118: Zeke Hernandez. Immigration is good for economic prosperity – but it can take two or three generations to come fully to fruition

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I'm excited to introduce Zeke Hernandez.

Zeke is the Max and Bernice Garchick Family Presidential Professor at the Wharton School.

He studies how the movement of people and ideas and firms creates economic prosperity, but also other kinds of prosperity.

His research is particularly linking immigration to investment and economic growth.

He's won a million prizes, including three Emerging Scholar Awards from our associations.

He's also a renowned teacher and educator at Wharton.

Zeke's personal story is incredible.

He was born in Uruguay and lived in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Argentina for several years before returning to Uruguay as a teenager.

He then spent a couple of years on a service mission in Buenos Aires, and he thinks about those experiences and draws on them.

as awakening his desire to understand what leads to economic prosperity.

If you fast forward to his enrollment at the University of Minnesota as a PhD candidate, and then eventually now at Wharton, he's developed these ideas into a really remarkable body of scholarly work on immigration as a central feature of our economic and social life.

He's dedicated his career to studying how people's moves affect our lives and our livelihoods.

Welcome, Zeke.

Thanks, Anita.

I'm so honored to be here with you today.