On the 13th of October 2025, Professor Catia Batista of NOVA SBE delivered a talk at UC Berkeley’s Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics, presenting her work titled “Integrating Migrants: Experimental Evidence on Cross-Border Spillover.”
In her talk, Professor Batista drew on the findings of a recent randomized controlled trial that evaluated how a low-cost, scalable information and support intervention can significantly improve immigrant integration outcomes. Specifically, she described evidence from a field experiment with Cape Verdean immigrants residing in Portugal, where providing migrants with targeted information helped enhance job search effectiveness, increased the quality of employment obtained, and facilitated regularization of migrant status.
Beyond the direct benefits for migrants themselves, Professor Batista emphasized the spillover effects documented in the study for their home communities — notably, increased political participation and a shift in gender norms in Cape Verde, among relatives remaining behind.
Through this example, the lecture underscored a broader message: immigrant integration — far from being a narrow labor-market policy issue — can serve as a powerful lever for social and institutional development, with implications for employment, legal status, and democratic governance in both destination and origin countries.
This talk came about as a result of a Portugal-Berkeley Visiting Professor Program grant which was awarded to Professor Magruder, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley, by the Center for Portuguese Studies to host Professor Batista and sponsor this public lecture.