A Map of Migration Policy Priorities

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I’m trying to get my head around global migration.

Where do people move from and where do they go? Why?

How do countries prioritize different types of immigrants? And what can different systems learn from each other?

All of this with an eye towards informing where I, and others trying to do good in the space, should focus our energy.

At a basic level, a country that accepts immigrants has two big decisions to make.

  1. Do we want people to stay permanently, or just temporarily?

  2. What role will migrants play here? (working, accompanying family, studying, seeking refuge)

Below is my attempt to map how the world’s top immigration destinations have answered these two questions:

Up is permanent migrants, down is temporary. Right is work-driven migrants, left is not (family, students, refugees). Size of bubble is how many migrants accepted per year (1)

Some very brief insights:

There are four clear clusters in how the top countries approach immigration:

  • EU free-movement zone: Citizens from any EU country can move and settle permanently. These countries have high permanent migration but not all of it is for work — many movers come for family or retirement.

  • UK and former British colonies: Relatively balanced systems with a strong focus on skilled migration, but with lots of temporary work visas, student visas, and family-based pathways.

  • East Asia: Japan and Korea focus on temporary workers to support their aging demographics

  • Gulf + Russia: Autocracies who have a large amount of circular migration - the gulf from South Asia, and Russia from former Soviet neighbors.

Countries accepting of permanent migration tend to have less work-related immigration. Presumably one of the reasons is because when people want to move a place permanently, they want to bring their (potentially non-working) family.

East Asia takes in way more migrants than I had thought.

Next time I’ll double click into labor mobility specifically.

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1. My data here comes from the OECD data explorer (permanent, temporary) for 2022. They . For Russia, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, data was harder to find, so take these with a grain of salt.

A timeline of human experience

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Humanity has been around for a long time. About 300,000 years. For almost all of that time, people lived as hunter-gatherers or in tiny agricultural lived in settled, state-based societies as we do now.

But the world’s population was also very low for much of that time. Because there are about 8 billion of us today but fewer than one million people 100,000 years ago, each year of the modern era contains far more total “people-years” of lived experience.

A single calendar year in 2025 “contains” more human life than a year in 100,000 BCE, simply because today’s population is thousands of times larger.

One way to visualise history is to ask: at every point in time, how many total people-years had accumulated so far? (1)

The graphic divides history into ten equal “blocks” of experience: each block represents 170 billion people-years.

With an average population of roughly 600,000, it took nearly 300,000 years of prehistory to rack up the same 170 billion people-years that humanity has now accumulated in just the last 25 years.

By this estimate, 1300 is the half-way point of humanity. Half of human experience took place before 1300, and half took place afterwards.

This also lets answer some questions that may or may not be of interest:

  • What percent of human experience has been lived in the past 25 years? A whopping 10%

  • What percent of human experience has taken place since the Industrial Revolution? A little over 1/3.

  • What percent of human experience took place before the first human settlements (~6000 BCE)? Approximately 10%.

  • What percent of human experience has taken place since the birth of Jesus? Around 75% (2).

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1. People-years are calculated by taking the world’s population, and multiplying by the number of years that population lived. So in a world with population 8 billion, every year that passes makes up 8 billion people years. In a world with a constant population of 100 million, it would take 80 years to create 8 billion people-years (100 million × 80 = 8 billion).

For you nerds out there, this is the integral under the population curve.

2. A couple other articles of interest:

Due to different methodologies and assumptions, some of them have answers that differ from mine by up to a factor of 2. For example, my analysis implies that about 1.7 trillion people-years have been lived, as opposed to 3.2 trillion from David Beiber. But what’s a factor of 2 among friends?

Why the wise old Greeks sound so wrong today

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Lately I’ve been trying to get into the headspace of an ancient Greek (1).

Philosophers back then had some pretty funny notions:

  • Plato thought there was a world of ideas, where, for example, there was an ideal bed, of which all existing beds are just a copy.

  • Aristotle talked a lot about a thing’s “essence” as being core to its identity. For example, that a tree has some fundamental “tree-ness” property. If it loses its essence, it ceases to be a tree.

  • Parmenides believed that if we can think of a dead person, then that person must still exist somehow.

Outside of poetry, most people now don’t think there is some fundamental metaphysical difference between a bed and a table — both are just different configurations of atoms (2). And we don’t take the fact that we can think of someone as evidence that they exist.

So why do some of the smartest thinkers in antiquity get themselves into entire modes of thinking that now seem so wrong? Here’s how I’m coming to understand it:

Imagine you have not had any formal science or math education. But you are curious, you like thinking, and have the leisure to indulge yourself (3). How would you start trying to make sense of the world around you?

The winning move, in retrospect, was to restrict your questions to things that could be measured and tested. Don’t use concepts like “beauty”, “fitness”, or “essence” unless they are connected to a specific measurable quantity. And do this patiently, collecting tons of data over the course of lifetimes to understand which theories are right vs wrong (4). This is the approach that eventually gave us vaccines, airplanes, and the internet.

Now not only is all of this pretty hard. It’s also just not that obvious from the start how useful all this data collection will be.

The Ancient Greeks did not don the straightjacket of modern science. They investigated the physical world, but also metaphysics, ethics, politics, and music. They were interested in a thing’s purpose, not only causes and effects. And they described the relationships they observed or hypotheses using language, rather than just math.

This ancient approach to learning is wide-reaching, and poetic. The scientific approach to learning about the world is narrow and dry. But happens to be incredibly fruitful — allowing us live long lives, safe from disease, amidst the wonders of the modern world.

It took humanity hundreds of thousands of years to build the societal systems to pursue this method effectively. The great triumph of modern science is that we’ve tricked many of our smartest young people that the best use of their time is sitting in a lab taking detailed measurements and doing precise calculations. Their work is critical to all of us getting to live the (relatively) charmed lives that we do in the year 2025.

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1. This came about because I’ve been reading A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell - a terrific read to give you a big-picture model of the entirety of western history.

2. People who know a bit more physics might think that rather than atoms, things are really made up of wavefunctions or fields or something. But people like that tend to be a confused bunch, and we’ll leave them to their own troubles for now. The point is that we all think of tables and beds as fundamentally made up of strictly physical things, with no metaphysical essence.

3. Most people in antiquity were, of course, illiterate, destitute, and/or enslaved. So to the extent they pondered the secrets of the universe, we don’t have any record as to what they thought.

4. A more detailed recipe to kick of a scientific revolution:

  • Only make claims that you can prove or disprove by observation and measurement. Then start taking down lots of observations and measurements.

  • Remember - you also need to track all these measurements super carefully. And paper is really expensive.

  • Oh, and to make sense of all the measurements you’re making, you will need more complex math than just addition and subtraction. So get on with inventing that.

  • And you can’t do all this by yourself. You also need to convince a bunch of other people to do the same. Even when most of the measurements aren’t useful, and the claims are wrong. And buy yet more paper so you all can correspond with each other.

  • And yet more: You should also convince rich people to invest lots of money into supporting you all while you do this, and help you to build the better and better gadgets you will need over time.

Whew, science is hard.

My brother is disabled, not differently abled

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My brother has Down Syndrome. In my view, calling him “differently abled” is quite offensive.

1.      It is condescending. My brother is just quite literally unable to do basic things that most 22-year-olds can do. He can’t go do errands on his own, read chapter books, or clearly communicate his thoughts to people who don’t know him well.

2.      It supports a pernicious worldview. The only reason to be afraid of being blunt about my brother’s basic abilities is if you worry that lack of ability undermines his human dignity. But then why is his human dignity contingent on his ability to achieve tasks? (1)

To put it bluntly: To use the term “differently abled” to refer to my brother, is to imply that people with less ability inherently less valuable than more able individuals.

Down syndrome abortion rates should trouble us

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Over the past 25 years, parents have largely stopped aborting girls just because they are girls. In 2000, 1.6M pregnancies were ended worldwide because parents would rather have boys than girls. “This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.”

This is terrific progress and should be celebrated. Because terminating a pregnancy on the basis of sex is wrong.

In the US and Europe we have another related problem - which is that people routinely terminate pregnancies where the unborn baby has Down syndrome.

The numbers here are pretty sobering. In the US, ~75% of pregnancies tested for Down syndrome get terminated. In Europe it is ~90% (1).

If you don’t think this is a problem, I want to convince you it is.

In the US and Europe, most of us believe people have equal worth, with equal rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. If you agree, you should be skeptical about denying life – even to an as of yet unborn person - based on genetics.

We also generally value diversity - it’s good to have people with different worldviews and values, different appearances and different levels of ability because encountering human variety helps us become better. People with Down syndrome (DS) intimately force the people around them to see the world differently – and generally more positively. Do we want to get rid of those people?

But still, you might think the arguments from liberty and diversity perspective are outweighed by the costs to the person with DS and to their parents.

But on the whole, people with DS lead long and happy lives. Life expectancy is 50-60 years in the developed world (2). And 99% of people with DS report being happy with their lives.

Parents do face a burden in raising children with DS – a meta-study shows higher levels of stress and depressive symptoms. But they show similar levels of parenting reward to other parents. And many parents report being thrilled to have their child with DS. There is some evidence that at the time of making an abortion decision, parents are given a more-negative-than-accurate picture about what life is like for someone with DS.

So it is possible for parents of children with DS to thrive given the right circumstances. To the extent that DS creates extra burden for parents, we should take this as a problem to be solved, rather than looking to eliminate DS. Schools, healthcare, and societal expectations about what a good life look like all play a role here.

So on net - the costs of DS seem nonexistent from the perspective of people with Down syndrome, and the extra burden to parents seems manageable. But systematically we are ending pregnancies of people with Down syndrome.

A wealthy society that fundamentally values liberty and champions diversity cannot be satisfied when 70%+ of pregnancies with Down syndrome end up terminated.

I don’t think this is an easy one to solve – because it comes down to our fundamental values as society. But I may take a stab at it in another post – because why else would I be writing on the internet?

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1. To translate that into a “missing people” number: Between Europe and the US there are about 12,000 “missing” people with Down Syndrome. 9,000 from Europe and 3,000 in the US.

2. Lower than average in rich countries. But still high by world historical standards – world life expectancy was <60 until 1979.

Could Pope Leo get an O-1A visa?

Since Pope Leo XIV is now the head of state of a foreign nation, will he lose his US citizenship?

Perhaps. I’m not an expert there and can’t really weigh in. But I can shed some light on a much more pressing question: If Pope Leo XIV loses his US citizenship, would he be able to get an O-1A visa?

The O-1A visa is for “aliens of extraordinary ability” – people who are at the top of their field globally. USCIS judges whether you are “extraordinary” enough using 8 criteria of which you must meet at least 3.

Let’s see how Pope Leo XIV stacks up against the 8 criteria:

Membership: Prior to becoming Pope, Leo was selected as a Cardinal of the Catholic Church. While perhaps an unusual way to meet this criteria, one could make a strong case that the College of Cardinals is an exclusive professional organization.

Authorship: Leo has a PhD in Cannon Law, and has published a thesis, a book, and likely some peer-reviewed papers. So it should be pretty straightforward to argue he meets the authorship criteria.

Judging the works of others might be more tenuous. To meet this criteria you must show that you were in a position to judge experts in your field. Although – as a priest – Leo has been vested by Christ with power to “forgive” and “retain” sins (John 20:23), it would be hard to argue to USCIS that hearing confessions counts as judging. Perhaps in his academic career Leo acted as a peer reviewer – which would be a more straightforward way to meet the judging criteria. So this is a maybe.

Publications (press): Obviously, Leo has been mentioned by name in major publications around the world. Slam dunk here.

Critical role in a distinguished organization: In order to make this argument, we would have to prove two things: One is that Leo has a critical role at an organization, and two that the organization is distinguished.

  • As Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Leo clearly has a critical role in the Church.

  • The Roman Catholic Church is millenia old, and holds the “Keys of the kingdom” of Heaven (Catechism, 551). Luckily USCIS does not require that an organization's record be spotless, so there shouldn’t be a problem here.

High salary: A quick Google search reveals that Cardinals typically earn under 60k per year, so it’s unlikely that Leo meets this criteria.

Internationally recognized prizes: You could try to make a creative argument here about him being “awarded” his cardinalship or the Papacy. But again this likely wouldn't be the strongest argument.

Original Contribution: To meet this criteria, we must show that Leo made an original contribution in his field, and that this contribution had major significance. I imagine with enough digging we could prove that he made significant contributions during his missionary work in Peru.

But it’s not really necessary, because we can already make a very strong case for Leo based on Membership, Authorship, Press, and Critical Role.

But there is one critical problem with Pope Leo’s hypothetical O-1A application: The O-1A is an employment-based visa, and so is only available for people working and living in the US.

So unless he intends to move the papal seat to the Windy City, I would not recommend Pope Leo XIV apply for an O-1A visa.

IF he loses his US citizenship, Leo will be better off applying for a diplomatic “A” visa when he makes trips to the US.

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All opinions my own.

Going to California

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I'm moving to San Francisco at the end of June to work at Lighthouse! Here are my goals living in SF for (at least) the next few years (1):

1. Do a great job at Lighthouse. High-skill immigration is great for the US - and the world. I’m excited to work on this with the terrific team at Lighthouse.

2. Host the best dinner parties. Quite modestly, my wife and I want to create a salon for builders, a gathering space for thoughtful people driving the future of business, technology, and society. Put less pretentiously, we want to hang out with fun and interesting people. Our apartment is called the Big Beautiful Sino-American Co-Prosperity Sphere, and those of you in the Bay Area can look forward to coming to its launch party in July (2).

3. Meet builders more generally. I’m inspired by entrepreneurs, by Progress Studies, and Effective Altruism. I’m excited to meet as many people as possible in these spaces to trade ideas and build together (3). If this sounds like you or anyone you know, let’s grab coffee!

4. Become great at using AI. My ability to use AI to get things done better and faster will determine how much I get done in my career. So it’s worth continuously investing time in learning to use the tools. Luckily, there’s no better place to be for this than the Bay Area.

Also I’m excited to be active in local and national politics. When I lived in Kenya, I didn’t have much scope for political activity. I’m not planning to run for governor or anything, but I’ll be an engaged citizen.

Perhaps most importantly: I’ve made a playlist of canonical California songs. Please add any I've missed.

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1. I made a similar post when I moved to Nairobi, and found it extremely useful to have a public record of my motivations.

For keen readers tracking my evolving views on how to have positive impact in the world: I previously said that working in global development/global health was the best use of my time. Do I still believe this now that I am working in US high-skill immigration? I do still think global development is incredibly important, and am still working in it, though not as directly as I was before.

Here’s how I think about it:

  • Immigration drives development. It brings new opportunities - directly for the people who move. It drives the sending of remittances home. And it drives development in origin countries via brain gain.

    • Even if you are skeptical that high-skill immigration specifically has much development impact, it can still be instrumentally useful to creating more cross-spectrum immigration in the future. Because successful high-skill immigration can makes immigration overall more politically feasible.

    • In the future I will likely do a cost-benefit from an international development perspective of high-skill migration vs skill-trade immigration vs other types of development projects.

  • US excellence is important. I had previously underrated this. US technology, institutions, politics, and culture are really important for the world at large - including for global development (for starters - USAID matters!). By working in high-skill immigration in the US, I can contribute to making all of these better.

  • I have more faith in capitalism and commonsense morality to drive positive impact. I overestimated the impact I would have in my previous jobs, trying to optimize for global development impact. So taking a well-paying job in a field I think is important seems like a pretty good bet.

  • I’m also simply not optimizing for impact as much as I used to try to.

2. AKA “The Sphere”

3. I also intend to sharpen my own ideas by getting them out there. So expect more blog posts!

I'm joining Lighthouse

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Career update: I’m joining Lighthouse as Go to Market lead!

Lighthouse is the fastest immigration solution for the startup and technology industry. Our mission is to help the world's talent build their biggest ambitions in the U.S. and accelerate emerging technologies by making visa preparation fast and accessible.

High-skilled immigration is a flywheel that benefits both the US and the world’s top talent. This is great for the world. And US immigration services can be a lot better than they are now.

I’ve heard stories from multiple friends who have spent frustrating months going back and forth with unresponsive immigration consultancies. These are people who went to places like MIT and Stanford and who should be focused on building, not stressful immigration paperwork.

Lighthouse gives consistently fast, great experience to founders and critical tech workers so that they can focus on building the great companies of tomorrow.

If you or someone you know needs support on your immigration journey, let me know!

Half of the kids used to die

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Half of the kids used to die.

Across societies with very different climates, cultures, and forms of governance, half of children died before the age of 15. People tried to stop children from dying, and they just failed.

Our World in Data

Things are much much better now. Worldwide childhood mortality is now 4%. In Niger it’s the worst, and it’s still only 15%.

15% of children dying is awful, but it’s way less awful than 48%. Prior to 1800, any country that achieved a child mortality rate of 15% would be seen as the absolute pinnacle of good governance and public health.

Half of children used to die, and now they don’t. If you were making a list today of the top 10 most important facts about the world, this would definitely be in it.

Previous generations have worked hard, and given us the gift of a world where only one in twenty-five children die.

It’s still too many! It’s up to us to give future generations a world where less than 0.5% of children die. It’s possible! It’s already the case in Finland, Norway, Japan, and Slovenia.

If you find yourself thinking that modern life is terrible, just remember that half of children used to die.

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This post is essentially just my reflections on this much better post from Our World in Data.

No-regrets actions for the AI transformation

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AI is changing the world and nobody knows what is going to happen.

Will we see an intelligence explosion or have a slow takeoff? Will AI lead to a new era of human flourishing, to autocracy, or to something much more mundane? How much work will get automated and how quickly?

All these things are subject to wide uncertainty. Smart people have widely differing opinions.

So, dear reader, what (if anything) should YOU do given that there is so much uncertainty?

I think there are a few no-regrets actions you can take if you - like me - you take the potential of AI seriously. Some actions that will be beneficial under a wide range of possible outcomes (1).

There are a few basic assumptions that underly my thinking:

  1. AI will transform society. This has happened before with technologies like agriculture, the steam engine, and the computer. It is already starting with AI.

  2. Nobody knows how the transformation will go. There is just a lot of uncertainty about what AI will be able to do, how well we will be able to control it,  how it will be deployed, and on what timelines.

  3. It might be bad. AI could enable terrorists to create powerful biological weapons. It could lead to mass unemployment. We could - wittingly or not - give AI systems access to powerful weapons that they decide to deploy.

  4. AI will take over a lot of work. AIs already do an OK job of writing copy, illustrating, writing code, and doing research. They will only get better.

  5. The AI transformation will occur under circumstances of competition. Both between nations as well as between companies.

Those are my starting points. I may write a future post on how you might think differently if you disagree with one or more of these starting points.

So now, let’s turn to the first thing that comes to mind in a situation like this. What’s going to happen to me?

How do I ensure the AI transformation goes well for myself?

If AI will take over a lot of work, what should you do to make sure that you will be ok if AI takes over a bunch of jobs?

There are four areas to focus here:

  • Use the AI. Become great at getting things done faster and better using AI. This blog post by Ethan Mollick has some great suggestions on how to get good. They boil down to “just use it a bunch and figure out what it’s good at.”

  • Know people and be likable. As more and more of the “thinking work” gets done by machines, a lot of the “people work” will still be left to humans. Your network will become more and more important. So be someone people know and like.

  • Manage. Know how to manage people well. And if relevant for your job, know how to manage AIs too.

  • Save more. To have a cushion against future shocks.

Now that your career is future-proof, and you have ample savings in the bank, let’s turn to what you can do to help the rest of us out.

How do I ensure the AI transformation goes well for the world?

Everyone should have at least one political cause of choice. If you don’t have one already, it is a great time to make AI your political cause of choice. Especially if you live in the US or China, since these are the two leading countries in the development of AI, and are both reasonably responsive to the concerns of their people.

But! Uncertainty. Is it better to Nationalize parts of AI development, or leave it largely in the hands of private companies? What kinds of regulations should be placed on AI development and deployment? To what extent should Americans be focused on getting the best models before China at all costs?

There are a couple principles that seem to make sense under a broad range of paths that AI development could take:

  1. Ensure transparency about what developers are training AI models to do. About what values are being instilled in the models. About what kind of safety measures are being programmed into them. The more these models influence the world, the more critical it is that they are subject to scrutiny by the widest possible number of stakeholders.

  2. Ensure adequate cybersecurity to ensure dangerous AI tools don’t get into the wrong hands.

Make your voice heard! The development of top AI models should happen transparently and securely.

It also seems valuable, even without the pressure of AI, to ensure US-China competition doesn’t turn violent. This is an area I am trying to learn much more about. If anyone has any concrete ideas on how we can ensure we don’t have war, let me know ;) (2)

Closing thoughts

AI is changing the world and nobody knows what is going to happen. The above is my best guess - right now - for how you can give yourself and the world the best chances of success during the AI transformation.

What do you think?

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  1. None of my thinking in this post is original. And this is very much a work in progress capturing my thinking at this point in time. I would love for you, dear reader, to tell me what you think. Also note that this advice - especially the political advice - will make the most sense for white collar Americans.

  2. My vague thinking here is: It’s inevitable that the US and China will compete. This is what global powers do. But the more we can channel our competition into productive ends, the better. For example, you can imagine countries focusing their competition on achieving soft power dominance by providing paths for economic development, winning at sports, and exporting great culture rather than fighting wars.

Learnings on the skill-trade migration opportunity

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I spent the past few months piloting a labor mobility project. This is a write-up of what I learned, in case it is useful for others thinking of launching similar projects.

Migration is an vast space. Migration occurs between thousands of origin-destination country pairs, across dozens of industries. There are refugees, economic migrants, family migrants. Every region in each destination country seems to have its own rules. I hope this post will help other entrepreneurs get up to speed faster than I did.

The opportunity in skill-trade migration

OECD countries are facing labor shortages in skill-trade workers in fields like construction and healthcare. For example:

  • There is a global gap of 7 million workers in green energy alone.

  • Canada has 40k+ job vacancies in construction work.

  • The UK’s NHS has over 100k+ unfilled jobs.

The driver is straightforward demographics: There are less young people in rich countries to do these jobs.

In rich regions working age to old age ratio has halfed since 1960 and is expected to half again by 2050 (1).

In a growing number of cases, governments are realizing the labor needs and are making visas available for workers in critical fields. For example, the UK does not cap visas for skilled workers. But obviously, there are a lot of frictions in hiring a worker from abroad, such as validating certifications, getting visas, booking flights, and establishing trust from both the employer and the employee that this job will work out.

The market to solve these problems is tens of billions of dollars. Increased skill-trade migration will be a huge trend over the next 30 years. Significant new businesses will be built in skill-trade migration.

It is also an area where there is enormous impact to be had.

  • The migrant benefits by 3-10xing their income, gaining new skills, and improving their quality of life.

  • The origin country benefits from remittances (typical migrant sends $1k+ home per year) + a stronger incentive for human capital investment

  • The destination country fills critical labor gaps

Learnings from looking into the space

Over the past few months, I explored the possibility of starting an organization facilitating migration of nurses or construction workers from Africa to the UK and Canada, and had 50+ conversations with nurses, construction workers, recruiters, prospective employers, and experts.

Here are some of my key conclusions.

1. You don't need a huge operation to make real money.

You can make profit of a few thousand dollars per worker moved, assuming the employer pays you a headhunter fee, or the migrant pays you an income-share agreement. Assuming you don’t have any employees, you only need to move 30-50 workers per year in order to make a comfortable living.

I would love to see a bunch of operations that are one person, using a bunch of AI tools, to move 50-100 workers per year within a very specific niche. Who is the person who will get Tanzanian solar installers moving to Sweden? Nigerian electricians moving to Italy? Many pockets of opportunity.

2. Many have worked on labor supply, but not on labor demand.

There are a lot of nonprofits and funders who, for impact reasons, want to help Africans find jobs abroad. None of them understand in detail the needs of employers in rich countries.

My advice for any entrepreneur working in the space is talk to your customers, talk to your customers, and talk to your customers (1).

3. Visa and certification requirements are complex.

Prospective migrants don’t know how to navigate visa applications, certification requirements, or English tests. At times it seems processes are kept deliberately complex so that middlemen can benefit.

There is clear opportunity for non-profits to provide legibility here (like Rahi Impact). Perhaps for-profits too, as part of a wider suite of offerings.

4. International actors are overly cautious.

Offering someone the chance to move from Africa to Canada is to offer them a chance to 5x their income. On its face, in this situation there is no moral problem with charging that person a fee for providing them this opportunity. But the international norm is to say that under no circumstances can migrants pay anything.

Similarly, the WHO advises rich‑countries not to do healthcare recruitment from a series of redlist countries. The red list list is built on crude head‑count ratios and a generic universal‑health‑coverage score. Of the 54 countries in Africa, 40 are on the red list, and the nurses in those countries who want to find opportunities abroad are not happy that the international community is providing obstacles from them.

International actors have overcorrected their stances in response to very valid concerns about exploitation, and less-valid concerns about brain drain. There is potential for policy advocacy to shift some of these policies to be more migrant-friendly.

5. It’s tough for new players in UK healthcare space.

Africa→UK nurse migration was the pocket I looked into most deeply and I think it would be pretty hard for a new entrant to enter the market here.

  • Demand for nurses is much lower than it was 3-4 years ago.

  • The focus within the NHS has shifted to improving nurse retention.

  • There are shakeups within the NHS over the past few months.

  • Trust is incredibly important in nursing recruitment. And there are already trusted and approved agencies in place, who to some extent have captured the NHS.

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What’s next for me with all these learnings?

In the near-term, I will be devoting my career to facilitating high-skill migration into the US.

  • There are exciting opportunities to improve migration here. More to come on this.

  • I want to be in the Bay Area - where the action is in AI.

  • I need to be in the US for immigration reasons of my own. My wife will be getting her green card over the course of the next year.

Skill-trade migration is something I’ll be keeping a keen eye on, and may come back to in the future.

If you are an entrepreneur making migration work better and want to chat, email me at ljeure@gmail.com (3).

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1. For a sense of what this means - Japan had a working-to-old-age ratio of 2 in 2015, and there were news stories all the time about how Japan didn’t have enough young people. All “advanced regions” will be below 2 in 2050.

2. I felt I was being productive when I was setting up conversations with knowledgeable people in the space to pick their brains. I was fooling myself. I should have been talking to the companies who would be my prospective customers. If I had done that earlier, I would have learned much faster that the demand for nurses in the UK had gone down a lot in the past few years.

3. There are a growing number of organizations doing great work in the area. To help any other entrepreneurs get up to speed, the below is a list of organizations/individuals that I found useful and relevant:

Trying to get free money betting on the election

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In October I decided I'd try to make some free money off the betting markets (1).

I had just read On the Edge, by Nate Silver and thought it would be cool to be one of these renegades, going against conventional wisdom, putting money on the line, and being proven right. So when I saw that there were significant spreads between some of the election betting markets (Kalshi and Polymarket), I decided I had to act.

For example: In the presidential election, Kalshi had the odds of Trump winning Georgia at 26%. Polymarket had the odds at 29%.

This looks like free money! All I have to do is:

  • On Kalshi, bet that Trump wins. I put in $0.26, and if he wins, I get $1.

  • On Polymarket, bet that Harris wins. I put in $0.71, and if she wins, I get $1.

  • In total between the two markets, I spent $0.97. No matter who wins, I win $1. So I’ve made $0.03 for free!

Logical conclusion: I should drain my IRA, take out a huge loan, and put everything into chasing spreads.

My wife talked me down from “levering up and letting it all ride” to “take $100 and give it a try”. Which I’m glad she did, because I ended up losing money on this scheme.

And obviously so. Because there are transaction costs involved in making these bets. This is why - while you expect markets like Kalshi and Polymarket to be pretty similar to each other - still you can find small (<5%) spreads. Everyone knows this, and several people told me about this before I tried.

In the end, I placed $90 worth of bets, and won $92. A profit of $2. But since I paid $6 in transaction fees loading money onto the markets, I came out $4 behind overall (2).

My takeaway: Market frictions are very real, and finding a free lunch is a bit harder than I had hoped.

Shouldn’t I have been able to learn this takeaway without actually spending all the time and $4?

Yes. But so it goes in this vale of tears we call life. I can be told a hundred times that my idea is a bad idea and that it won’t work. But sometimes I just have to try for myself before I can admit that I’m wrong, and everyone else is right.

At least this time, my wasted effort has been the fodder for a blog post for you, Dear Reader.

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1. Betting markets are sites where you can bet on real-world events. They are fun, and also helpful in checking how seriously you should take particular news stories.

Why? In short, because “BS talks, money walks”.

In contrast to your political friend who makes dire predictions in order to make a point that his enemies are ruining the country, the people betting on these sites have a financial incentive to be correct. When there are a bunch of people trying to make money, you would expect the aggregate behavior to be a fairly good prediction of the future. And studies of sports betting bear this out.

For example - when I heard people saying that they were worried that the government would start deporting US citizens to El Salvador, I initially thought that this was overblown exaggeration. But then I checked Kalshi and saw that they had the odds of this happening as greater than 50%. So now I take this pretty seriously.

Plus, "why don't you put money on it?" is a nice comeback to have in the old quiver.

2. Ironically, the transaction fees were all related to getting money onto Polymarket - a blockchain based betting market. I was very disappointed in the difficulty of using crypto to move money to Polymarket from Kenya (where I lived at the time). The traditional banking system fueling Kalshi was much easier and cheaper.

Kenya lessons and new ideals

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When I moved to Kenya, I boasted to have two core ideals. Now that I’m moving back to the US, I’ve revisited them.

Core Ideal 1: I ought to push myself to help people as much as I can.

I’ve moderated on this.

Fine fine fine! Older, wiser people were right. I’m not as radical as I thought I was. I no longer foresee a life of living in tiny rooms, on beans, trying to engineer my personality around having as much positive impact as I can.

I still won’t be complacent with a career that does only an ok amount of good. I’m still strongly opposed to [hedonism](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hedonism?). I have ambition to do great things in my career.

Concretely helping others is still one of my priorities. But it is no longer my only priority.

And to be frank, it’s not clear that obsessing over my impact has even done me much good. At both BCG Nairobi and Kapu I had less impact than I thought I would at the outset. There was definitely impact-motivated wishful thinking on my part in both these career decisions.

I can’t know the counterfactual, and I deliberately did things that were higher risk But there’s a decent case to be made (my wife has made it) that I have overthought things and would have had more impact by just working in the US at a job that made a lot of money, and donating a lot.

So gone are the days of looking at my calendar and pretending that all my time is exclusively optimized for having as much impact as I can.

Core Ideal 2: I ought to look for opportunities where I will be doing work that would otherwise not be done.

I 100% still agree.

Over the course of 3 years helping to build a company, it's become clear to me how many problems exist only because nobody has built solutions to them.

More generally: Much of our world was built by people. Companies. Relationships. Social norms. Works of art.

It's up to us to continue the work of those who went before. To build on what has already been built. And - when needed - to tear down and build anew.

So I plan to build things. Create some products. Start a company or two. Write music. Create community. Start my own family.

So: Luke’s New and Improved Ideals as I move back to the US:

  1. My top priority is my wife (and future children).

  2. I build things.

  3. I ought to push myself to help others a lot.

Let’s see how they stand up in 4 years time.

The AIs come for the homeschool teacher jobs

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The Alpha school claims that in just two hours per day, it’s students learn 2.6 times more than they would in conventional schools. They manage this using AI tutors, who give students individualized lessons.

I believe it. I was homeschooling until I was 14, and most days finished school before noon. I definitely learned just as well or better than I would have if I went to any of the private or public schools in my town. And I never got my love of learning ground out of me, as some kids do (1).

But it took up a lot of my dad's time! He spent hours each day teaching me and my sisters. Luckily, he seemed to enjoy it.

It's exciting to think that by the time I'm a parent, a lot of the benefits of homeschooling - personalized learning, and a minimum of wasted student time - will be freely available to all kids using AI tutors. At a minimum time cost to the parents!

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1. Or so I've heard. From my understanding, elementary school is a lot of standing in lines

We have now perfected the Frig-O-Matic Sabbath Zeiger

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I love the way that people solve problems. Like the way that Hasidic Jews in the 50s solved the challenge of whether or not to open the fridge on the Sabbath.

Observant Jews cannot work on the sabbath. And for Hasidic Jews, a lot of things can count as "work".

Consider the following chain of events: You open a walk-in refrigerator, causing warm air to come in This causes the thermometer to rise, which in turns starts the motor to cool the refrigerator Therefore you have - extremely indirectly - turned on the motor, which is not allowed on the Sabbath.

To get around this, a Hasidic Jew can install a timer on his fridge that turns the motor on and off at fixed intervals, irrespective of the door opening and closing. (Presumably the installation cannot happen on the Sabbath). Now the shop-owner can be assured that his fridge will be cold, and he does not have to worry that he is indirectly turning the motor on by opening the fridge.

This timer is marketed within the community as a "Sabbath Clock" - or a Fridge-O-Matic Zeiger:

With the aid of God Great Announcement

...We announce that we have now perfected the Frig-O-Matic Sabbath Zeiger through which you may open the door of the refrigerator on the Sabbath every time and it doesn't make any difference whether the motor is running or in a standstill position.

The Frig-O-Matic Zeiger is refined in every respect, it is much nicer, smaller, and more practical, it is easier to regulate, and also it is cheaper, to make it possible for everyone to have one. It is completely automatic; once it is connected it is good for the Sabbath and for every day.

Come in for a demonstration daily after 6 in the evening and on Sundays all day.

We sell wholesale and retail. Frig-O-Matic, care of L. Kaufman, 201 Division Avenue, Brooklyn 11, New York.

From The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg by Solomon Poll, 1962.

The AIs will replace the human-trafficked jobs

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Within 10 years, AIs will be able to do any job that right now is done by a human fully remotely at a computer. Probably sooner.

This is good news for some victims of human trafficking! This week, 260 victims of human trafficking in Myanmar were released. These victims were from all over the world, and had been duped into coming to Myanmar. On arrival, they were “pressed into conducting online criminal activity, ranging from love scams… and crypto fraud, to money laundering and illegal gambling” (1).

The human workers doing all four of of these types of scams will be quickly replaced by AIs. This is good news for people who would otherwise be trafficked into performing this labor against their will. It’s bad news for people with a propensity to fall for online scams.

We can hope the the AIs who defend us against online scams will win the arms race against the AIs who perpetrate the scams.

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  1. I should note that apparently, of the 260, some were willing to stay and do the work, but others were held against their will with reports of torture.

10 things to remember from 2024

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About the world

  1. People are wrong all the time. Even when they have strong incentives to be right. How much more so when they don’t have strong incentives to be right?

  2. Almost everything is non-essential. Having the right political opinions, “good taste” in movies and music do not matter. They might be fun, but they are not important outside of that.

  3. We need to get out there and build things. Care about people’s identities and opinions less, and what they are getting done more

  4. “My kind of people” don’t necessarily get things done. Analytical, impact-driven westerners often are very fluffy on executing things that matter.

  5. Embed yourself with the right collaborators. David Bowie is not great because he did it all himself, but because he pulled together the right collaborators in the environment to do great things together. The same thing happens in companies, partnerships, film crews, bands, etc.

  6. VC is very hard in Africa. There are markets worth building for, but in most cases VC is not the right model. And there are relatively few builders in the ecosystem operating at a high level. Then how are there so many startups? Because there is a lot of impact money - so frankly, the bar to get funding is lower. This enables a lot of “mickey mouse” startups, that look nice but have no real chance to become profitable at a VC scale.

About myself

  1. Jia is my #1 priority.

  2. I want to do hard things in my life. Not just “can”: - “want to”

  3. It will be hard enough to be a good husband, and spend my career building something. After that, just play video games all day for all that it matters

  4. The people I want to be around believe in things and act on them.

"Africa risk"

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I’ve heard from some founders fundraising in Africa that the one hurdle to get over with VCs is a general sentiment that “Africa is a risky place to invest”, that isn’t grounded in any actual fundamentals about the company or the market.

At first it might not seem rational for an investor to feel this way if it’s not based on company or market fundamentals. But general sentiment about a market can be self-fulfilling.

An early-stage investor in a company will only make money if the that company survives long enough to have a good exit. The company will only survive this long if other investors can be persuaded to invest at later rounds (1).

So an early-stage investor must believe that later-stage investors will believe invest in this company. If the early-stage investor knows that most investors won’t believe in the company because they are worried about “Africa risk”, then she won’t want to invest.

She has to behave as if she believes in “Africa risk” - even if she herself believes that there is no fundamental Africa risk (2).

The value of impact investors is to break this negative cycle. To put money into an ecosystem (be it a geographical ecosystem like African startups, or a cause-oriented ecosystem like climate-tech or immigration) until it becomes an attractive investment destination for purely profit-seeking investors.

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  1. Or if the company can become profitable without having to raise another round of funding. A good option for many African startups

  2. This is the same fundamental dynamic that leads to speculative bubbles

What are human smugglers really like?

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“These people are not only my customers: they are my brothers. I help them because they are on the wrong side of the world.” -Abu Hamza, a human smuggler

Luigi Achilli is a anthropologist who studies migrants and refugees, and the smugglers who help them move across borders. For many people, the image that comes to mind when we think of human smuggling is a ruthless criminal who preys on vulnerable people. This was certainly my image of a human smuggler. But his fascinating research reveals a far more positive picture of human smugglers.

I did a quick run-through of some of his papers. Here were the main things I learned:

  • Migrants like the individual smugglers they work with, rather than thinking of them as exploitative. “Remarkably, accounts about the callousness of smugglers were often dismissed by those very people who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean. The majority of migrants with whom I spoke did not perceive their smugglers as exploitative.” And the smugglers themselves emphasize the “importance of being morally respectable and kind.” Smuggling is a business, and as in any business your reputation is extremely important.

  • But when both migrants and smugglers think of “smugglers” in the abstract, they think of someone predatory. "[T]he degree of consensus was surprising: smugglers were fundamentally evil.” So in the abstract, they think about human smuggling basically the same way as we all do. They just don’t think of themselves as engaged in that sort of activity. (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • There is not a strict dichotomy between smugglers and migrants. A lot of smugglers are migrants themselves, and migrants assist in smuggling activities (e.g., piloting boats, recruiting migrants, serving as lookouts) (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • Smugglers often share ethnic ties with the people they transport, which helps them establish solidarity with them. At times they will even transport the elderly, infirm, or children for lower than their typical costs. The unfortunate converse to this ethnic solidarity is that when when smugglers and migrants do not share the same ethnic background, abuse is more likely to occur. (”Irregular Migration”)

  • Migrants underestimate the risks - at least those migrating from Africa to Italy. Many say that if they had known the risks, they never would have left (page 5).

He also has a few points that counter common narratives about how smuggling is organized For example:

  • There is this idea of extremely organized criminal organizations who organize the smuggling of people from, say, Nigeria all the way to Europe. This is not the case. Instead, the people who move from Africa to Europe typically make their way piecemeal. They don’t even have a final destination in mind when they set out - much less have their entire journey planned for them by a centralized crime organization.

    • “Indeed, it would hardly be possible for a single centralized organization to carry out all services alone along a route that comprises journeys of several thousand kilometres and in a market characterized by high levels of instability and unpredictability.” (from Irregular Migration)

  • Similarly, sometimes you might hear that terrorist organizations participate in migrant smuggling as a source of revenue. He finds that this is not really true.

One of my overarching takeaways from his work is that the “smugglers are predators, migrants are victims” narrative is far too simple. It is a way of thinking that lets you avoid blaming illegal immigrants, while still allowing you to view illegal migration as a moralistic issue. The reality is much more complicated than that.

I’m very glad there are people like Luigi Achilli in the world - helping the rest of us understand this area of human activity that is important, often misunderstood, and fascinating.

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Some interesting works from Achilli: