Open Philanthropy donations made to ImmigrationWorks Foundation

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

ItemValue
Country United States
Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions)GiveWell Good Ventures
Best overview URLhttps://causeprioritization.org/Open%20Philanthropy%20Project
Facebook username openphilanthropy
Websitehttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/
Donations URLhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants
Twitter usernameopen_phil
PredictionBook usernameOpenPhilUnofficial
Page on philosophy informing donationshttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/vision-and-values
Grant application process pagehttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers
Regularity with which donor updates donations datacontinuous updates
Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)continuous updates
Lag with which donor updates donations datamonths
Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)days
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Open+Philanthropy

Brief history: Open Philanthropy (Open Phil for short) spun off from GiveWell, starting as GiveWell Labs in 2011, beginning to make strong progress in 2013, and formally separating from GiveWell as the "Open Philanthropy Project" in June 2017. In 2020, it started going by "Open Philanthropy" dropping the "Project" word.

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: Open Philanthropy is focused on openness in two ways: open to ideas about cause selection, and open in explaining what they are doing. It has endorsed "hits-based giving" and is working on areas of AI risk, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and other global catastrophic risks, criminal justice reform (United States), animal welfare, and some other areas.

Notes on grant decision logistics: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-grantmaking-so-far-approach-and-process for the general grantmaking process and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/questions-we-ask-ourselves-making-grant for more questions that grant investigators are encouraged to consider. Every grant has a grant investigator that we call the influencer here on Donations List Website; for focus areas that have Program Officers, the grant investigator is usually the Program Officer. The grant investigator has been included in grants published since around July 2017. Grants usually need approval from an executive; however, some grant investigators have leeway to make "discretionary grants" where the approval process is short-circuited; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/discretionary-grants for more. Note that the term "discretionary grant" means something different for them compared to government agencies, see https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10213483361534364 for more.

Notes on grant publication logistics: Every publicly disclosed grant has a writeup published at the time of public disclosure, but the writeups vary significantly in length. Grant writeups are usually written by somebody other than the grant investigator, but approved by the grant investigator as well as the grantee. Grants have three dates associated with them: an internal grant decision date (that is not publicly revealed but is used in some statistics on total grant amounts decided by year), a grant date (which we call donation date; this is the date of the formal grant commitment, which is the published grant date), and a grant announcement date (which we call donation announcement date; the date the grant is announced to the mailing list and the grant page made publicly visible). Lags are a few months between decision and grant, and a few months between grant and announcement, due to time spent with grant writeup approval.

Notes on grant financing: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers or https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/who-we-are for more information. Grants generally come from the Open Philanthropy Fund, a donor-advised fund managed by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, with most of its money coming from Good Ventures. Some grants are made directly by Good Ventures, and political grants may be made by the Open Philanthropy Action Fund. At least one grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform/working-families-party-prosecutor-reforms-new-york was made by Cari Tuna personally. The majority of grants are financed by the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; however, the source of financing of a grant is not always explicitly specified, so it cannot be confidently assumed that a grant with no explicit listed financing is financed through the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; see the comment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Funding for multi-year grants is usually disbursed annually, and the amounts are often equal across years, but not always. The fact that a grant is multi-year, or the distribution of the grant amount across years, are not always explicitly stated on the grant page; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Some grants to universities are labeled "gifts" but this is a donee classification, based on different levels of bureaucratic overhead and funder control between grants and gifts; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information.

Miscellaneous notes: Most GiveWell-recommended grants made by Good Ventures and listed in the Open Philanthropy database are not listed on Donations List Website as being under Open Philanthropy. Specifically, GiveWell Incubation Grants are not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=GiveWell+Incubation+Grants with donor GiveWell Incubation Grants), and grants made by Good Ventures to GiveWell top and standout charities are also not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+top+and+standout+charities with donor Good Ventures/GiveWell top and standout charities). Grants to support GiveWell operations are not included here; they can be found at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+support with donor "Good Ventures/GiveWell support".The investment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/impossible-foods in Impossible Foods is not included because it does not fit our criteria for a donation, and also because no amount was included. All other grants publicly disclosed by open philanthropy that are not GiveWell Incubation Grants or GiveWell top and standout charity grants should be included. Grants disclosed by grantees but not yet disclosed by Open Philanthropy are not included; some of them may be listed at https://issarice.com/open-philanthropy-project-non-grant-funding

Full donor page for donor Open Philanthropy

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country

Full donee page for donee ImmigrationWorks Foundation

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 2 150,000 217,500 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 285,000 285,000 285,000 285,000 285,000
Migration policy 2 150,000 217,500 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 285,000 285,000 285,000 285,000 285,000

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Total 2015 2014
Migration policy (filter this donor) 2 435,000.00 150,000.00 285,000.00
Total 2 435,000.00 150,000.00 285,000.00

Graph of spending by cause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)

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Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)

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Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (2 documents)

Title (URL linked)Publication dateAuthorPublisherAffected donorsAffected doneesAffected influencersDocument scopeCause areaNotes
Update on the Open Philanthropy Project’s Work on Migration Liberalisation2016-04-08Sebastian Nickel Open Borders: The CaseOpen Philanthropy Center for Global Development U.S. Association for International Migration Protect the People ImmigrationWorks Foundation No Lean Season Niskanen Center New York University Third-party coverage of donor strategyMigration policyThe blog post provides an update to https://openborders.info/blog/overview-of-the-open-philanthropy-projects-work-on-migration-liberalisation/ (a blog post from a year ago), providing updates on the grants discussed in the previous post, as well as descriptions of new grants. A section titled "Closing thoughts" gives the author's take on events; it stresses the difficulty of figuring out how best to effect political change, and the longer time horizon needed for efforts to bear fruit.
Overview of the Open Philanthropy Project’s work on migration liberalisation2015-03-18Sebastian Nickel Open Borders: The CaseOpen Philanthropy Center for Global Development ImmigrationWorks Foundation U.S. Association for International Migration Evidence Action Third-party coverage of donor strategyMigration policyThe blog post reviews Open Philanthropy's philanthropy strategy related to promoting freer migration in the context of their broader thinking, and discusses grants made so far to the Center for Global Development, ImmigrationWorks Foundation, and U.S. Association for International Migration. It also has a section on work related to migration within national borders that Open Philanthropy is funding. A conclusion section discusses the author's overall takeaways, and includes the sentence: "I am very impressed with the Open Philanthropy Project’s work on labour mobility."

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (2 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 2)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
150,000.0022015-12Migration policy/low-skilled migration promotionhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016Alexander Berger Donation process: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016#Our_process says: "We began discussing the possibility of renewing our support of ImmigrationWorks as the previous grant period drew to a close. Tamar Jacoby spoke with us about potential activities for ImmigrationWorks over the next 18 months, and about ImmigrationWorks’ current funding situation."

Intended use of funds (category): Organizational general support

Intended use of funds: A list of proposed activities is submitted by the granteee at https://files.givewell.org/files/shallow/international-migration/grants/IW-2015-2017-memo.pdf (2015-10-23) and summarized at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016#footnoteref6_elw4mih including activities such as: mobilize a donor collaborative, develop a strategy for future Congressional advocacy, advance a worker-visa pilot program, develop a communications strategy, and colllaboration with the Niskanen Center.

Donor reason for selecting the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016#Case_for_the_new_grant says: "We see IW as a small organization which shares the Open Philanthropy Project’s goal of increasing lower-skill immigration, an aspect of immigration policy that does not receive much other support. IW is experiencing a funding shortfall while focus has shifted away from immigration reform in Congress, and we believe that this grant could play a significant role in keeping IW operating at its current capacity. In particular, we believe that our grant will allow IW to continue to do more work on immigration, rather than shift resources partially or entirely to Opportunity America (or close down)."

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The amount was chosen to meet the limited goal of continuing to keep ImmigrationWorks running during a lean time when prospects for immigration reform in Congress are limited. It is about half the size of the pre vious one-year grant. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016#Case_for_the_new_grant says: "[W]we believe that this grant could play a significant role in keeping IW operating at its current capacity. In particular, we believe that our grant will allow IW to continue to do more work on immigration, rather than shift resources partially or entirely to Opportunity America (or close down). [...] [W]e are hopeful that our grant will allow IW to continue operations and maintain good relationships with policymakers and others so that it can be present and involved when the issue of CIR is raised again in Congress (likely in 2017)"

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): The timing is based on the end of the timeframe for the previous grant and the progress of conversations with the grantee, as https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016#Our_process explains.
Intended funding timeframe in months: 18

Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016#Plans_for_learning_and_follow-up includes details on expectations from the grant and plans for a more holistic evaluation.

Donor retrospective of the donation: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/sites/default/files/Tamar_Jacoby_03-31-16_%28public%29.pdf (2016-03-31) has a followup conversation with Tamar Jacoby of the grantee organization. No followup grants are made as of 2021.

Other notes: The grant page https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016 has several sections including a section reviewing the previous grant and a section on risks. Affected countries: United States; announced: 2015-12-14.
285,000.0012014-07Migration policy/low-skilled migration promotionhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-supportAlexander Berger Donation process: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-support#Our_process says: "GiveWell approached IW in March 2014 to discuss funding opportunities relating to advocacy for lower-skill immigration and learned that IW was seeking philanthropic funding. A series of conversations about IW’s work culminated in a request for funding. We shared a draft version of this page with IW staff prior to the grant being finalized."

Intended use of funds (category): Organizational general support

Intended use of funds: Grantee prepared funding options at https://files.givewell.org/files/shallow/international-migration/grants/IW%20menu%20of%20funding%20options.pdf and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-support#Proposed_activities provides a summary: $55,000 funding gap for 2014 (funded), $40,000 for a grassroots coordinator in Washington (funded), $180,000 for campaigns in the states (not funded), $150,000 for public opinion research (funded), and $40,000 for building consensus around policy (funded). The funding is unrestricted even though the intended use funds specific programs.

Donor reason for selecting the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-support#Case_for_the_grant links to https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/policy/labor-mobility#What_is_the_problem for the importance of funding low-skilled immigration, the focus of ImmigrationWorks and not a focus of most organizations. Also: "One positive feature of the public opinion research may be that it is less time-sensitive than the advocacy work: messages that are found to work today may continue to be helpful if immigration reform appears on the national agenda again in a few years." A learning goal is also cited: "In addition to the potential for impact, we also see this grant as a good way to learn more about advocacy opportunities around immigration reform in the U.S."

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The amount is the total of activities that Open Philanthropy chose to fund oof https://files.givewell.org/files/shallow/international-migration/grants/IW%20menu%20of%20funding%20options.pdf at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-support#Proposed_activities namely $55,000 funding gap for 2014, $40,000 for a grassroots coordinator in Washington, $150,000 for public opinion research, and $40,000 for building consensus around policy.

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): The timing seems to be a result of when Open Philanthropy started the process and how long the due diligence took. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-support#Our_process says: "says: "GiveWell approached IW in March 2014 to discuss funding opportunities [...] A series of conversations about IW’s work culminated in a request for funding."
Intended funding timeframe in months: 12

Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-support#Plans_for_learning_and_follow-up has details on questions that Open Philanthropy will continue investigating, and plans for continued conversations with Tamar Jacoby every 2-3 months over the course of the year-long grant.

Donor retrospective of the donation: The renewal grant write-up https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-general-support-2016#Previous_grant has a detailed evaluation of the outcome of the grant. The grant was mostly to maintain existing expenses rather than expand significantly; one form of impact is described: "Jacoby has considered shifting focus away from immigration policy to prioritize her work with Opportunity America, and we believe there is a reasonable probability that Open Philanthropy’s grant played a role in keeping Jacoby active in the area of immigration."

Other notes: The grant page https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-policy/immigrationworks-foundation-general-support#Plans_for_learning_and_follow-up is fairly detailed; in particular, it includes details on ImmigrationWorks' past track record and has a section on risks to the success of the grant. Affected countries: United States.