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Resolved: On balance, legal barriers to immigration are
more harmful than beneficial to society.
PRO CASE ____________________________________________________________________________________ 2
SLOGANS PAGE _______________________________________________________________________________ 8
ECONOMIC BENEFITS _________________________________________________________________________ 9
INCREASE LIVING STANDARDS ________________________________________________________________ 11
INCREASE LIVING STANDARDS (TONGA) ______________________________________________________ 12
INCOME _____________________________________________________________________________________ 13
EMPIRICALLY PROVEN _______________________________________________________________________ 14
EMPIRICALLY PROVEN _______________________________________________________________________ 15
OTHER BARRIERS ____________________________________________________________________________ 16
POVERTY ____________________________________________________________________________________ 17
AT: BRAIN DRAIN ___________________________________________________________________________ 18
AT: WELFARE _______________________________________________________________________________ 19
AT: WELFARE _______________________________________________________________________________ 20
AT: HURTS LOW-SKILLED WORKERS _________________________________________________________ 21
AT: HURTS LOW-SKILLED WORKERS _________________________________________________________ 22
AT: BRAIN DRAIN ___________________________________________________________________________ 23
AT: HURTS WAGES __________________________________________________________________________ 24
AT: HURTS WAGES __________________________________________________________________________ 25
AT: HURTS WAGES __________________________________________________________________________ 26
AT: BRING BAD CULTURE ____________________________________________________________________ 27
AT: DON’T ASSIMILATE ______________________________________________________________________ 28
AT: IMMIGRANTS ARE UNHAPPY _____________________________________________________________ 29
AT: HURTS ORIGINAL COUNTRIES ____________________________________________________________ 30
AT: NO EFFECTS _____________________________________________________________________________ 31
AT: POLITICIANS ____________________________________________________________________________ 32
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Pro Case
For too long the immigration debate has been marked by high emotion and little
knowledge. Today we hope to change this by affirming the resolution, Resolved: On
balance, legal barriers to immigration are more harmful than beneficial to society.
To understand the resolution, we think ‘on balance,’ suggests a utilitarian
calculation of impacts, in other words the team who proves a benefit to the most
people should win the debate. So rather than just showing one or two instances
where barriers to immigration are beneficial, the Con must prove that across the
world more people are helped by legal barriers.
On to the best contention, Contention 1: Poverty Alleviation
Subpoint A: The Global Poor
According to the United Nations
United Nations. UN Sustainable Development Goals. Accessed 3 March 2017.
http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/
836 million people still live in extreme poverty
About one in five persons in developing regions lives on less than $1.25 per day
The overwhelming majority of people living on less than $1.25 a day belong to two
regions: Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa
High poverty rates are often found in small, fragile and conflict-affected countries
One in four children under age five in the world has inadequate height for his or her age
Every day in 2014, 42,000 people had to abandon their homes to seek protection due to
conflict
And this doesn’t even tell the whole story because people can still struggle for access
to adequate living conditions even without being in extreme poverty. As a recent
analysis of World Bank data by the Pew Research Center explains,
Rakesh Kochhar. Pew Research Center. “A Global Middle Class Is More Promise than
Reality.” August 13, 2015. http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/08/a-global-middle-classis-more-promise-than-reality/
The first decade of this century witnessed an historic reduction in global poverty and a
near doubling of the number of people who could be considered middle income. But the
emergence of a truly global middle class is still more promise than reality.
Poverty Plunges from 2001 to 2011 and the Global Middle-Income Population Increases,
but Most People Remain Low Income. In 2011, a majority of the world’s population
(56%) continued to live a low-income existence, compared with just 13% that could be
considered middle income by a global standard, according to a new Pew Research Center
analysis of the most recently available data.
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And though there was growth in the middle-income population from 2001 to 2011, the
rise in prosperity was concentrated in certain regions of the globe, namely China, South
America and Eastern Europe. The middle class barely expanded in India and Southeast
Asia, Africa, and Central America.
Even those newly minted as middle class enjoy a standard of living that is modest by
Western norms. As defined in this study, people who are middle income live on $10-20 a
day, which translates to an annual income of $14,600 to $29,200 for a family of four.
That range merely straddles the official poverty line in the United States—$23,021 for a
family of four in 2011.1
And as World Bank economist Branko Milanovic has found,
Sean McElwee. November 14, 2014. Interview with Branko Milanovic is a World Bank
economist and development specialist. He's currently a visiting presidential professor at
CUNY's Graduate Center and a senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center.
“On Income Inequality: An Interview with Branko Milanovic.” Demos.
http://www.demos.org/blog/11/14/14/income-inequality-interview-branko-milanovic
It turns out that—depending on the year and how detailed your data are—some 50 to 60
percent of income differences between individuals in the world is due simply to the
mean income differences between the countries where people live. In other words, if
you want to be rich, you’d better be born in a rich country (or emigrate there). You
can see that in the figure here, where very poorest people in the United States have an
income level which is equal to that of the middle class in China or even upper middle
class in India.
So that's very striking. At least half of your income is determined by where you live,
which for most people is where you were born. Then about 20 percent is due to the
income level of your parents. So, your citizenship plus your parental background
explain around two-thirds or even 70 percent of your income.
Then, obviously, if I had data for gender, race, ethnicity and other things, which are
similarly exogenously “given” to an individual, that percentage would go up, perhaps to
more than 80 percent.
When it comes to enforcing this system and keeping people limited in their
productive abilities the number one culprit is legal barriers to immigration. Barriers
to immigration lock people into unproductive economies for generations with no
chance to escape. An elimination on barriers to immigration would cause a shift in
world economic growth unlike anything we have ever seen before. Migration is
more effective at bringing people out of poverty than any other form of aid. As
economist Dr. Michael Clemens, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development
has found,
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington,
D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn. His research
in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global migration,
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development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard
University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society Prize.
“Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
Researchers have built models of the world economy to estimate the gains from
eliminating various barriers to trade, capital flows, and migration. Table 1 summarizes several recent estimates for policy barriers to trade, and (to my knowledge) all
existing estimates for barriers to capital flows and migration. Even without delving into
the details of these studies, the overall pattern is unmistakable and remarkable: The gains
from eliminating migration barriers dwarf—by an order of a magnitude or two—
the gains from eliminating other types of barriers. For the elimination of trade policy
barriers and capital flow barriers, the estimated gains amount to less than a few percent of
world GDP. For labor mobility barriers, the estimated gains are often in the range of
50–150 percent of world GDP.
In fact, existing estimates suggest that even small reductions in the barriers to labor
mobility bring enormous gains. In the studies of Table 1, the gains from complete
elimination of migration barriers are only realized with epic movements of people—at
least half the population of poor countries would need to move to rich countries. But
migration need not be that large in order to bring vast gains. A conservative reading of
the evidence in Table 2, which provides an overview of efficiency gains from partial
elimination of barriers to labor mobility, suggests that the emigration of less than 5
percent of the population of poor regions would bring global gains exceeding the gains
from total elimination of all policy barriers to merchandise trade and all barriers to capital
flows. For comparison, currently about 200 million people—3 percent of the world—live
outside their countries of birth (United Nations, 2009).
Should these large estimated gains from an expansion of international migration outrage our economic intuition, or after
some consideration, are they at least plausible? We can check these calculations on the back of the metaphorical envelope.
Divide the world into a “rich” region, where one billion people earn $30,000 per year, and a “poor” region, where six
billion earn $5,000 per year. Suppose emigrants from the poor region have lower productivity, so each gains just 60 percent
of the simple earnings gap upon emigrating—that is, $15,000 per year. This marginal gain shrinks as emigration proceeds,
so suppose that the average gain is just $7,500 per year. If half the population of the poor region emigrates, migrants would
gain $23 tril- lion—which is 38 percent of global GDP. For nonmigrants, the outcome of such a wave of migration would
have complicated effects: presumably, average wages would rise in the poor region and fall in the rich region, while returns
to capital rise in the rich region and fall in the poor region. The net effect of these other changes could theoretically be
negative, zero, or positive. But when combining these factors with the gains to migrants, we might plausibly imagine
overall gains of 20–60 percent of global GDP. This accords with the gasp-inducing numbers in Tables 1 and 2.
This calculation suggests a different kind of sanity check on the global estimates: comparing the price wedges caused by
different types of international barriers. If the gains from eliminating barriers to labor mobility are greater than all
remaining gains from eliminating barriers to trade and capital flows, we should expect to see proportionately greater
international price wedges between different labor markets than between different goods and capital markets. In fact, this
pattern is exactly what we see. Typical international trade costs, up to and including the border—not just policy barriers but
all barriers, including distance, language, currency, and information—are the rough equivalent of a 74 percent ad valorem
tariff, according to Anderson and van Wincoop (2004, p. 692)1; price wedges between the same goods in different national
markets are also of this magnitude (for example, Bradford and Lawrence, 2004). For identical financial instruments,
Lamont and Thaler (2003) find that the price rarely differs across the globe by more than 15 percent. Both these wedges
look small next to the global price wedges for equivalent labor. In Clemens, Montenegro, and Pritchett (2008), we
document gaps in real earnings for observably identical, low-skill workers exceeding 1,000 percent between the United
States and countries like Haiti, Nigeria, and Egypt.2 Our analysis suggests that no plausible degree of unobservable
differences between those who migrate and those who do not migrate comes close to explaining wage gaps that large.
All of this suggests that the gains from reducing emigration barriers are likely to be
enormous, measured in tens of trillions of dollars. But of course, the exact magnitudes of the
estimates in Tables 1 and 2 are highly sensitive to modeling assumptions. For convenience, I will refer to the
studies by their initials: Hamilton and Whalley (1984) [HW], Moses and Letnes (2004, 2005) [ML], Iregui
(2005) [I], Klein and Ventura (2007) [KV], Walmsley and Winters (2005) [WW], and van der Mensbrugghe
and Roland-Holst (2009) [VR]. The backbones of these studies vary from a static partial equilibrium model
(HW and ML), to a static computable general equilibrium model (I, WW, VR), to a dynamic growth model
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(KV). Some have two factors, labor and immobile capital (HW, ML, I), and some allow mobile capital plus
third factors and international differences in total factor productivity (KV, WW, VR). Some include
extensions that differentiate between skilled and unskilled labor (KV, I, WW, VR). Differences among the
models’ conclusions hinge critically on how the effects of skilled emigration are accounted for; the
specification and parameters of the production function (and thus the elasticities of supply and demand for
labor); assumptions on international differences in the inherent productivity of labor and in total factor
productivity; and the feasible magnitude of labor mobility.3 Assumptions on the mobility of other factors
matter a great deal as well; in KV the majority of global efficiency gains from labor mobility require mobile
capital to “chase” labor—as described by Hatton and Williamson (1994).
Sub B: Solvency
There are two reasons why this works: the first is simply wages. As Sebastian
Mallaby a Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations explains,
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
To understand the economic stakes in Europe's refugee crisis, start in an unlikely place:
the South Pacific island of Tonga. In 2006, the World Bank brokered a deal between
this impoverished microstate and nearby New Zealand. Tonga would satisfy New
Zealand’s unmet need for fruit pickers by sending some of its citizens to its wealthy
neighbor; New Zealand would provide those citizens with employment. The experiment
increased the income of participating Tongan workers by a factor of ten, an effect
that dwarfed the potential benefit of any imaginable aid program. With this
extraordinary leap in income came improvements in everything from the quality of
workers’ homes to the school performance of their children. The program cost New
Zealand nothing.
There is an enormous benefit for immigrants who are able to get access to higher
paying jobs. Not only does it helps the workers, but it allows them to remit money
back home.
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
A large economics literature has sought to untangle migration’s national and regional
impacts. From the point of view of countries from which migrants emigrate, the findings
are mixed, but probably more positive than most people imagine. For one thing,
emigrants from developing countries remit around $440 billion annually to relatives
at home, a transfer that is three times the size of total official development aid
worldwide. For another, the loss of productive workers may be less crippling to countries
of origin than is frequently assumed. It is often asserted, for example, that Africa’s health
services have suffered grievously from the exodus of trained nurses and doctors from the
continent. But African countries with the largest outflows of physicians as a share of total
population, such as Algeria, Ghana, or South Africa, tend to have the lowest rates of child
mortality; apparently, enough doctors and nurses stay behind to prevent a breakdown.
Likewise, it is easy to lament that Greece’s bankrupt economy has been irreparably
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damaged by the brain drain of educated twenty-somethings. But Greece has an
unemployment rate of 25 percent, and its economy was hardly benefiting from young
people who weren’t working. Migrants, in other words, tend to leave places where
productive opportunities are meager, and even as they leave, enough workers tend to stay
behind to fill those opportunities that remain. Clearly, it would be grotesque to oppose the
flood of Syrians to Europe on grounds of an alleged loss to Syria’s economy.
2nd is that it makes the economy over all more productive. As immigrants come in
not only do they take the low-skilled jobs, allowing the native workers to move to
more specialized work, but they create demand because they’re people and they
spend money. For instance,
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
Consider a natural experiment in Denmark. Starting in the early 1990s, Denmark took
in refugees from countries such as Bosnia, Iraq, and Somalia, boosting the share of
non-EU migrants in the population from around 1.5 percent in 1994 to 4.7 percent in
2008. The officials in charge of this asylum program paid no heed to the skills,
education, or job preferences of migrants, nor did they consider the skill gaps in the
regions of Denmark to which the refugees were allocated. Rather, they settled people
according to where public housing was available and later according to the location of
their relatives. At least two-fifths of the newcomers lacked postsecondary education, few
spoke Danish, and many came from cultures very distant from northern Europe’s. If
an influx of outsiders was ever going to damage a host country’s economy, here
surely was a ripe example.
Remarkably, this damage did not materialize. A 2013 working paper by Mette Foged
of the University of Copenhagen and Giovanni Peri of the University of California,
Davis, considered the impact of this influx, particularly on one of Denmark’s most
vulnerable groups: its low-skilled native workers. Foged and Peri’s study found that the
influx of migrants to Denmark had no negative impact on wages. Instead, as refugees
came in, low-skilled native-born workers shifted into different jobs, sometimes using
their command of Danish to differentiate themselves from the newcomers. What is more,
the number of low-skilled jobs in the economy increased: proof that humans can
sometimes substitute for machines, in a reversal of the familiar teleology. Because of
these adaptations, the wages and job prospects of low-skilled native workers either
improved or stayed the same.
The Danish study is especially striking because it disposes of the standard objection to
the optimistic view of the economic effects of migration, which is that migrants harm
native workers in ways that are invisible to researchers. Earlier studies from the United
States had tracked the response of native wages to migration in particular towns, finding
that wages of low-skilled workers in places with high migration rose roughly as fast as in
those with low migration. Critics of those studies, however, objected that natives who
suffered job losses might move, thereby disappearing from the sample. But Denmark’s
workers are tracked nationally, no matter where they go, as are their fluctuating work
fortunes. The positive verdict from the Danish study is all the more powerful because it
held up even under this comprehensive tracking.
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That means contrary to what the con will say, this doesn’t hurt the native workers.
We see this time and time again in empirical examples like
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
If you ask entry-level economics students what they would expect a large influx of lowskilled immigrants to do to the economic prospects of natives, most will reason that the
increase in the labor supply will reduce wages and increase unemployment, perhaps
especially for poorer, less-educated locals. But professional economists have found
something very different: study after study has shown that opening up labor markets to
more people has not only increased the supply of labor but also raised the return on
capital investments, accelerated economic growth, and thus increased the demand for
labor -- improving the lives of natives as well as those of the immigrants.
Collier deserves credit for embracing the consensus on this question. But the embrace is fleeting. His
argument quickly leaves empirical evidence behind as he speculates about unprecedented bad economic
effects that might happen in the future. He argues that although some rich countries do need more
immigrants, others can absorb only a few and so should impose caps. The tipping point, he claims, hinges on
a country’s population density. It would be “selfish” for countries with lots of open land, such as Australia or
Canada, to shut their doors, he writes, yet justifiable for high-density countries, such as Denmark and the
United Kingdom, to do so. But it makes little sense to use overall population density as a meas-ure of a
country’s ability to absorb new people, since those who immigrate to Australia or Canada these days
disproportionately flock to Sydney or Vancouver, not vacant homesteads.
Collier’s fears that immigration will someday doom dense countries are also undermined
by evidence showing that even massive inflows of people constitute an economic boon.
The most dramatic modern example is the desegregation of South Africa. With the
fall of apartheid in 1994, black migrants who had been exiled to remote areas
flooded to major cities, where they began competing with white workers for jobs.
The scale of this change dwarfed Collier’s worst nightmares of mass immigration to
Europe. Yet the results are a staggering rejection of his simple analysis of supply and
demand. As the economists Murray Leibbrandt and James Levinsohn have shown,
between 1993 and 2008, the average income of black South Africans rose by 61
percent. And white South Africans suffered, well, nothing. Their average income also
rose over the same period: by a staggering 275 percent.
Recent U.S. history is not so different. From 1960 to 2011, the number of immigrants in
the United States rose from less than ten million to more than 40 million, doubling the
foreign-born share of the population. The question of whether this enormous influx of
labor has raised or lowered wages and employment has spawned much debate among
economists. But the distance between the two sides is quite small; estimates of the
cumulative effect of decades of immigration on natives’ wages range from around
negative three percent to positive one percent. No serious economists have found
evidence of the large hypothetical effects that worry Collier.
Considering the damage to the world’s poor that legal barriers to immigration
enforce, we urge a Pro ballot.
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Slogans Page
the immigration debate has been marked by “high emotion and little knowledge.”
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Economic Benefits
The economic benefits of migration are likely to be measured in the tens of trillions
of dollars, far outweighing any other global reforms
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
Researchers have built models of the world economy to estimate the gains from
eliminating various barriers to trade, capital flows, and migration. Table 1 summarizes several recent estimates for policy barriers to trade, and (to my knowledge) all
existing estimates for barriers to capital flows and migration. Even without delving into
the details of these studies, the overall pattern is unmistakable and remarkable: The gains
from eliminating migration barriers dwarf—by an order of a magnitude or two—
the gains from eliminating other types of barriers. For the elimination of trade policy
barriers and capital flow barriers, the estimated gains amount to less than a few percent of
world GDP. For labor mobility barriers, the estimated gains are often in the range of
50–150 percent of world GDP.
In fact, existing estimates suggest that even small reductions in the barriers to labor
mobility bring enormous gains. In the studies of Table 1, the gains from complete
elimination of migration barriers are only realized with epic movements of people—at
least half the population of poor countries would need to move to rich countries. But
migration need not be that large in order to bring vast gains. A conservative reading of
the evidence in Table 2, which provides an overview of efficiency gains from partial
elimination of barriers to labor mobility, suggests that the emigration of less than 5
percent of the population of poor regions would bring global gains exceeding the
gains from total elimination of all policy barriers to merchandise trade and all
barriers to capital flows. For comparison, currently about 200 million people—3
percent of the world—live outside their countries of birth (United Nations, 2009).
Should these large estimated gains from an expansion of international migra- tion outrage
our economic intuition, or after some consideration, are they at least plausible? We can
check these calculations on the back of the metaphorical envelope. Divide the world into
a “rich” region, where one billion people earn $30,000 per year, and a “poor” region,
where six billion earn $5,000 per year. Suppose emigrants from the poor region have
lower productivity, so each gains just 60 percent of the simple earnings gap upon
emigrating—that is, $15,000 per year. This marginal gain shrinks as emigration proceeds,
so suppose that the average gain is just $7,500 per year. If half the population of the poor
region emigrates, migrants would gain $23 tril- lion—which is 38 percent of global GDP.
For nonmigrants, the outcome of such a wave of migration would have complicated
effects: presumably, average wages would rise in the poor region and fall in the rich
region, while returns to capital rise in the rich region and fall in the poor region. The net
effect of these other changes could theoretically be negative, zero, or positive. But when
combining these factors with the gains to migrants, we might plausibly imagine overall
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gains of 20–60 percent of global GDP. This accords with the gasp-inducing numbers in
Tables 1 and 2.
This calculation suggests a different kind of sanity check on the global estimates:
comparing the price wedges caused by different types of international barriers. If the
gains from eliminating barriers to labor mobility are greater than all remaining gains from
eliminating barriers to trade and capital flows, we should expect to see proportionately
greater international price wedges between different labor markets than between different
goods and capital markets. In fact, this pattern is exactly what we see. Typical
international trade costs, up to and including the border—not just policy barriers but all
barriers, including distance, language, currency, and information—are the rough
equivalent of a 74 percent ad valorem tariff, according to Anderson and van Wincoop
(2004, p. 692)1; price wedges between the same goods in different national markets are
also of this magnitude (for example, Bradford and Lawrence, 2004). For identical
financial instruments, Lamont and Thaler (2003) find that the price rarely differs
across the globe by more than 15 percent. Both these wedges look small next to the
global price wedges for equivalent labor. In Clemens, Montenegro, and Pritchett (2008),
we document gaps in real earnings for observably identical, low-skill workers
exceeding 1,000 percent between the United States and countries like Haiti, Nigeria,
and Egypt.2 Our analysis suggests that no plausible degree of unobservable differences
between those who migrate and those who do not migrate comes close to explaining
wage gaps that large.
All of this suggests that the gains from reducing emigration barriers are likely to be
enormous, measured in tens of trillions of dollars. But of course, the exact magnitudes
of the estimates in Tables 1 and 2 are highly sensitive to modeling assumptions. For
convenience, I will refer to the studies by their initials: Hamilton and Whalley (1984)
[HW], Moses and Letnes (2004, 2005) [ML], Iregui (2005) [I], Klein and Ventura (2007)
[KV], Walmsley and Winters (2005) [WW], and van der Mensbrugghe and Roland-Holst
(2009) [VR]. The backbones of these studies vary from a static partial equilibrium model
(HW and ML), to a static computable general equilibrium model (I, WW, VR), to a
dynamic growth model (KV). Some have two factors, labor and immobile capital (HW,
ML, I), and some allow mobile capital plus third factors and international differences in
total factor productivity (KV, WW, VR). Some include extensions that differentiate
between skilled and unskilled labor (KV, I, WW, VR). Differences among the models’
conclusions hinge critically on how the effects of skilled emigration are accounted for;
the specification and parameters of the production function (and thus the elasticities of
supply and demand for labor); assumptions on international differences in the inherent
productivity of labor and in total factor productivity; and the feasible magnitude of labor
mobility.3 Assumptions on the mobility of other factors matter a great deal as well; in
KV the majority of global efficiency gains from labor mobility require mobile capital to
“chase” labor—as described by Hatton and Williamson (1994).
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Increase Living Standards
Lifting barriers to immigration is enormously beneficial to living standards around
the world. More so than any other form of increasing GDP. Tonga example proves.
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
To understand the economic stakes in Europe's refugee crisis, start in an unlikely place:
the South Pacific island of Tonga. In 2006, the World Bank brokered a deal between
this impoverished microstate and nearby New Zealand. Tonga would satisfy New
Zealand’s unmet need for fruit pickers by sending some of its citizens to its wealthy
neighbor; New Zealand would provide those citizens with employment. The
experiment increased the income of participating Tongan workers by a factor of ten,
an effect that dwarfed the potential benefit of any imaginable aid program. With
this extraordinary leap in income came improvements in everything from the
quality of workers’ homes to the school performance of their children. The program
cost New Zealand nothing.
As in Tonga, so in Europe and across the world: the cross-border movement of
people can boost prosperity more powerfully than other forms of globalization.
Trade liberalization can expand countries’ output by a few percentage points—worth
having, to be sure, but generally not transformative. International capital flows can in
principle improve the allocation of the world’s savings, but they can also misfire,
triggering crises. Migration, in contrast, can generate vast increases in living
standards. “The gains to eliminating [migration] barriers amount to large fractions
of world GDP,” the development scholar Michael Clemens has argued, that are “one or
two orders of magnitude larger than the gains from dropping all remaining restrictions on
international flows of goods and capital.”
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Increase Living Standards (Tonga)
Labor mobility between Tonga and New Zealand is one of the most effective
development policies ever.
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. Sep 15, 2016. “The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-clemens/the-south-pacific-secret-to-breakingthe-poverty-cycle_b_8135780.html
It started in the South Pacific in 2006. Tonga is a poor country, with few good jobs and
at least a third of the population in poverty. New Zealand is a rich producer of winegrapes and other fruits, where farm labor is hard to find. World Bank economist Manjula
Luthria and many colleagues helped the two countries strike a deal, together with other
poor countries in the region: Tonga and others would provide the labor New Zealand
needed, for jobs that were the opportunity of a lifetime for Tongan workers.
It was a big blow against poverty. The average Tongan household that participated
was earning just NZ$1,400 per year before these jobs. The average worker who
participated earned NZ$12,000 for just a few months of work. It multiplied lowincome workers’ earnings by a factor of 10. Almost no other antipoverty project
you’ve ever heard of can claim that. Imagine what that did to poverty.
Well, you don’t need to imagine, because the World Bank rigorously evaluated the
impact of the project on families in Tonga. It followed participating and nonparticipating households, from 2007 to 2010, and compared them. The project
caused big increases in subjective and material well-being, durable assets, home
improvement, financial access, and children’s schooling.
The study’s conclusion: This project was “among the most effective development
policies evaluated to date.” And it did that not by taking money away from New
Zealanders, but by adding value to the New Zealand economy.
What’s working against poverty? International labor mobility. So you might think
that projects like this — among the most effective ever evaluated — would be at the
center of the global antipoverty agenda. You might think that the World Bank and other
aid agencies would scour the globe for similar opportunities, as a centerpiece of their
activity. You’d be wrong.
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Income
Immigration has huge effects on income. 97% of the world lives in the country they
were born in and 60% of the variance in their income is based on where they live
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
Collier’s second argument is that “although international migration responds to global
inequality, it does not significantly change it.” Here, his logic is circular, since a key
reason immigration has not reduced global inequality is that it is so tightly constrained.
According to the economist Branko Milanovic, 60 percent of the variance in real
incomes worldwide can be explained solely by one’s country of residence. Yet
immigration is a tiny phenomenon: 97 percent of all people live in the country they
were born in. Collier’s argument is akin to claiming that freeing a slave will not improve
his earnings because while enslaved, he has earned little in the labor market.
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Empirically Proven
All empirics suggest Pro. No historical examples of major negatives suggest that
arguments against immigration are just fear mongering
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
Economics knows little about the mechanisms and magnitudes of such exter- nalities at
the destination, particularly under large-scale emigration. These deserve study. But there
is little reason at present to think that they would greatly alter the message of Tables 1
and 2. First, the literature contains no documented case of large declines in GDP or
massive declines in public-service provision at the destination caused by
immigration. Second, century-old issues of the American Economic Review and the
Journal of Political Economy extensively discuss concerns that any further
emigration might degrade the American economy and society (for example, Hall,
1913; Kohler, 1914). Since then the American population has quadrupled—with
much of the rise coming from increasingly diverse immigration to already settled
areas—and the United States remains the world’s leading economy, with much
greater availability of publicly-funded amenities than a century ago. Third, there are
also many plausible positive externalities from increased immigration. These include
spatial aggregation economies in high-skill labor (for example, Glaeser and Maré, 2001)
and the effects of low-skill labor availability on the productivity of high-skill labor,
particularly women’s labor (for example, Kremer and Watt, 2009; Cortes and Tessada,
forthcoming). Fourth, all serious economic studies of the aggregate fiscal effects of
immigration have found them to be very small overall— small and positive at the federal
level (Auerbach and Oreopoulos, 1999; Lee and Miller, 2000), small and negative at the
state and local level (Congressional Budget Of ce, 2007).
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Empirically Proven
Economists have done little research on the total effects of immigration flows, thus
you should prefer our empirical examples
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
The available evidence suggests that the gains to lowering barriers to emigration
appear much larger than gains from further reductions in barriers to goods trade or
capital flows—and may be much larger than those available through any other shift
in a single class of global economic policy. Indeed, “some big bills have not been
picked up on the routes that lead from poor to rich countries” (Olson, 1996). Research
economists, however, write relatively little about emigration. The term
“international trade” is 13 times more frequent than “international migration” in
all the published article abstracts contained in the Research Papers in Economics
(RePEc) archive. Furthermore, economists focus on arrival, not departure: in RePEc,
“immigration” is four times as frequent as “emigration.”
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Other Barriers
Even after lifting visa barriers, there will still be other barriers to immigration
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
There are at least two fundamental problems with this idea. First, it assumes that skilled
labor emigration is not already taxed. But many skilled workers face binding migration
restrictions that are the economic equivalent of large taxes. The United States strictly
rations its visas for temporary and permanent employment- based skilled migration,
especially from large countries like India, and most physicians from the developing
world face large nonvisa migration barriers such as the requirement to repeat
medical residency for U.S. licensing. Just as nontariff trade barriers have a tariff
equivalent, quotas and licensing restrictions on the movement of skilled workers
have a migration tax equivalent. International gaps in real earnings for high-skill
workers are very high: 500–1,000 percent for some professors, computer
programmers, and health workers (Clemens, 2009). Even if only a small fraction of
these gaps is due to policy restrictions, the economic equivalent of a large emigration tax
is already broadly applied.
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Poverty
United Nations. UN Sustainable Development Goals. Accessed 3 March 2017.
http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/
836 million people still live in extreme poverty
About one in five persons in developing regions lives on less than $1.25 per day
The overwhelming majority of people living on less than $1.25 a day belong to two
regions: Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa
High poverty rates are often found in small, fragile and conflict-affected countries
One in four children under age five in the world has inadequate height for his or her
age
Every day in 2014, 42,000 people had to abandon their homes to seek protection due to
conflict
Poverty doesn’t tell the whole story. There isn’t a global move toward a middle
class.
Rakesh Kochhar. “A Global Middle Class Is More Promise than Reality.” August 13,
2015. http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/08/a-global-middle-class-is-more-promisethan-reality/
The first decade of this century witnessed an historic reduction in global poverty and a
near doubling of the number of people who could be considered middle income. But the
emergence of a truly global middle class is still more promise than reality.
Poverty Plunges from 2001 to 2011 and the Global Middle-Income Population Increases,
but Most People Remain Low Income. In 2011, a majority of the world’s population
(56%) continued to live a low-income existence, compared with just 13% that could
be considered middle income by a global standard, according to a new Pew
Research Center analysis of the most recently available data.
And though there was growth in the middle-income population from 2001 to 2011, the
rise in prosperity was concentrated in certain regions of the globe, namely China,
South America and Eastern Europe. The middle class barely expanded in India and
Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America.
Even those newly minted as middle class enjoy a standard of living that is modest by
Western norms. As defined in this study, people who are middle income live on $1020 a day, which translates to an annual income of $14,600 to $29,200 for a family of
four. That range merely straddles the official poverty line in the United States—
$23,021 for a family of four in 2011.1
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AT: Brain Drain
Immigrants move to find better economic opportunities, but enough people stay
behind to fill the need of their home country.
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
A large economics literature has sought to untangle migration’s national and regional
impacts. From the point of view of countries from which migrants emigrate, the findings
are mixed, but probably more positive than most people imagine. For one thing,
emigrants from developing countries remit around $440 billion annually to relatives
at home, a transfer that is three times the size of total official development aid
worldwide. For another, the loss of productive workers may be less crippling to
countries of origin than is frequently assumed. It is often asserted, for example, that
Africa’s health services have suffered grievously from the exodus of trained nurses
and doctors from the continent. But African countries with the largest outflows of
physicians as a share of total population, such as Algeria, Ghana, or South Africa,
tend to have the lowest rates of child mortality; apparently, enough doctors and
nurses stay behind to prevent a breakdown. Likewise, it is easy to lament that
Greece’s bankrupt economy has been irreparably damaged by the brain drain of educated
twenty-somethings. But Greece has an unemployment rate of 25 percent, and its economy
was hardly benefiting from young people who weren’t working. Migrants, in other
words, tend to leave places where productive opportunities are meager, and even as
they leave, enough workers tend to stay behind to fill those opportunities that
remain. Clearly, it would be grotesque to oppose the flood of Syrians to Europe on
grounds of an alleged loss to Syria’s economy.
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AT: Welfare
Immigrants are far more productive to the workforce and far less of a burden on
public services than native born citizens in the UK
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
For receiving countries, meanwhile, the verdict on migration is even more favorable. A
good example of the benefits is to be found in the United Kingdom—despite the fact that
many Britons deeply resent immigrants. Contrary to popular mythology, the United
Kingdom’s immigrants are, on average, better educated, more productive, and less
of a burden on public services than native-born citizens. Almost half of the Britishborn work force left school at 16 or younger; fewer than one in five foreign-born
workers abandoned the classroom so early. At the other end of the spectrum, 46
percent of recent immigrants to the United Kingdom in 2005 stayed in education until
age 21 or beyond; only 16 percent of native Britons were as well educated.
Meanwhile, just over a third of British residents are either too young or too old to
work and pay taxes, whereas the vast majority of migrants are in the prime of their
productive years. In London, where 37 percent of residents were born abroad,
migrants account for fully 60 percent of the labor force in parts of the city.
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AT: Welfare
Immigrants contribute far more to public welfare programs than they take because
they move to work, and are generally younger than the native population
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
Nor are governments providing charity to immigrants, as Collier contends. Ignoring the
large literature documenting the positive contribution of immigrants to public coffers, he
cites a single study that offers an entirely theoretical model of how immigrants could
strain the Scandinavian welfare state. But Collier’s conclusions require empirical data.
These exist -- although not in the pages of Exodus -- and they suggest the opposite of
what Collier asserts. In a 2013 study of 27 countries, the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that immigrants contribute an
average of $4,400 more per household to the government than they receive in
benefits each year. For 20 of these countries, immigrants’ net fiscal contribution was
positive; in the United States, that figure was around $11,000 per immigrant
household. These numbers should not come as a surprise, since immigrants tend to
be younger than natives, and most of them move to work, not to qualify for benefits.
Their age alone means that they will work longer (thus paying more in taxes) than
natives and will remain healthy longer (thus receiving less in benefits).
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AT: Hurts Low-Skilled Workers
This is a nice story but studies show that it is false for 2 reasons: 1) workers can shift
to work that emphasizes native language abilities and 2) workers compete with
automation so immigrants take jobs from robots, not from other workers.
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
Migrants, then, boost output and are net contributors to the United Kingdom’s public
finances. But do they nonetheless harm low-skilled native workers by flooding the labor
market and depressing wages? At first glance, this is a plausible story: migrants often
compete for low-skilled jobs despite having good educational qualifications. But
studies in the United Kingdom and in the United States have shown that migrants
do surprisingly little to depress wages for low-skilled native workers. One reason
may be that low-skilled natives can shift into occupations that place a premium on
English-language skills, for which migrants represent limited competition. Another
may be that workers compete not just with one another but also with machines, so
that when migrants swell the labor force, businesses spend less on automation and
hire more workers. The supply of jobs thus rises to match the increased pool of job
seekers, and wages remain more or less unaltered.
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AT: Hurts Low-Skilled Workers
The Denmark example shows that native workers are able to shift so that wages and
jobs either stayed the same or improved with the influx of immigrants
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
Consider a natural experiment in Denmark. Starting in the early 1990s, Denmark
took in refugees from countries such as Bosnia, Iraq, and Somalia, boosting the
share of non-EU migrants in the population from around 1.5 percent in 1994 to 4.7
percent in 2008. The officials in charge of this asylum program paid no heed to the
skills, education, or job preferences of migrants, nor did they consider the skill gaps
in the regions of Denmark to which the refugees were allocated. Rather, they settled
people according to where public housing was available and later according to the
location of their relatives. At least two-fifths of the newcomers lacked postsecondary
education, few spoke Danish, and many came from cultures very distant from
northern Europe’s. If an influx of outsiders was ever going to damage a host
country’s economy, here surely was a ripe example.
Remarkably, this damage did not materialize. A 2013 working paper by Mette
Foged of the University of Copenhagen and Giovanni Peri of the University of
California, Davis, considered the impact of this influx, particularly on one of
Denmark’s most vulnerable groups: its low-skilled native workers. Foged and Peri’s
study found that the influx of migrants to Denmark had no negative impact on wages.
Instead, as refugees came in, low-skilled native-born workers shifted into different
jobs, sometimes using their command of Danish to differentiate themselves from the
newcomers. What is more, the number of low-skilled jobs in the economy increased:
proof that humans can sometimes substitute for machines, in a reversal of the familiar
teleology. Because of these adaptations, the wages and job prospects of low-skilled
native workers either improved or stayed the same.
The Danish study is especially striking because it disposes of the standard objection to
the optimistic view of the economic effects of migration, which is that migrants harm
native workers in ways that are invisible to researchers. Earlier studies from the United
States had tracked the response of native wages to migration in particular towns, finding
that wages of low-skilled workers in places with high migration rose roughly as fast as in
those with low migration. Critics of those studies, however, objected that natives who
suffered job losses might move, thereby disappearing from the sample. But Denmark’s
workers are tracked nationally, no matter where they go, as are their fluctuating work
fortunes. The positive verdict from the Danish study is all the more powerful because it
held up even under this comprehensive tracking.
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AT: Brain Drain
If brain drain were true African countries seeing the highest number of doctors
leaving should have the worst health care, but that’s not the case.
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
Human capital externalities are, it turns out, hard to locate and measure in the wild. The
most commonly cited example of externalities that emigrants might impose on those
remaining in the origin country involves healthcare workers. But if human capital
externalities from health workers were a first-order determinant of basic health
conditions, African countries experiencing the largest out flows of doctors and
nurses would have systematically worse health conditions than other parts of Africa.
In fact, those countries have systematically better health conditions (Clemens, 2007).
More broadly, if the external effects of schooling were major and straightforward
determi- nants of economic development, the vast increases in schooling levels across the
world since 1960 would have been accompanied by a substantial rise in total factor
produc- tivity. As Pritchett (2001) points out, nothing like that happened in poor
countries.
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AT: Hurts Wages
Historically wages have not been driven down with large reductions in barriers to
immigration
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
Of course, these elasticities could be different at much higher levels of emigration. The
literature gives no clear support for such a pattern, however, even under greatly increased
migration. In historical cases of large reductions in barriers to labor mobility
between high-income and low-income populations or regions, those with high wages
have not experienced a large decline. For example, wages of whites in South Africa
have not shown important declines since the end of the apartheid regime (Leibbrandt
and Levinsohn, 2011), despite the total removal of very large barriers to the physical
movement and occupational choice of a poor population that outnumbered the rich
population six to one. The recent advent of unlimited labor mobility between some
Eastern European countries and Great Britain, though accompanied by large and
sudden migration flows, has not caused important declines in British wages (Blanch
ower and Shadforth, 2009).
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AT: Hurts Wages
Societies don’t make decisions based purely on monetary justifications. We must
take into account the whole picture
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
Further, even if emigrants modestly depress wages when they arrive at the
destination, this does not justify restricting movement by the standard welfare
economics analysis. Such effects represent “pecuniary” externalities rather than
“technical” externalities. The human capital externalities discussed in the previous
section, along with common examples like belching smokestacks, are examples of
technical externalities. Pecuniary externalities, in contrast, operate through the price
mechanism: for example, my decision not to place a bid on the house you are selling may
lower the price you can receive from an alternative buyer. Pecuniary externalities are a
near-universal feature of economic decisions. In standard economic analysis, they offer
no welfare justification for taxation or regulation of those decisions.7
For example, research on domestic labor movements has found—to the surprise of
few—that movement of labor from one city to another tends to modestly lower
wages at the destination (Boustan, Fishback, and Cantor, 2010), and that the entry of
women into the labor force can modestly lower men’s wages (Acemog ̆lu, Autor, and
Lyle, 2004). However, no economist would argue that these facts alone signify
negative externalities that reduce social welfare and should be adjusted with a
Pigovian tax on those who move between cities or on women entering the work- force,
because these externalities seem to be almost purely pecuniary. Similarly, economists
would be virtually unanimous against imposing a tax on new domestic competitors on the
grounds that they imposed costs on existing firms, because again such externalities are
pecuniary. Of course, this argument need not imply that policies to help low-wage
U.S. workers in some manner are socially undesirable, only that such policies should
be based on concerns over equity or building human capital, rather than on
standard efficiency justifications.
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AT: Hurts Wages
The argument that an influx of immigrants would decrease the wages is an
assumption that isn’t backed up by data. All empirical examples show the opposite
is true
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
If you ask entry-level economics students what they would expect a large influx of
low-skilled immigrants to do to the economic prospects of natives, most will reason
that the increase in the labor supply will reduce wages and increase unemployment,
perhaps especially for poorer, less-educated locals. But professional economists have
found something very different: study after study has shown that opening up labor
markets to more people has not only increased the supply of labor but also raised
the return on capital investments, accelerated economic growth, and thus increased
the demand for labor -- improving the lives of natives as well as those of the
immigrants.
Collier deserves credit for embracing the consensus on this question. But the embrace is fleeting. His
argument quickly leaves empirical evidence behind as he speculates about unprecedented bad economic
effects that might happen in the future. He argues that although some rich countries do need more
immigrants, others can absorb only a few and so should impose caps. The tipping point, he claims, hinges on
a country’s population density. It would be “selfish” for countries with lots of open land, such as Australia or
Canada, to shut their doors, he writes, yet justifiable for high-density countries, such as Denmark and the
United Kingdom, to do so. But it makes little sense to use overall population density as a meas-ure of a
country’s ability to absorb new people, since those who immigrate to Australia or Canada these days
disproportionately flock to Sydney or Vancouver, not vacant homesteads.
Collier’s fears that immigration will someday doom dense countries are also
undermined by evidence showing that even massive inflows of people constitute an
economic boon. The most dramatic modern example is the desegregation of South
Africa. With the fall of apartheid in 1994, black migrants who had been exiled to
remote areas flooded to major cities, where they began competing with white
workers for jobs. The scale of this change dwarfed Collier’s worst nightmares of mass
immigration to Europe. Yet the results are a staggering rejection of his simple
analysis of supply and demand. As the economists Murray Leibbrandt and James
Levinsohn have shown, between 1993 and 2008, the average income of black South
Africans rose by 61 percent. And white South Africans suffered, well, nothing. Their
average income also rose over the same period: by a staggering 275 percent.
Recent U.S. history is not so different. From 1960 to 2011, the number of
immigrants in the United States rose from less than ten million to more than 40
million, doubling the foreign-born share of the population. The question of whether
this enormous influx of labor has raised or lowered wages and employment has spawned
much debate among economists. But the distance between the two sides is quite small;
estimates of the cumulative effect of decades of immigration on natives’ wages range
from around negative three percent to positive one percent. No serious economists
have found evidence of the large hypothetical effects that worry Collier.
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AT: Bring Bad Culture
The idea that immigrants bring their countries dysfunctions with them is
historically inaccurate.
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
But if you buy the argument that immigrants come from culturally inferior countries, it
leads to some strange historical conclusions. For example, between 1850 and 1913, more
than a fifth of the populations of Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom emigrated en
masse, landing in countries with wages several times higher, such as Argentina and
Canada. Yet it would be difficult to claim that the United Kingdom and Scandinavia
possessed broken social models at the time or that immigrants from these places infected
their adopted countries with dysfunction they brought from home.
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AT: Don’t assimilate
Not only do immigrants benefit societies and neighborhoods, they are assimilating
faster than ever before
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
In fact, immigration has been widely shown to have many positive effects. For example,
economists have found that crime is significantly lower in the English and Welsh
neighborhoods in the United Kingdom with the largest immigrant inflows and that
immigration raises local property values in Spain and the United States. But Collier
makes no mention of such research.
Nor does he account for the evidence that undermines his assertion that “culturally
distant” immigrants from poor countries fail to assimilate in rich countries. And such
evidence is abundant. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, has
compiled an “assimilation index” of immigrants in the United States that measures
such factors as labor-force participation, earnings, English fluency, intermarriage,
legal naturalization, and military service. After Canadians, it turns out that the
highest-scoring groups come from the Philippines, Cuba, and Vietnam -- hardly
countries with social institutions mirroring those of the United States. Indeed, as
U.S. immigration has accelerated, so has integration: the institute’s researchers
found that “immigrants of the past quarter-century have assimilated more rapidly
than their counterparts of a century ago, even though they are more distinct from
the native population upon arrival.”
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AT: Immigrants are Unhappy
Their logic is flawed. People should be free to make their own choices about their
happiness
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
This reasoning is bizarre. Using the same logic, one could make the case for barring
mothers from working outside the home, noting, accurately, that women with
children who work report more sadness and stress than those who do not work. To
be blunt: polls showing that immigrants are no happier after leaving home do not
justify taking away people’s right to move freely.
Yet the survey evidence Collier cites does reveal a dark side to immigration. In many
countries, especially in the Persian Gulf, immigrant workers enjoy few legal protections,
have their passports seized by their employers, and are locked into a single company,
making them easy targets for exploitation. Collier recognizes the risks that immigrants of
precarious legal status face and makes a persuasive case for granting legal amnesty to
undocumented workers in rich countries. That conclusion is correct and should be
extended further: aiding the victims, not punishing them with quotas and
deportations, is the right response to abuse in the labor market.
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AT: Hurts Original Countries
There is no evidence to support the argument that forcing people to remain in their
countries will make their countries more productive. People choose to flee countries
like Haiti BECAUSE they can’t be more productive
Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur. Jan/Feb 2014. Michael Clemens is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Justin Sandefur is a Research Fellow at
the Center for Global Development. “Let the People Go: The Problem With Strict
Migration Limits.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/reviewessay/2013-12-16/let-people-go
But once again, Collier is not satisfied to let historical experience guide policy. He
speculates that increased emigration from poor countries could someday prove harmful
and concludes that rich governments should cap immigration as an act of compassion. In
making that argument, Collier first claims that retaining skilled and motivated workers is
necessary to boost the economic prospects of those who do not emigrate, but his policy
recommendation rests on a fundamentally different claim: that blocking immigration will
lead to economic development in the countries immigrants leave. He offers no evidence
to support this claim, because he cannot: there is no country, region, district, or city on
earth where coercive policies to restrict departure have been shown to trigger
economic growth.
Consider Haiti, which Collier offers as the quintessential case study of the down-sides to
emigration, since the country “has lost around 85 percent of its educated people.” In fact,
the true figure is closer to 75 percent; Collier inappropriately counts university-educated
Haitians who left as children and were educated abroad. The bigger problem with this
example, however, is his logical leap. It is obviously true that if Haiti is to have a
twenty-first-century economy, it will need to convince skilled workers not to leave.
But it is wrong to slip from that claim to a different one, for which there is no
evidence: that if skilled people born in Haiti were coerced into staying there against
their will, because of immigration caps abroad, then the country’s economy would
modernize. Eighty percent of Haitians who earn more than $10 per day live in the
United States, not Haiti. In other words, emigration is the main way to escape
poverty in Haiti. Yet Collier would deny poor Haitians this opportunity on the baseless
grounds that forcing them to remain in Haiti will cause the country to prosper.
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AT: No effects
Tens of millions of people from low-income countries would permanently move
given the opportunity
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in
Washington, D.C. and a research fellow at IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.
His research in peer-reviewed academic journals focuses on the economics of global
migration, development, and foreign assistance. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society
Prize. “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of
Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 83–106.
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender
for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Yet
the effects of these distortions are little studied in economics. Migration economics has
focused elsewhere—on immigration, how the movement of people affects the economies
that receive migrants—while the effects of emigration go relatively neglected.
Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those
countries but cannot. The Gallup World Poll finds that more than 40 percent of
adults in the poorest quartile of countries “would like to move permanently to
another country” if they had the opportunity, including 60 percent or more of adults
in Guyana and Sierra Leone (Pelham and Torres, 2008; Torres and Pelham, 2008).
Emigration is constrained by many forces, including credit constraints and limited
information at the origin (Hatton and Williamson, 2006). However, policy barriers in
the destination countries surely play a major role in constraining emigration. The
size of these constraints is apparent in the annual U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery, which
allocates permanent emigration slots mainly to developing countries. In fiscal year 2010,
this lottery had 13.6 million applications for 50,000 visas (U.S. Department of State,
2011)—272 applicants per slot. Many other potential destinations, such as Japan, restrict
migration more than the United States.
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AT: Politicians
Politicians aren’t looking at the big picture. They only look out for national
interests.
Sebastian Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Sept 28, 2015. “How to Understand the Economic Impact
of Migration.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-09-28/net-benefits
If the gains from migration are so vast, why do political leaders tend to resist new
arrivals? The answer lies in the distribution of these gains, the lion’s share of which
accrues to the migrants. If a cabdriver from Lima moves to New York, for instance, his
skills will remain unchanged, but his income will shoot up dramatically. Yet the
economic consequences for New York and for its native-born cabdrivers will not be
immediately obvious, and the impact of the migrant’s new job on the Peruvian economy
will be hard to assess.
Seen from the standpoint of global welfare, in other words, migration offers a clear
win. But politicians speak for national and sometimes regional interests, not for the
global commons. It is perhaps for this reason that European leaders have struggled to
respond to a crisis that, properly managed, could greatly increase the global total of wellbeing.
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