Fixing the world, one migrant at a time
From The Atlantic’s “Ideas to Fix the World,” Kerry Howley gets it:
Nothing rich countries can send the global poor—not loans, not textbooks, not fair-wage campaign materials—will boost the income of the average worker nearly so much as letting him walk among the wealthy. Transported from Haiti or Nigeria to the United States or Canada, a low-skilled worker will watch the value of his labor jump more than 700 percent—instantly. Wage gaps of that magnitude have some economists, notably Harvard’s Lant Pritchett, supporting a small but potentially revolutionary shift in the nature of economic cooperation: a global guest-worker program, run by rich countries in the interest of the poor. Every wealthy country would hand out enough work visas to increase its labor force by 3 percent, and the visas would be temporary, allowing the benefits to be broadly shared among successive waves of foreign workers.
Because border control stifles so much potentially beneficial cooperation, even a modest easing of immigration restrictions produces huge payoffs. In 2005, the World Bank estimated that a 3 percent program could yield $300 billion annually for the citizens of developing countries. That’s $180 billion more than what the major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries dished out in foreign aid last year. So while aid is a transfer that leaves wealthy countries slightly poorer, a global guest-worker plan would leave the countries of the OECD slightly better off.
Stunning statistics. Who would have thought that restoring some dignity to fellow human beings and allowing freedom of movement will *actually* make a positive difference. Yet I fear there are still mountains to climb and entrenched ideas to destroy before any real progress is made on this front.
I whole-heartedly agree with the economic basis for the argument…but what about the socio-cultural impacts Geoff? The impact of the waves of people getting a chance to experience “First World” existence only to be shipped back to their dirty, chaotic, unjust “Third World” countries could be difficult psychologically to handle…resulting in even greater dissatisfaction and unhappiness than experienced previously. Not to mention the potential for run-aways, abandoned families, and as for any migrant worker, transmission of STIs upon return to one’s spouse(s).
And isn’t it a little simplistic to say that an increase in income, no matter how great, will lead to improved living conditions? You need not only the education to know what that looks like so that the increased income isn’t abused…but also the resources available to create that better living condition…resources that money sometimes can’t buy….
Just some thoughts.
Thanks Nadim and Miq for your comments. They provide a welcome incentive to continuing to post, even when the events of life seems to colonize every reflective moment.
There are, of course, not only entrenched ideas but entrenched *interests* that maintain what is essentially a very unjust system of international order. Joseph Carens, a philosopher at University of Toronto, has argued that the principles of almost any theory of justice support the idea of open borders. One such theory suggests the following: imagine that you had to create an international migration regime without knowing your own nationality. The system that is just is the one that you would choose without prior knowledge of your social position. It becomes much easier to defend an international system that places high restrictions on some people and virtually no restrictions on others (*only* because of where they were born). South Africa tried to do this within it’s borders and it was called apartheid. Why do we consider it just to maintain a similar system in international society?
Once we accept that a truly just international order would permit free migration, then we have to discuss the very real political barriers to getting there. In the last decade or so there has been a lot of new research coming out showing that more migration tends, on the whole, to be good for sending countries, receiving countries, and migrants themselves. This creates a strong case for removing many of the barriers to migration that developed around the outbreak of WWI.
However, as Miquela notes, sudden and massive migration has social and cultural costs (which are highest in the short-term). The guestworker idea that is being promoted at the highest levels of the UN and OECD (and in the pages of the Atlantic) is gaining currency because it is an intermediate step to increasing mobility in a highly managed way. Actually, Canada runs perhaps the most successful guestworker program. We bring over thousands of Mexicans to harvest crops during the summer months, and then send them back after a few months. They earn higher wages (to send their kids to school and provide better health care to their families), fill labour gaps in the Canadian economy, and bring back income that stimulates their local and national economy. Sure, there is a percentage of those who stay on as undocumented workers, but it’s surprisingly small. Who would want to stay in Canada, constantly fearing deportation, when your family is at home and you have the promise of a relatively well-paying job the next summer?
As always, it is helpful to think about how the principle of the fundamental oneness of humanity can be applied to this case. I tend to think that it should incline us to opening borders.
I’m enjoying this discussion between students of development! I think short-term summer farm workers differ from the idea of a ’3-year guest worker program’ as suggested in the Atlantic article, and share Miquela’s concerns. The potential socio-cultural impacts are real – families would have to be allowed to join the workers, language and cultural adaptation would take some effort and time, and would the rights of the guest workers be similar to their co-workers? Would they have a route to citizenship or always be ‘second-class’? A comparison might be made with Saudi Arabia, which recruits workers for low-skill jobs from Asia, but they are never allowed a route to citizenship. Is that just? Certainly they send lots of money back home, and many other developing world economies already depend on remittances from their diaspora. A better comparison might be the large numbers of medical trainees that come to Canada from Saudi Arabia for 4-7 years with their families, work and train in our hospitals, then return to their countries with a qualification and career. Perhaps the ‘guest-worker program’ could be a ‘guest-apprentice program’ with workers gaining experience and qualifications working alongside our own Canadian workers as equals, but with a requirement to return service in their home country.
Now, that is an aspect of it that I agree more with. To have a system of apprenticeship and learning skills that are actually in need upon return to one’s home is something that benefits the sending society in the long-run, much more than a guest worker program for less skilled labour. Sectors such as education and health care would particularly benefit from having people and their families come over for a period of years on condition of return. It is only just that the borders of the world be open, but is the ‘brain drain’ of Africa just? I’m seriously trying to picture what would happen, if the lines and lines of people I see outside the South African, French, Canadian, and American embassies here praying that this time, they’ll get a visa, just disappeared one day…it would be disastrous. This country and many others would be emptied, and others flooded.
So I guess I’m wondering if it is just to accept the principle of what a just migration system would look like (i.e. open) but not institute it immediately? Is that like the colonizers of Africa saying, “ok, you’re right, you need independence, but we’ll prepare you for it over the next 10 years”?
You know, the interesting thing is that Japan doesn’t have a very welcoming immigration policy but it does have a large apprenticeship program. That’s how most people from the region migrate to Japan — as ‘apprentices’. I don’t know enough about whether that translates into return migration or whether it’s just a legal cover for more permanent migration.
On the subject of brain drain, there has been a lot of more recent research that shows that brain drain actually has negative affects for very very few countries (primarily small Caribbean island states). The reason is that the prospect of earning higher wages overseas is a significant incentive for people to invest in their education at home, with the *hope* of eventually migrating overseas. Since most of those who get educated won’t, in fact, migrate, the country ends up with a *brain gain*. Say, 30% of university graduates leave to work overseas and 10% of these return after 5 years. You’re looking at a gross loss of 20% of the university educated population. But you also have 50% more people enrolling in university because they know that they’ll need an education to succeed overseas. Even though the country loses a share of its university grads, it ends up with a more educated population overall. Now, there are particular problems in the case of doctors and nurses, but that shouldn’t colour our whole perception of skilled migration from developing countries.
Perhaps the idea of Charter Cities could be a useful one with regard to some of the fundamental issues that are talked about when dealing with migration in all its positive and negative aspects.
(see this 20 min video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHBma0Ithk)
Building communities based on positive structures of stability can address many of the negative issues with respect to migration and ‘brain drain’.
Cuba, for example, uses its quantity and quality of medical doctor training and education as an economic trading commoddity with other countries. They trade their expertise for resources.
My experience as a teacher has taught me that stability can be conditioned. Nurture and nature. The potential for good things is always there, just as the bad.
One day a student expressed their general dislike for Swedish laws (my current place of work). During the ensuing class discussion, we covered many interesting topics, e.g. refugees, migration, xenophobia, different legal systems, etc… What we ended on was that the stability of a country depends on the quality of their laws and the actualized ability of the citizens people to live by and enforce those laws. Hallowed or Hollowed, stability depends on the coherance between these two aspects being in sync.
The actualized quality of community structures helps stability, like the coherant architecture of a story, they help individuals build meaning and positive value (that something was worth their time) from their experiences. This, to me, is the central identity of development; it is a quest for stability.
(For a great indirect look at what stability depends on check out Jordan Petterson’s Maps of Meaning
here: http://www.mapsofmeaning.com/).