The World’s Best and Brightest Are Moving, but Not to America

Opinion|The World’s Best and Brightest Are Moving, but Not to America

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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Carlos Lozada: We’re here together because in a sort of serendipitous way, we’ve been working on parallel tracks for the last few months.

You wrote a terrific series in which you explored why and how and where people are moving in great numbers from the places where they were born to new countries, new regions, new lives. You’ve gone around the world for this, not really focusing on the United States, where the immigration debate seems to be all-encompassing.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing some columns a lot less systematically than you on the role of immigration in the U.S., looking in part on some policy questions — whether birthright citizenship or English as the official language — that surround this debate and also just exploring some of the rhetoric on immigration during the Trump era.