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Politician and/or getting into the weeds of party politics and setting the agenda of a political party.
Public intellectual advocating for it.
I'm sure our friends at Progress Studies also have some ideas.
Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
I think this is a hugely important issue, and am excited someone else is thinking about it too!
I did a bit of thinking on this last year, and tried for a few months in my spare time to take some action on high-skilled immigration specifically. Ultimately I wasn't able to find anything super tractable for me to work on since I currently live in Kenya (but I was more focused volunteer/part time things, not full time).
I wrote up my conclusions in a blog post here.
In Germany there's this organization Malengo that you could potentially volunteer with. For full-time jobs, Formally and the Institute for Progress seem great. But other than those, I couldn't find much. Institute for Progress has great articles on immigration reform in the US.
I also looked into bothering the US embassy in Kenya to increase their visa processing capacity - I wrote that up here.
I'm happy to chat if you want to talk more over what I saw when I looked into this, or if you find anything worth working on! I'm excited about the potential for progress in this space and am happy to collaborate.
Thanks Luke for the comment I think you might be one of the most qualified people around here for this question.
I just wanted to give the heads up that the Formally link is a dead end and the blog link doesn't link directly to the post.
I tried finding the specific post but I likely missed it.
wow, very poor link-wrangling by me. thank you for catching - fixed now!
Thank you so much for this! I may get in touch to chat more about your experiences if I look into this further. The three organizations you mention are probably not a good fit for me because of location (I'm based in the UK), but maybe there are similar ones nearer me.
I'm curious about why you focussed on high-skilled immigration.
For sure! Let me know if you want to chat.
On "why high skill immigration", I wrote another blog post on my decision to focus on it:
"I have a strong belief in the importance of immigrants to the US, both as a matter of fact (economically/ culturally/ scientifically) and as a matter of what the US should aspire to be.
Living in Kenya makes this especially salient - it was so easy for me to move here and I think I am doing good. There are so many people here who can’t move to the US, and I think that they would do good.
I think allowing immigration of skilled workers is pretty indisputably good for the US, those individuals, and (more disputably) for the world. This article captures arguments for high-skill immigration quite well.
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I personally would be much more in favor of lots more immigration of all kinds - low-skill and refugee as well. But I’m focusing on high-skill immigration since those are politically much tougher issues, high-skill immigration is more important from a scientific / economic progress perspective, and the fact that it seems likely that increased high-skill immigration makes countries more receptive to immigration of all kinds.
A further clarification that I’m saying “immigration” here for simplicity, but I am including temporary residence status that enables people to work (e.g., H1B visas) in the scope of what I am working on."