How Can Governments Facilitate the Integration of Newcomers? Building an Evidence and Innovation Agenda for Migration Research

Migration is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Many countries have experienced a stark increase in the size and diversity of their immigrant and refugee populations. Reeling and reactive, governments are struggling to facilitate their successful integration. Policymakers responding to the integration challenges often don’t know where to start or what programs work best, and there’s little solid evidence and expertise to guide them. In this talk, I will describe some of the efforts that my research group at the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) has undertaken to make headway against these obstacles. This involves our collaborative efforts to build an evidence base for what works and what doesn’t and our exploration into leveraging data science and behavioral insights to create algorithms and digital tools to facilitate better decision making.