A Labor Case for Managed Migration

The last generation has famously lifted millions out of poverty in rising economies such as China and India, but countless millions more lag behind, caught in societies that fail to gain a foothold on material progress. What to do for them? Lant Pritchett, an Oxford development researcher formerly of the World Bank, has an idea in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/global-economy-immigration-before-automation-people-over-robots) He cites studies showing that the default approach–aid programs to the lagging countries–produces scant relief, whereas voluntary migration to better opportunities has a 10X better result. And that’s even when the migrants take the lowly work that is usually on offer to them. So, suggests Pritchett, the same world institutions that try to coordinate relief (and many other global functions, from transport to public health), should convene to offer migratory work passes. The holders would come alone, stay for only a designated time, be protected from abuses, and return to their origins with a nest egg. This is obviously recognizable as a formalization of what partially happens, massively but with great uproar, around the world already. Pritchett makes the standard argument that receiving economies benefit from having gaping labor gaps filled. (He gets sidetracked, as the article’s title suggests, in a riff against automation.) What he does not address is the acute resistance in many lands to having the composition of towns and cities changed by immigration. Perhaps he has too much faith in the operation of his plan–something you might call a humane Bracero program–to see that these visits are solitary and transitory. Human beings tend to aggregate where there’s a better life. But he does make an intriguing point about the currently unrealized potential in so many of the destitute. Consider this: “…the massive expansion of education in the developing world since the 1950s means that the average adult in Haiti today [an extreme basket case] has had more schooling than the average adult in France had in 1970.”

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/global-economy-immigration-before-automation-people-over-robots