The Best Provocative, Short Read on Migration And Development

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.