Fixing the migrant mismatch: What happens when firms value immigrants differently than governments?

Immigrant doctors driving Uber, engineers serving as baristas and researchers cleaning offices all represent a fundamental mismatch between national immigrant policy, which determines who is sufficiently valued by the nation to be admitted into the country, and the degree to which a nation’s employers also value those same immigrants’ skills. Nations whose firms restrict career success among recent immigrants can expect that eventually people will act on their anger, provoking social unrest, protests, riots or worse (Algan, Dustmann, Glitz, & Manning, 2010). This project is an attempt to answer two questions: (1) Why does a mismatch exist between the implied value of recent immigrants by national immigration policy and that implied by firm-level practices? (2) What can be done to fix it?