four years in command of the NATO mission there. It is incomprehensible to me that we would not bring them here to the United States, fulfilling the most fundamental obligations of trust and honor. nytimes.com/2026/04/21/wor…

Scoop: The DOJ has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it wants to revoke, part of a push to increase the pace of denaturalizations by assigning the cases to prosecutors in dozens of U.S. attorney’s offices across the country. nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/…