The New Republic

For three years now the Mountain Monitor—Brookings Mountain West’s Mountain Zone variant of Brookings’ MetroMonitor—has been tracking the region’s protracted, in-most-places anemic, economic recovery. Quarter-to-quarter, the Monitor has reported on a slow healing of the region’s metropolitan economies that has differed starkly from the region’s past boom-bust cycles. READ MORE >>

Brookings’ MetroMonitor has been, we hope, a steady witness over the past three years, tracking the downs and ups and back-down-agains of economic recession and recovery across the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas each quarter.   The story hasn’t often been one of breakthroughs but it has been revealing about the nature of the nation’s sluggish recovery and the extensive variation among the nation’s diverse metro areas.  READ MORE >>

with Shyamali Choudhury READ MORE >>

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced big news: Effective immediately, eligible undocumented youth are granted deferred action from deportation (a form of administrative relief). READ MORE >>

In this week’s TIME Magazine and on last Sunday’s CNN prime-time special, Fareed Zakaria focused on the shortcomings of the U.S. immigration policy and its current and future impact upon the U.S. economy. A lot of the discussion was about the inability of high-skilled immigrants to stay in the United States and how it influences the competitiveness of U.S.-based companies. READ MORE >>

Ready. Set. Stop! Over the past week, American employers have been sprinting to the finish line to submit their H-1B applications for fiscal year 2013. It took only 10 weeks this year to reach the FY2013 visa cap of 85,000. Last year, it took more than three times longer, 33 weeks.  READ MORE >>

It’s been five years since we seriously attempted to reform U.S. immigration policy. Since then, partisan politics and extremist views have hijacked any sensibility on the topic, both in Congress and in many states and communities across the country. Five years ago, the Great Recession and housing crisis hadn’t yet wreaked economic havoc, crushing businesses, swelling unemployment, and threatening millions of homeowners. Back then, we had a lot less to worry about. READ MORE >>

This week, the debate over the economy and environmental policy reached a new low. Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform which he chairs, made Bureau of Labor Statistics officials go through a list of jobs and say whether or not they were counted as green in their “Green Goods and Services Survey” in order to ridicule it. READ MORE >>

Is Dallas a “global region?” READ MORE >>

I’ve been enjoying Niall Ferguson’s new PBS series on the rise of civilization in Western Europe. READ MORE >>