One of the key policy debates in Europe centers on how best to integrate immigrants. The issue is particularly salient in Switzerland where immigrants make up almost 25% of the population. New research from scholars at Stanford and the University of Zurich demonstrates that naturalization substantially improves the political integration of immigrants. 

Jens Hainmueller, faculty affiliate of The Europe Center and co-director of the Immigration and Integration Policy Lab, along with his co-authors Dominik Hangartner and Giuseppe Pietrantuono, use an innovative research strategy to show that naturalization serves as a catalyst for integration. 

Between 1970 and 2003 residents decided on naturalization applications in secret ballot referendumsin some Swiss municipalities. The researchers compare immigrants who just barely won a referendum with those that just barely lost, and the resulting natural experiment provides a treatment and control group that are almost identical. 

"In some cases, the difference between them was merely a few votes, which turned 49% into 51%. It was down to luck whether people received Swiss citizenship or not," says Professor Hainmueller. 

And because the researchers were able to survey immigrants 15 years after their naturalization decisions, the study provides one of the first unbiased estimates of the causal impact of naturalization on the long-term integration of immigrants. 

In Switzerland, where immigrants must wait twelve years to apply for citizenship, the study suggests that reducing this waiting period could improve immigrant integration and positively impact Swiss society. 

The full article is located on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website.

A recent news article on this research can be found in the October 22, 2015 Stanford Report

Lauren Wedekind is a Stanford undergraduate studying Human Biology and Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her research focuses on social medicine and the potential for telemedicine to mitigate health care coverage gaps. Lauren believes that human rights advocacy requires a two-way street of listening and communication within and across national and cultural borders—which she explores with Stanford CDDRL, UNA-USA, and WFUNA on projects involving the right to health. Wedekind received funding from CDDRL's Program on Human Rights to travel and participate in the WFUNA Human Rights Youth Training Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

By age seventeen, Nam had been forced into marrying a stranger, bearing his child, and risking her life to be a refugee on a remote island.  In April 1975, the North Vietnamese Communist Party took over the Republic of South Vietnam, and violently threatened residents of Saigon, South Vietnam’s then-capital and Nam’s hometown.  Like thousands of other residents, Nam’s family desperately uprooted from their relatively comfortable living situation, only to cram like sardines into an over-capacity boat headed toward international waters, hoping to be rescued by the United Nations.  With their lives in very real danger, the to-be refugees who boarded that boat did so without any guarantee that they would safely cross the passage across the Pacific Ocean.  In fact, these “boat people” were held hostage, robbed, raped, and beaten on three separate occasions by pirates in the Sea of China.  After the attacks, they floated aimlessly on the ocean for days, and were finally rescued by a UNHCR vessel, which guided them to refugee camps in Indonesia.  One year later, Nam and her boat’s survivors—those who were not killed by violence or disease—reached the United States.  The survivors who finally reached peacekeeping nations accepting refugees had often endured poverty, abuse, and posttraumatic mental and physical health issues.

Wedekind with her cohort of training attendees in Geneva.

This summer, I was honored to be nominated by UNA-USA to attend the WFUNA High Commissioner of Human Rights Training in Geneva, in which 30 young human rights advocates representing 25 countries learned about international human rights instruments and the UN Human Rights Council.  Through WFUNA’s training curriculum, and even more, through interactions with our peers, our cohort agreed on concepts of fundamental human rights—that people of all ages and backgrounds should be guaranteed: (1) Fundamental human rights and (2) The right to defend these rights.  Point (2) necessitates governments exercising structural competence to guarantee the protection of human rights for all members of society.  As part of Point (2), listening to many different viewpoints within society has been humbled me: As a human rights advocate, I am responsible for ensuring that I also understand the stories of the marginalized so that I can best voice collective advocacy points to others – advocacy is a two-way street. 

When watching the UN Human Rights Council Emergency Session on Gaza with the Human Rights Training in July, I was first awestruck that I was able to watch a history-making decision before my eyes.  As I held the wired translator earpiece to my ear for the last hour of the Session in which NGOs were stating their own perceptions of human rights violations on-the-ground, though, I realized that many stakeholders were actually leaving the assembly hall.  I wondered: “How can multilateral, international organizations realistically ensure that they respect the human dignity of all members of society without each ambassador engaging with community members who directly experience conflicts on-the-ground?”  I respect the major responsibilities of Ambassadors to the UN Human Rights council: (1) Developing realistic pictures of events he/she has often not directly perceived, (2) Communicating these pictures to members of his/her society, and (3) Voicing the collective opinions of his/her constituency on human rights issues in international engagements.  These three actions are not simple, but when put into practice, they enable action over apathy.

Since returning to the U.S., I have asked: “How can I be most useful to my society?”  After witnessing both multinational cooperation as well as largely unheard voices of NGOs in international human 

Wedekind at one of the training sessions at the UN.

In partnership with the Program on Human Rights at Stanford's Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Afia Khan (Economics ’16) and I are developing a student-initiated course on health and human rights advocacy, which we will launch in 2015, for intermediate school through university-level students.  We hope to provide young people with a knowledge base and advocacy toolkit for young people on health and human rights, and to let them know what I have learned from UN Human Rights Council and Nam: Every single person can advocate for human rights – we must start small by exercising compassion to understand others’ experiences, and then share with others what we have learned.

Nam’s name changed to respect confidentiality.

Also see Wededkind's blog posted on the WFUNA website and on FSI Global Student Fellows' 'In The World' Blog. 

Human Capital & Ageing

as part of the "Next World Program"

Harvard School of Public Health

Boston, Massachusetts

April 13-14, 2015

Organized by:

David E. Bloom, Harvard School of Public Health, USA; David Canning, Harvard School of Public Health, USA; Karen Eggleston, Stanford University, USA; Wang Feng, Fudan University, China; Hans Groth, World Demographic & Ageing Forum, Switzerland; Alfonso Sousa-Poza, University of Hohenheim, Germany; Thomas Zeltner, Special Envoy, World Health Organization, Switzerland.

Topic

One of the challenges faced by ageing societies is maintaining a workforce large enough to supply the goods and services needed by a country's entire population. In the coming decades, industrialized countries will experience a steep increase in the share of elderly persons in the population and a fall in the share of the working-age population. In some countries, the number of people aged 60-64 (many of whom are about to retire) already exceeds the number of people aged 15-19 (the cohort soon entering the labour market). There will, however, be mitigating factors that will tend to decrease the effects of declines in the working-age share of the population: (a) the burden of caring for a high number of elderly people will be offset by there being fewer children to support, and (b) the proportion of adult women who work will rise when there are fewer children to take care of. Still, if there is no change in work and retirement patterns, the ratio of older inactive persons per worker will almost double from around 38 percent in the OECD area in 2000 to just over 70 percent in 2050 (OECD, "Live Longer, Work Longer", 2006). In Europe, this ratio could rise to almost one older inactive person for every worker over the same period.

Ageing on the anticipated scale will place substantial pressure on public finances and economic growth. According to the OECD, on the basis of unchanged participation patterns and productivity growth, the growth of GDP per capita in the OECD area would decline to around 1.7 percent per year over the next three decades, as compared with about 2.4 percent per year between 1970 and 2000. These negative consequences of ageing could be possibly offset by postponement of retirement, greater immigration, faster productivity growth, or higher fertility (although the positive economic effects of higher fertility would only come several decades after an uptick in fertility rates). While these developments would all help offset the negative effects, they need to go hand-in-hand with attempts to mobilize available labour in order to sustain economic growth. One of the most significant sources of additional labour supply is older people who are currently inactive. Indeed, as labour markets tighten, companies will soon have little choice but to be more welcoming of older employees. Prompt action to harness – and enhance – the contributions of older workers could become a key competitive advantage.

The objective of this workshop would be to discuss one important topic related to an ageing workforce, namely human capital. How does a worker’s human capital change over the life course and what role does the health and skill status of workers play? The answer to these questions is of great importance, not only for adequate human resource policies, but also for macroeconomic policies, especially those associated with retirement and economic growth. Despite the importance of this issue, this question is not easily answered.

The workshop will bring together researchers to present recent research on ageing and human capital. Research questions and topics that could be dealt with include:

• Human capital, economic growth, and the demographic dividend.
• Firm-level experience in promoting human capital among older workers.
• Evaluation of policies aimed at enhancing the quantity, quality, and value of older workers’ human capital.
• The relationship between human capital and productivity.
• Training and wages of older workers.
• Technological change, knowledge replenishment, and productivity. 

Submission for the Workshop

Interested authors are invited to submit a 1-page abstract by the 30th of September 2014 to David E. Bloom (dbloom@hsph.harvard.edu) and Alfonso Sousa-Poza (Alfonso.sousa-poza@uni-hohenheim.de). The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by the end of October and completed draft papers will then be expected by the 28th of February 2015.

Economy class travel and accommodation costs for one author of each accepted paper will be covered by the organisers.

A selection of the papers presented at the workshop will (assuming successful completion of the review process) be published in a special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

Submission for the Special Issue

Interested authors (also those not attending the workshop) are invited to submit papers for the special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing by the 31st of May 2015. Submissions should be made online at http://ees.elsevier.com/jeoa. Please select article type “SI Human Capital.”

About the Next World Program

The Next World Program is a joint initiative of Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging, the WDA Forum, Stanford University’s Asia Health Policy Program, and Fudan University’s Comparative Aging Societies. These institutions will organize an annual workshop and a special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing on an important economic theme related to ageing societies.

We write to invite you to an international conference on “Regional Carbon Policies” that PESD is hosting at Stanford University on Thursday, December 5^th. With efforts to expand international carbon markets beyond Europe’s trading scheme seemingly stalled, various countries and subnational jurisdictions have taken unilateral action on climate policy. Switzerland, the Canadian provinces of Québec and British Columbia, California, the member states of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the northeastern United States, and New Zealand have all moved forward on carbon markets or taxes. Asian countries including Japan, India, South Korea, and China are also in the process of implementing carbon policies.
 
Linking regional efforts to create a single larger carbon market has the potential to increase the impact and reduce the cost of climate mitigation. With this in mind, our conference brings together academics, government policymakers, and market participants to share the best available academic and practical knowledge about how to make regional carbon policies work. We specifically seek to: 1) identify common implementation challenges facing regional climate policies around the world, 2) formulate a “best practice” market design that can serve as a starting point for a country or region contemplating a GHG emissions allowance market, and 3) identify the policy pathways most likely to foster rapid and successful integration of regional carbon efforts. An additional goal of the meeting is to identify key market rules and integration protocols that can be tested as part of a new research project at Stanford that uses structured “games” to simulate cap and trade markets.

We hope you will join us for this unique event.

Click here for the conference agenda and to register
                                                                                       
Frank A. Wolak                                       Mark C. Thurber
Director, PESD                                          Associate Director, PESD
wolak@stanford.edu                              mthurber@stanford.edu