GeoLegal Weekly #13 - Immigration Politics and AI
Immigration politics is turning nasty around the world. How will AI impact the practice of immigration law? Also: Larry David in Court. Plus: Meet me at CLOC in Vegas!
This week I’ll look at the economic and political cycles of immigration before asking how AI will shift us to a new equilibrium. In the process, we’ll look at questions of rule of law and also how AI is shifting the practice of immigration law.
Immigration is a function of politics
Immigration moves in political and economic cycles. Right now, there are strong economic incentives for immigration but there’s political pressure against it. This nets out to countries being surgically supportive of immigration - supportive of certain types of high-skilled immigration, that is - while largely trying to stem the tide of lower-skilled economic migrants.
From an economic perspective, many countries need increasingly relaxed immigration policy to satisfy labor demand. Major developed economies have tight labor markets and serious skills mismatches as they are also facing demographic pressure from aging populations. Trends like nearshoring put increasing pressure on workforces at “home” as manufacturing and services businesses increasingly eye and execute deleveraging from offshore plays. Highly skilled workers from around the world would flock to these jobs if only immigration policies permitted it. Lower-skilled workers continue to eye moving abroad as a way to build a better life - with many willing to take dramatic personal security, family and legal risks to do so.
Politics does not match economics. While economic policymakers recognize these labor market dynamics, their populations are in an increasingly protectionist mood. The world is awash in populations displaced because of current and past conflict, and, some day soon, due to climate change. Others are simply migrating for economic opportunity. Increasingly, Western populations feel like they have absorbed many migrants fleeing conflicts from Syria and Ukraine, or fleeing political persecution or limited economic prospects in South America, at a time when they feel poorer due to inflation and increased borrowing costs. These types of dynamics lead to nativist instincts among parts of the population that feel left behind by gloablization, fear job scarcity due to technological advancement, or are simply taking the opportunity of cover for long-held xenophobic views.
In the US, Donald Trump promises that in the sequel to his first term in office, he would stop a “bloodbath” of inward migration. Current President Joe Biden is jockeying to be seen as tough on the border. He is also keeping in place restrictions on Chinese nationals moving to the US, which undercuts his stated policies of attracting the world’s top talent to the US given that China is increasingly dominant in producing top-tier AI researchers in absolute terms (see below). Congressional Republicans are seeking to impeach the US Homeland Security chief for paroling migrants into the country. US states are challenging federal jurisdiction over immigration and launching their own strategies to make undocumented immigration a crime in their borders.
The UK has committed to the “biggest ever reduction in net migration” by raising salary thresholds for skilled workers, cutting the ability of overseas care workers to bring dependent families, and sending asylum seekers elsewhere for resettlement. Far right parties in Europe are set to make gains in the upcoming EU Parliamentary elections on platforms of nationalism and xenophobia.
It’s not just the US and Europe. South Africa has seen the launch of a new border force and efforts to beat back migration, primarily from Zimbabwe. Australia and New Zealand are both seeking to curtail migration as well.
At the same time, many countries are seeking to bring their well-educated diasporas back home or to make it more challenging for them to leave, which affects the demand side for immigration or potentially changes its direction. After all, why subsidize a strong education system only to suffer a brain drain as your smartest get enticed overseas? For instance, under a proposal in Nigeria doctors would not get portable licenses until practicing at home for 5 years. Kenya has put forward incentives for scientists and researchers to return home. (h/t to Fragoman’s useful overview of 2024 global immigration policies, which surfaced these examples).
Rule of Law
It’s worth pausing for a moment to take in the texture of some of the debates around immigration. While I don’t typically cite partisan papers, I found this piece from lefty Center for American Progress insightful in pointing out that the US political discourse on immigration seems stuck in a dynamic of whether America is a country of laws or a country of immigrants, with Republicans equating “law and order” with “rule of law” and Democrats siding instead with a historical sense that Americans should leave the door open for immigrants of the future. Instead, the article points out that having an immigration system that is unworkable and non-transparent doesn’t live up to most definitions of rule of law and, thus, enforcement of the laws does not actually bolster or restore rule of law.
The same can be said for many other countries, where divisive politics make comprehensive overhauls unworkable. And, perhaps, that’s why there is such an emphasis on enforcement. As a result, there’s a weighty question of whether increased enforcement of the laws on the books - in the face of dysfunctional systems - will give the citizenry more or less confidence that their government fair and just. In a world of a rule of law recession, this takes on even more importance than in the past.
Enter AI - Fortress-maker or Immigration-enabler?
As with most topics AI is reshaping the discourse. Today, AI impacts immigration in a number of ways. First, the race to be dominant in AI provides a reason for countries to keep their doors open to high-skilled technical talent. Second, AI is increasingly used as a technology in the enforcement of immigration policy - everything from high-tech border policing to efficiency gains for governments dealing with backlogs of immigration paperwork.
In the future, however, AI will reshape the politics of immigration. In fact, if AI bulls are to be believed, any tightness in the labor market or worries about aging in Western countries are temporary concerns that will all be relieved by AI rendering humans less and less necessary. Lawyers, more than most professions, are grappling with the potential that AI will become increasingly capable of taking on more and more of their value chain. But before AI comes for lawyers, it’s already devouring many of the first jobs that economic migrants take when they arrive somewhere new. Factories are being automated and airport cleaning robots eliminate the need for human cleaners. Soon, autonomous vehicles will take on the role of taxi, truck drivers and the like.
As more and more of the economy is run by intelligent agents, countries will be racing to upskill their own populations to make them relevant to the workforce of the future. The implication to me is that there will be less and less logic to welcome immigrants on any basis other than humanitarian in that type of dynamic because we simply won’t be constrained by human labor as we have been for most of history.
Scenarios of machines doing all the work while populations relax and earn free basic incomes are instructive as a thought experiment for how they would impact immigration. Do you think there would be more or fewer individuals clambering for entry to rich countries in a world where there’s no work at home or abroad? Probably more. A lot more. And if the imagined job losses manifest but spreading of the wealth does not, then the immigration politics of the future will get nastier.
Back to Today
So that bit of futurism aside, let’s spend a few minutes thinking about how companies can make the most of the current dynamic.
First, AI workers are the name of the game and every company is an AI company now. To the extent that your company needs access to talent, you’ll do better getting specialized advice on how to place roles in the context of in-demand skills lists of the country of concern.
Second, don’t place a lot of currency in debates about comprehensive immigration overhauls. Politics are too calcified to see comprehensive movement in the near-term. Instead, to the extent you are pushing for increased visa-thresholds and the like, you are better off finding other moving legislative vehicles to achieve tactical changes under the guise of increasing national competitiveness.
Third, governments are beginning to experiment with AI in the immigration process. For instance, the US DHS just announced pilot training projects for immigration officers and the UK has long experimented with algorithms for visa applications. The challenge is that AI is not yet foolproof, which means these results can be biased or faulty. To the extent that you’re not getting what you want out of the immigration system, there may be increasing grounds to challenge the outcome.
Fourth, global talent is increasingly available to companies that can figure out how to harness it remotely - rendering immigration itself less critical for business than before. Importing talent is increasingly challenging and so is the prevailing model of setting up an offshore hub for low-cost work - the latter coming under pressure from the fact that many attractive hubs are no longer low cost and also that the most talented individuals are competing in a global economy where they can leave your hub for more attractive remote work - all without leaving their home country. There’s a good argument globally distributed teams will represent a next wave of talent. While there may be shortages onshore, there’s certainly no shortage of capable individuals looking to perform meaningful work from global locations - some of whom have been displaced and others who have taken on digital nomad visas. Companies like Sora Union (which, in full disclosure, is headed up by one of Hence’s investors) have built the first platform to harness talent displaced by conflict and climate change. Being able to hire at-risk populations for design, quality assurance and engineering may satisfy economic and values-based criteria while also reducing the need for such talent to migrate to where their clients are.
Thoughts for law firms
Finally, a couple of thoughts for law firms arise.
First, immigration law is open to all the same forces of automation and efficiency gains as the rest of the legal field. Perhaps more, given how formulaic many immigration processes are.
John Khosravi, whose JQK Law Corporation is one of the more innovative practices I know, tells me:
AI “definitely will be disruptive to the field. For immigration lawyers, which are primarily solo and small firms, there may be a winner-take-all-all system for those that can invest and create their own AI…There are 3 places it can help (and has already started, but is at infancy): (1) Fine-tuning marketing content production, (2) Lead Funnel - Client Admin Service, (3) Attorney research and case creation.
Most likely, the sharpest players in the existing pool will grow faster and take more market share, but the tremendous enhancements that will occur with this technology will create a myriad of new positions that use the skills differently. Human interactions with the regular public/court will always be needed, so that role will be there. Also, the language model is only as smart as the information given. So, for example, having a lawyer in charge of fine-tuning an AI language model dataset, answers become an important position.
For Applicants…the (US) government administrative process is so confusing that applicants usually don't know what is happening. However, it opens up the process for better customer service and data accumulation/sharing with the client. Potentially lowering overhead costs (but who knows how much the AI will cost).
These are important points that parallel applications of technology we are seeing across the board in other areas of law.
For instance, as legal research is is being automated and enhanced in broader applications, so too is it in immigration. Visalaw.ai, for example, is partnering with the American Immigration Lawyers Association to make AI-powered case research available for its 16,000 members. Their demo looks like a GPT referencing immigration specific law, which, of course, would provide some value in terms of time saving.
In other news
Natalie Runyon published an interview with me on how politics is shifting the role of the GC, for Thomson Reuters.
Larry David has his day in court in the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale. As most of you know, I’m a decaf coffee nut, so I was pleased to see Mocha Joe turn up in the finale. You can check out my visit to Latte Larry’s pop-up in LA a few months ago here.
Nicaragua takes Germany to the International Court of Justice because it provides arms to Israel.
—
Finally, if you’re attending CLOC in Vegas this year, drop me a note. I’d love to meet. Let’s book some time!
-SW