Comments on Vernon Briggs's the State of U.S. Immigration Policy: The Quandary of Economic Methodology and the Relevance of Economic Research to Know
![handle is hein.journals/jecoplcy5 and id is 197 raw text is: 2009]
COMMENTS ON VERNON BRIGGS'S THE STATE OF U.S.
IMMIGRATION POLICY: THE QUANDARY OF
ECONOMIC METHODOLOGY AND THE RELEVANCE OF
ECONOMIC RESEARCH TO KNOW
Rimvydas Baltaduonis
Professor Briggs provides a broad picture of the scope and complexity
of U.S. immigration law. His paper acknowledges our inability to com-
pletely understand this complicated system and calls for policy research so
that the law can be reformed to serve U.S. national interests.
The migration of humans in search of opportunities and a better life is
probably as old as the human race itself. It precedes the emergence of na-
tion-states by thousands of years.
[A] growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single
small group that crossed the Bering Straight, got stuck on the Alaska side, and straggled to
the rest of the Americas in two or three separate groups, with the ancestors of most modern
Indians making up the second group... [S]ome scientists have theorized that the Americas
may have been hit with as many as five waves of settlement before Columbus, with the earli-
est occurring as much as fifty thousand years ago.'
I moved from Lithuania to the United States in 2001. Given my legal
status in the United States, Professor Briggs would classify me under the
third sub-group of foreign-born persons. In other words, the group of
foreign-bom persons who have been legally admitted as non-immigrants, which means
they may live temporarily in the country but they do not have the right to remain or partici-
Dr. Rimvydas Baltaduonis is an IFREE Visiting Post-doctoral Fellow in the Interdisciplinary
Center for Economic Science at George Mason University. Dr. Baltaduonis's broad fields of specialty
are industrial organization, experimental economics, and market design. His current research is focused
on deregulated electricity markets. Lately, Dr. Baltaduonis examined the performance of auction mecha-
nisms in wholesale power markets when electricity suppliers act strategically. He also analyzed whole-
sale gas market in California, retail milk market in New England, banking sector in Eastern and Central
Europe, wood and furniture industry in Lithuania. Dr. Baltaduonis received his Ph.D. in economics
from the University of Connecticut in 2007. He started teaching Spontaneous Order and the Law at
George Mason University in Spring 2008.
1 CHARLES C. MANN, 1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS 16-17
(2005).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jecoplcy5&div=8&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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