NU GSPP RESEARCH WEBINAR WITH DR. FARHOD YULDAS “Foreign aid and international migration: Is development-promotion an effective immigration policy?”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Farhod Yuldas is a senior statistician and lead research methodologist at US-based financial services bank Wells Fargo, where he advises commercial and consumer banking executives and their teams on critical business challenges with insights gleaned from large volumes of quantitative and qualitative information. Dr. Yuldas has also served on the advisory boards of nonprofits and taught courses in political economy and data analytics at Point Park University, Duquesne University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Yuldas’s research publications have appeared in academic journals, government portals, newspaper and think tank websites, and private websites behind paywall. Dr. Yuldas’s most recent peer-reviewed papers appeared in International Studies Quarterly, World Development, and Review of International Organizations.

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

Faced with the failure of traditional immigration controls, policymakers in the United States and Western Europe increasingly look to foreign aid to reduce migrant inflows. Some analysts expect development assistance to improve living standards in source countries, thereby deterring residents from moving abroad. While this idea makes intuitive sense, research on aid and migration shows mixed results: some scholarly work supports aid-based migration policies, but other analyses suggest that aid actually enables migration by providing individuals with resources that facilitate movement across borders. We suggest that this tension in the literature reflects a failure to distinguish between different types of foreign aid. We hypothesize that governance aid should deter emigration by enhancing government capacity and alleviating political push factors; in contrast, economic and social aid should enable migration by increasing individuals’ means and capabilities to move.

Venue and time:

  • ZOOM, January 24, 2023, 17:45 (Astana time)

Watch the full video from the past NU GSPP Webinar: