Migration: Who Benefits?

According to the Economist ‘s review of Paul Collier’s Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World , we can’t answer the question about whether migration is good or bad without asking for whom it is good or bad. Most of the discussion concentrates on the countries receiving immigrants, but we need to ask about the migrants themselves and the countries they leave behind.

Migrants first: “Migration makes migrants better off. If it did not, they would go home. Those who move from poor countries to rich ones quickly start earning rich-country wages, which may be ten times more than they could have earned back home. ‘Their productivity rockets upwards,’ says Mr Collier, because they are ‘escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.’”

The reason is that migrants leave behind dysfunctional systems and find functioning ones:

“Bar a few oil sheikhdoms, rich countries are rich because they are well organised, and poor countries are poor because they are not. A factory worker in Nigeria produces less than he would in New Zealand because the society around him is dysfunctional: the power keeps failing, spare parts do not arrive on time and managers are busy battling bribe-hungry bureaucrats. When a rich country lets in immigrants, it is extending to them the benefits of good governance and the rule of law.”

Countries that receive immigrants benefit in various ways, but Collier argues that “continued mass immigration threatens the cultural cohesion of rich countries . . . . But a large unabsorbed diaspora may cling to the cultural norms that made its country of origin dysfunctional, and spread them to the host country. Furthermore, when a society becomes too heterogeneous, its people may be unwilling to pay for a generous welfare state, he says.” He suggests that “Immigrants assimilate better in America than in most European countries in part because welfare is less generous there. In parts of Europe it is possible for able-bodied newcomers to subsist on handouts, which infuriates the native-born. In America, by and large, immigrants have to work, so they do. Through work, they swiftly integrate into society.”

For the countries of origin, the results are mixed: “if too many educated people leave, poor countries are worse off. Big emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil benefit from emigration, but the smallest and poorest nations do not: Haiti, for example, has lost 85% of its educated people.”

The reviewer suggests that Collier sets up a straw man because he “”finds endless objections to a policy—more or less unlimited immigration—that no country has adopted. In the process, he exaggerates the possible risks of mobility and underplays its proven benefits.”