Thread: Migration Hurts the Homeland

Migration Hurts the Homeland

Andy Martin

By PAUL COLLIER

Published: November 29, 2013

OXFORD, England — Liberals have long fought for the rights of immigrants. Businesses have long fought for the right of people to immigrate. It’s a crucial distinction.

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Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook created a lobbying organization, FWD.us, this year to try to unite the two causes by casting comprehensive immigration reform in the United States as an issue of justice. “Eleven million people is a lot of people who are being treated unfairly right now,” he said. As self-serving as Mr. Zuckerberg’s advocacy may be — immigration reform happens to align nicely with the interests of the technology industry — his high-minded rhetoric reflects an attempt to appeal to pro-immigration liberals, who presume that opening doors wider is the humane thing to do. But humane for whom? What’s good for migrants from poor places is not always good for the countries they’re leaving behind.


Migration is good for poor countries, but not in every form, and not in unlimited amounts. The migration that research shows is unambiguously beneficial is the kind in which young people travel to democracies like America for higher education and then go home. Not only do these young people bring back valuable skills directly learned in the classroom; they bring back political and social attitudes that they have assimilated from their classmates. Their skills raise the productivity of the unskilled majority, and their attitudes accelerate democratization.


For example, global data on students from poor countries who have studied abroad since 1950 shows that those who went to democracies accelerated political liberalization in their home societies out of all proportion to their numbers. Democratization across Latin America, Africa and Asia has been supported by this process. In an opinion article in The Washington Post last spring, Mr. Zuckerberg asked, “Why do we kick out the more than 40 percent of math and science graduate students who are not U.S. citizens after educating them?” My response: Whatever the reason, it is a highly effective way of helping poorer societies.
Even what looks like a brain drain can sometimes be beneficial. When educated people emigrate and settle in a richer country, the poorer country suffers a direct loss; but by demonstrating that the effort to acquire education can end triumphantly, it can encourage many others to pursue an education, too. The brain drain becomes a reality only if too many of the educated leave.


But many poor countries have too much emigration. I do not mean that they would be better with none, but they would be better with less. The big winners from the emigration of the educated have been China and India. Because each has over a billion people, proportionately few people leave.


In contrast, small developing countries have high emigration rates, even if their economies are doing well: Ghana, for instance, has a rate of skilled emigration 12 times that of China. If, in addition, their economies are in trouble, they suffer an educational hemorrhage. The top rankings for skilled emigration are a roll call of the bottom billion. Haiti loses around 85 percent of its educated youth, a rate that is debilitating. Emigrants send money back, but it is palliative rather than transformative.


China and India, with their low rates of emigration and high rates of return, have dominated global thinking about how migration affects countries of origin. But the core development challenge is now whether the poor, small societies can catch up. Unlike China and India, they have too much emigration. They can do little about it, but we can do quite a lot: Their emigration rates are set by our immigration policies.


Much of the pressure for more rapid immigration comes from diasporas wanting to bring in dependent relatives. But bowing to this pressure is not necessarily humane: Bringing relatives to America reduces the incentive to send remittances back home. Migrant families do well for themselves by jumping into a chain of lifeboats headed for the developed world, but this can be at the expense of the vastly larger group of families left behind.


Seemingly the most incontestable case for a wider door is to provide a refuge for those fleeing societies in meltdown. The high-income democracies should indeed provide such a refuge, and this means letting more people in. But the right to refuge need not imply the right to residency. The people best equipped to flee from societies in meltdown are their elites: The truly poor cannot get farther than a camp over the border. Post-meltdown, the elites are needed back home. Yet if they have acquired permanent residence they are reluctant to return.




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For example, South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, is bleeding a remittance outflow: Government officials told me that key people can be coaxed back only by high salaries, and even then they leave their families abroad and send their Sudanese earnings back to them. Our priority should be to design policies of refuge that reconcile our duty of rescue with the legitimate concerns of post-conflict governments to attract back the people who could rebuild their countries. Émigrés face a coordination problem: Going home is much less scary if others are doing the same. The right to refuge could include sunset rules linked to peace settlements and the monitored efforts of post-conflict governments.


Bright, young, enterprising people are catalysts of economic and political progress. They are like fairy godmothers, providing benefits, whether intended or inadvertent, to the rest of a society. Shifting more of the fairy godmothers from the poorest countries to the richest can be cast in various lights. It appeals to business as a cheap supply of talent. It appeals to economists as efficient, since the godmothers are indeed more productive in the rich world than the poor. (Unsurprisingly, our abundance of capital and skills raises their productivity.) It appeals to libertarians as freeing human choice from the deadening weight of bureaucratic control. At the more radical end of this spectrum, aficionados of Ayn Rand will see it as the triumphant release of the strong minority from the clutches of the weak majority: “migrants shrugged.”

Many on the left, for their part, don’t like to recognize that we’re taking away fairy godmothers. They prefer to believe that they’re helping poor people flee difficult situations at home. But we might be feeding a vicious circle, in which home gets worse precisely because the fairy godmothers leave. Humanitarians become caught up trying to help individuals, and therefore miss the larger implications: There are poor people, and there are poor societies. An open door for the talented would help Facebook’s bottom line, but not the bottom billion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/op..._r=1&src=recg&




Paul Collier is a professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, and the author, most recently, of “Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World.”

Originally Posted by Mayday

The migration that research shows is unambiguously beneficial is the kind in which young people travel to democracies like America for higher education and then go home. Not only do these young people bring back valuable skills directly learned in the classroom; they bring back political and social attitudes that they have assimilated from their classmates. Their skills raise the productivity of the unskilled majority, and their attitudes accelerate democratization.

For example, global data on students from poor countries who have studied abroad since 1950 shows that those who went to democracies accelerated political liberalization in their home societies out of all proportion to their numbers.

China and India, with their low rates of emigration and high rates of return, have dominated global thinking about how migration affects countries of origin. But the core development challenge is now whether the poor, small societies can catch up. Unlike China and India, they have too much emigration. They can do little about it, but we can do quite a lot: Their emigration rates are set by our immigration policies.

IMO this info should be part of every patriot's knowledge base. The Zuckerbergs of this world like to say that they fear our missing out on a potential innovator. Well, I guess Zuckerberg et. al. forgot that we can always invest in companies or even buy them outright, just as we now already do in our tech industry. There is absolutely no need for us to pay huge numbers of foreigners to colonize us, when our own people still need jobs.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade