“The Economics of Immigration” presentation from Reynolds Week 2016 featuring Fernanda Santos.

1. The economics of
immigration
Broadening the boundaries of business reporting

2. !
Look at the business of business journalism
as everybody’s business in journalism. !
!
!
Partner (yes, work together) with journalists
who are not business journalists.

3. Shops Emerge From Ruins of Jackson Heights Fire
Maria Solano in her party store on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. After a fire in February,
Ms. Solano was forced into a much smaller space that she now shares with a travel agency, a hair
salon, a clothing shop and a spa. (Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)

4. … the going has been tough, in part because it has
been hard for small businesses to survive in a
gentrifying neighborhood like Jackson Heights,
where the price of commercial space has shot up in
recent years, forcing many old-timers to close shop.
(In an interesting twist, one of the burned-out
businesses, Colony Wine and Liquor, will reopen
next month in the space that had housed Cavalier
Restaurant and Lounge, a neighborhood institution,
for more than 50 years. The restaurant shut down in
February because of a sudden spike in rent.)

5. Immigrants Are Crucial to Innovation, Study Says
Wenyuan Shi, a native of China, earned a patent in 2011 for the active ingredient in a
lollipop that can help prevent tooth decay. (Credit: UCLA School of Dentistry)

6. STRUCTURE!
!
Option 1:!
findings => expert => example: story driven by the facts!
!
Option 2:!
story driven by stories

7. Effort to Secure Border Crimps Commerce Along It
Agua Prieta, Mexico, has a main street directly south of the border fence that is active with people
and businesses. Credit Samantha Sais for The New York Times

8. tight angles + big thoughts, statistics = humanization
humanization => broader appeal of “dry” stories. !
!
The key is to put a face to the numbers.!
!

9. Bangladeshis transforming Buffalo, one
block at a time
Families use life savings to buy, renovate run-down homes in
city’s poorest neighborhoods

10. His winning bid was $42,000. Just five years ago, $3,450
was the average price of a double in the same area of Bailey.
The auction story is the same for houses on other streets
where the Bangladeshis have bought, and many properties
are fetching more than what’s owed to the city, leading to
the record auction surplus money for foreclosed owners.
In 2009, a slate of 826 properties sold for $4.6 million at the
auction.
Five years later, 808 properties yielded $9.2 million.

11. The economics of immigration is !
a business story AND a social and
political story that is more effectively
told when all of these aspects are
combined.

12. They are examples of how global outsourcing
companies are using temporary visas to bring in
foreign workers who do not appear to have
exceptional skills — according to interviews with a
dozen current or former employees of Toys “R” Us
and New York Life — to help ship out jobs, mainly
to India.

13. the makeup of the workforce =>
window into demographic and social
changes AND predictors of political,
social and economic trends.

14. !•!Mexico is the second largest destination of U.S.
goods and services after Canada => $216 billion in
total exports in 2012, more than Japan and China
combined.!
!•!Mexico is the United States’ third largest trading
partner. Bilateral trade levels have quintupled since
NAFTA signed in 1994.!
!•!Close to 80 percent of bilateral trade crosses the
U.S.-Mexico land border every day.!
(Source: Five Reasons Why the U.S.-Mexico Border is Critical to the Economy by AS/COA, the Americas Society/Council of the Americas.)

15. A secure border is vital, but so is a border that
provides security in a way that does not result in
the unintended consequence of unnecessarily
stifling commerce.

16. More than six million U.S. jobs—and probably an even greater
number of Mexican jobs— now depend on bilateral trade.
Yet the economic vision of the border embedded in such a trade-
facilitation approach
can be limiting. The border essentially becomes little more than a
point of friction in
an otherwise seamless binational economy. Border communities
aspire to be more than
a node on a transportation network, more than what many of them
have titled a “pass- through economy,” one in which too little value
is added locally to the billions of dollars of commerce passing
through its corridors each year.