My primary research agenda is to make migration policy work for all.
A secondary agenda considers the theme of migration and borders more figuratively. I am interested in using language to understand culture, worldviews, and other conceptual boundaries. My first attempt at this studies interdisciplinarity in higher education using LLMs and network theory.
Abstract: Labor migration programs offer high wages to developing-country workers at scale, but exploitative practices along the supply chain can erode these gains. How do interactions between the migrant labor and recruitment markets shape total migrant surplus? In my simple framework, competition for the labor demand of employers drives fringe recruiters to exit or extract more migrant surplus to survive. The net prevalence of exploitative recruitment thus depends on heterogeneity in which recruiters exit. I show these forces empirically by exploiting a sudden increase in the minimum wage for overseas Filipino workers. The policy drives recruiters toward both exit and fraud, but disproportionately drives out fraudulent recruiters, who tend to have small market shares and place workers in low-wage jobs. However, the policy also caused migrant employment to decline sharply, partly reflecting spillovers from exits of recruiters who served multiple markets. Findings illuminate additional policy tradeoffs that arise when considering the labor and recruitment markets jointly.
Abstract: Institutional curriculum design in higher education is often discussed in terms of breadth and depth. While studies often rely on coarse disciplinary classifications or the number of majors, more granularity may be desired if students select courses from a broad range of fields. We develop a method to quantify curricular breadth by applying deep learning and graph theory to text data found in course catalogs. Using 17 years of data from a liberal arts college, we show that mapping the curriculum as a high-dimensional network based on semantic similarity recovers intuitive relationships between courses cutting across disciplinary boundaries. We apply Weitzman (1992)'s diversity index to measure breadth in a fully distance-based and discipline-agnostic way, and show three facts about the college's curriculum: i) differences in content within disciplines and similarities across disciplines are substantial, ii) our breadth metric has good theoretical properties and can be interpreted as a combination of more "primitive" measures, and iii) our breadth metric predicts student enrollment even conditional on the number of courses offered.
Abstract: I collect daily observations from centralized postings of overseas jobs in six of the largest migrant-sending countries across greater Asia (India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka). The harmonized job-level dataset includes the names of the destination-country employer and origin-country intermediary, as well as the occupation, number of vacancies, offered wages, specific qualifications, and non-pecuniary amenities. The high-frequency data collection allows observation of both demand (job orders from the same set of destination countries to many origin countries) and equilibrium supply (sorting of similar workers to different destinations based on job characteristics), which I validate using aggregate-level administrative statistics. Using this data, I estimate the effect of a minimum wage increase for Filipino migrant domestic workers enacted in August 2025.
Abstract: How do natives develop political attitudes about immigration, including in areas with few immigrants? We explore the political consequences of bringing localities in contact with federal immigration policies by exploiting openings of an especially salient institution: ICE detention centers. Using a matched event study design, we estimate the effect of detention centers on the prominence and political slant of immigration in local discourse, as measured from news coverage and speeches by local representatives. We then test using individual-level surveys whether exposed community members develop sharper positions -- both for and against -- and place greater weight on immigration relative to other issues. Finally, we estimate effects on voter turnout and polarization in federal elections among affected counties. Findings shed light on how exposure to institutions can intensify local political engagement with immigration, amplifying existing partisan tendencies.