Global Development: Views from the Center
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January 28, 2008
The Best Provocative, Short Read on Migration And Development
Posted by Michael Clemens at 08:54 AM
Harvard professor and CGD colleague Lant Pritchett has given a stunning interview to Reason magazine that will be a revelation if you haven't yet been exposed to Pritchett's incandescent ideas on migration and development. Below are selected quotations from Pritchett in the interview.
On aid and migration:
If we succeed in making Africa richer, there is going to be more pressure in outward migration rather than less. … The idea that aid and migration are substitutes is just not consistent with the experience of the world. [And] we shouldn't create hostages. We shouldn't keep people locked in place within some arbitrary post-colonial boundaries just so we can continue with the bold experiment of trying to make nation-states develop. People should be free to move.
On trade and migration:
Relative to when I started working as a trade economist in the early 1980s, [trade] is completely liberalized. So the incremental gains from anything that could happen as a result of WTO negotiations are just infinitesimal. … There are almost no tariffs left over, say, 20 to 25 percent, and yet wages for unskilled labor differ not by percents but by an order of magnitude -- workers in some poor countries make 8 cents an hour, not 8 dollars an hour.
On opposition to immigration:
I don't want to say that people who are concerned about inequality in the U.S. aren't right to be concerned about inequality in the U.S. But I think taking that concern and using it to keep people from coming to the United States is victimizing the world's true victims in favor of people who happen to live closer to you.
On discrimination in hiring:
If we say we are going to discriminate against ethnic Indians in Mexico vs. other citizens of Mexico, there would be a hue and cry across the world. But if we say we're going to discriminate in favor of people of Mexican descent born in the United States vs. people of Mexican descent born in Mexico, this creates absolutely no moral outrage.
On the compatibility of free migration and the welfare state:
Milton Friedman is wrong. It's not incompatible with a welfare state; it's incompatible with a welfare state that doesn't differentiate between people within its territory. Singapore manages to maintain an enormously high level of benefits for its citizens with massive mobility. Kuwait has one of the highest immigrant populations in the world, and you can't ask for a more cradle-to-grave welfare state than what Kuwait gives its citizens. So it's obviously possible to maintain whatever level of welfare state you want and have whatever level of labor mobility you want, as long as you're willing to separate the issues.
I find these thoughts compelling; they demand a much better response than researchers and policymakers have given them so far. CGD's initiative on migration and development, which I lead, is exploring some of these and related issues. If you want to know more about where Pritchett's radically moral ideas lead him in terms of practical policy proposals, read the whole interview above, then consult his penetrating book, Let Their People Come.
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Comments
I am extremely enthusiastic about Lant Pritchett’s book and arguments as they so closely mirror so many things that I have been arguing while an Executive Director in the World Bank (2002 – 2004) and thereafter, and I must say not without much luck in getting the message true.
That said there are nuances of course. And let me just present some few examples that might clarify these.
1. Are we really talking about the real dimensions?
El Salvador’s GDP is about 18.5 billion dollars in 2007. If we from this GDP deduct the 3.7 billion that their emigrant workers sent and that clearly translated into a larger GDP we could say that El Salvador’s GDP net of their emigrant workers is 14.8 billion dollars.
Now if say that the 3.7 billion that the Salvadorian emigrants remitted to El Salvador is 15 percent of their gross earnings (mostly salaries) then we could say that the Gross Emigrant Product GEP of the Salvadorians for 2007 is 24.7 billion dollars.
And there you have it El Salvador’s GDP in El Salvador 14.8 and El Salvador’s GEP outside of El Salvador 24.7!
And if you add El Salvador’s GDP and GEP you come up with 39.5 billion…and you might then suddenly realize that El Salvador has been growing faster than China.
2. The emigrants deserve more say…at home!
The emigrants are easily forgotten by their homeland (except for their remittances) and welcomed lukewarm at the best as immigrants by their new host and employer. In other words the emigrant/immigrant lives in a Limbo. I believe that the best way to assert the immigrants rights in the land of their host is to really assert their rights in their homeland. Therefore, for instance with reference to El Salvador, they should probably, among much other, have 50 percent or more of the seats in the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador.
3. We need to work on solutions not on borders!
I absolutely agree with Pritchard that the border should not have to be enforced at the border… among other things when border hinders present the problem that you might not really be sure on which side of it you might end up. In this sense and to help to create new solutions I am working at a plan that would have private insurers guarantee the government the return of immigrants after their visa expires.
4. The immigrants are much more needed than what is normally admitted!
The US, not because of the immigrants, has build up a tremendous overload of public debt that now needs to be serviced. Of course it will be harder to service it the fewer are working at it. Of course when the maitre arrives with the check that’s not the moment you would like some of the guests to leave. But if they are free or forced to leave why should they not? It is clearly not political correct to even raise the question but as Pritchett also dares to hint in that direction let me do it here too. Is not the best stimulus package we could ever think of for the US at this moment that of bringing in forty million additional foreign workers to help it settle the check?
Posted by: Per Kurowski at February 5, 2008 05:51 PM
Pritchett's work formalizes what many have recognized.
The distinction between migration and development is based on the same geographic imagination as the nation state, which over-writes the networks of commerce and migration with more-or-less arbitrary borders. When borders are turned into boundaries, there is a real economic cost on both sides.
Further, in discussing migration we tend to split internal and international migration, even while they share a common economic logic. California in the 1990s had as much immigration from other states as from other countries. Yet one is a problem, the other is not. (I argue that the internal migration is a powerful stimulant of international migration.)
The internal migration has been sustained for over 100 years without economic disaster. There are reasons for this, which I will not introduce here. Suffice it to say that internal migration and the field of economic geography are useful approaches to redefining the misleading split between migration and development.
Note: I researched both migration and economic development among Pacific Islander populations in the 1990s before coming to the conclusion that the distinction was less a feature of the real world than the product of disciplinary conventions.
Posted by: Jim Hess at April 23, 2008 06:32 PM