Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World. By Paul Collier. Oxford
University Press, 2013, 309 pp. $27.95.
Let the People Go
The Problem With Strict Migration Limits
By <
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/author/michael-clemens> Michael Clemens
and <
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/author/justin-sandefur> Justin Sandefur
October 19, 2014
Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World. By Paul Collier. Oxford
University Press, 2013, 309 pp. $27.95.
On May 29, 2013, British immigration officers raided the Alternative Tuck
Shop, a café just down the road from Oxford University’s economics
department, where South Asian and Middle Eastern employees serve tea,
scones, and sandwiches. The agents seized two young men, one from Bangladesh
and one from Algeria, under suspicion of working in the United Kingdom
without authorization. And they shuttered the business temporarily, meaning
that hungry Oxford economists would have to walk farther down Holywell
Street for their midday panini.
One of their number, Paul Collier, has just published an extended apologia
for the tight strictures on immigration that led to this raid, arguing for a
global system of coercive quotas on people moving from poorer countries to
richer ones. Such quotas, he writes in Exodus, would serve the “enlightened
self-interest” of immigrants’ host countries and constitute an act of
“compassion” for immigrants and their countries of origin. Collier argues
that at a certain point, immigration begins to harm both host and origin
countries, that many countries are near or past that point, and that even in
countries that have so far remained unharmed, “preventative policies are
greatly superior to reactive ones.”
It is refreshing to see the grand case against immigration served up by
someone of Collier’s intelligence and credentials. But although Collier
styles his book as a balanced review of the research literature, it is in
fact a one-sided polemic that stands mostly outside academic research -- by
Collier or anyone else. Far from advancing a convincing case for a moderate
middle path, the book offers an egregious collection of empirical and
logical errors about the sociological and economic consequences of
immigration. And they lead Collier to propose policies that would greatly
harm, not help, the millions of people seeking to escape their homelands in
search of a better life.
THE MASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Although Collier is best known for his work on Africa, Exodus is preoccupied
with the social costs of immigration for rich countries, such as the United
Kingdom and the United States. According to Collier, “culturally distant”
immigrants threaten “the mutual regard on which high-income societies
depend.” To make his case, he takes readers on a fascinating tour of recent
research into the political economy of Africa, tracing the roots of
modern-day corruption and conflict in the region to centuries-old patterns
of war and slave trading. He concludes, "Migrants are essentially escaping
from countries with dysfunctional social models. It may be well to reread
that last sentence and ponder its implications. For example, it might make
you a little more wary of the well-intentioned mantra of the need to have
'respect for other cultures.' The cultures -- or norms and narratives -- of
poor societies, along with their institutions and organizations, stand
suspected of being the primary cause of their poverty."
Unlike bad institutions or economic conditions, Collier asserts, bad culture
is not just a characteristic of poor countries; it is embedded in their
people. “Uncomfortable as it may be . . . migrants bring their culture with
them,” he writes. For example, he adds, “unsurprisingly, Nigerian immigrants
to other societies tend to be untrusting and opportunistic.”
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.
Another core premise of the book is that diversity per se is bad. In
Collier’s view, Bangladeshi immigrants in London are dangerous not only due
to their allegedly dysfunctional culture but also because they are
“culturally distant” from most people in the United Kingdom. Collier pins
his fear of diversity on one study by the political scientist Robert Putnam,
which found that residents of racially mixed U.S. neighborhoods trusted one
another less than their counterparts in more homogeneous neighborhoods, even
after controlling for poverty levels, crime rates, and demographic factors.
The statistics in Putnam’s study pertain exclusively to race, not national
origin.
Thankfully, Putnam chose not to interpret this finding as evidence in favor
of keeping blacks and Hispanics out of white neighborhoods. Collier,
however, offers this same data on race relations in the United States to
justify limiting the entry of immigrants into wealthy countries. Although he
no doubt opposes racial segregation, his conflation of race, culture, and
nationality invites this analogy, and he offers no reason why promoting
local homogeneity through the use of immigration barriers is any more
defensible.
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.”
VALUE ADDED
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 measure 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.
Collier compounds this error with another one: he confuses labor markets
with the overall economy. In market economies, he argues, the economic gains
of immigration accrue to the immigrants, in the form of higher wages,
“rather than to the indigenous population.” But Collier forgets that the
owners of capital in host countries would never pay such higher wages to
immigrants unless those workers added even more value to their employers
than what they cost. If one believes that immigrants generally do not
displace native workers -- as Collier rightly does -- then one also has to
accept that natives actually receive a greater economic gain from
immigration than do the immigrants themselves. Collier gets this logic so
wrong that he describes admitting immigrants as an act of “charity.” But
employers hire workers to make money, not to do good.
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).
At times, Collier seems to grasp for charges he can level at immigrants. He
complains that immigrants compete for the “glittering prizes” of affluent
societies, driving up the price of luxury apartments in London and capturing
most of the spots in elite high schools in Sydney and New York. But these
claims require readers to buy an odd pair of ideas: not only will immigrants
become a grubbing underclass that drains public coffers, but they will also
snatch up all the spots at the best colleges through their hard work and
intelligence.
MOVING ON UP
The median wage of immigrants in the United States is more than four times
that of comparable workers back home. Yet Collier describes governments’
putting forcible limits on immigration, to the United States and elsewhere,
as acts of “compassion.” This is a strange type of compassion, involving
armed agents turning away desperately poor immigrants and deporting them if
they somehow slip in.
According to Exodus, however, immigrants gain little by leaving home.
Collier supplies three arguments for why this is so -- all of them
misguided. The first is that new immigrants “drive down the earnings of
existing immigrants.” Although this may be true, all immigrants are still
better off for having moved: economists’ best estimate of how much new ones
depress the wages of existing ones is on the order of five to ten percent,
whereas typical immigrants who have moved from poor to rich countries raise
their earnings by several hundred percent. If there is a point at which job
competition among immigrants in their destination countries comes close to
undermining the benefits of moving, the world is light-years away from it.
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.
Collier’s third argument, about the plight of immigrants, deserves more
consideration. He points out that immigrants in Australia and India are not,
on average, much happier than the compatriots they left behind, despite
having seen their incomes skyrocket. “The massive productivity gains from
migration that so excite economists and that migrants capture appear not to
translate into additional well-being,” he writes, adding, “the psychological
costs borne by migrants may well be enormous, wiping out the income gains
that accrue to them.” If future research confirms this point, Collier
argues, “migration would not be an investment, it would be a mistake,” and
governments should act on that information by preventing such migration from
happening in the first place.
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.
LEFT BEHIND
Having dismissed the enormous gains to immigrants as small and possibly
illusory and immigration itself as a mistake, Exodus then asks whether
immigration harms the people left behind. Collier notes that from an
economic perspective, immigrants’ remittances likely trump any downsides of
their leaving. Indeed, the World Bank has estimated that in 2012, the
developing world received over $400 billion in remittances; in a handful of
smaller economies, such as Liberia and Nepal, such flows accounted for over
20 percent of GDP. “We can therefore safely conclude that migration is good
for those left behind,” Collier writes.
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
downsides 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.
Elsewhere in the book, Collier appears to reject the ethics of his own
proposal. He writes that Afghanistan, Haiti, and Zimbabwe would benefit from
coercive policies to forcibly prevent departure but admits that “of course
these are neither practicable nor ethical.” Yet he justifies forcible
restrictions on immigration to rich countries from these same countries on
the grounds that such limits will keep people from emigrating. He cannot
have it both ways; the policy prescriptions in Exodus are explicitly
designed to undermine the right to leave one’s home country.
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
Collier’s foregone policy conclusion is that countries need higher walls.
The main question, then, is which select few to let in. Collier proposes
four criteria: skills, employability, cultural distance, and vulnerability.
With the exception of vulnerability, all pose problems. The first two
criteria suggest that rich countries should skim the cream of the crop from
poor countries’ labor markets -- an odd conclusion for a book that devotes a
full chapter to the supposed deleterious effects of the emigration of
skilled workers from poor countries. Collier fails to explain the
incongruity between his analysis and his policy conclusions, leaving readers
to assume that he has chosen to prioritize the preferences of policymakers
in rich countries over the fate of workers in poor ones.
The third criterion, by which rich countries would weed out the immigrants
who would be unlikely to assimilate, is particularly troubling. Collier
writes that the rules determining which nationals to admit should be
designed to offset the effects of cultural distance “to the extent possible
without transgression into racism.” But such policies have a long history of
exactly such transgression. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 fixed quotas
for immigration in part according to the representation of origin countries
among the national origins of the U.S. population and was intended to limit
the inflow of immigrants who were deemed less likely to assimilate, such as
Asians and eastern Europeans, particularly Jews. The result was that over 85
percent of U.S. immigration slots were reserved almost exclusively for white
northern Europeans.
Curiously, even though Collier admits that in many countries, far fewer
people emigrate than ideally should, he never grapples with policies that
would help would-be emigrants in these places. For every Haiti (with 10.2
percent of its native-born population living abroad), there is a Tanzania
(with about 0.7 percent). There is no reason Tanzanians should be denied the
enormous increases in income, health, and opportunities for their children
that come from moving to a richer country. Yet Exodus never devotes a single
line to policies that would help such groups emigrate.
To get a sense of just how big the gains that Collier brushes aside are,
consider the following back-of-the-envelope calculation. Assume for a moment
that everything Collier says is correct. He argues that there is an optimal
level of emigration from low-income countries and that it lies somewhere
between Bangladesh’s rate of around four percent, which he deems beneficial,
and Haiti’s level of around ten percent, which he deems harmful. Many
low-income countries have emigration rates far below four percent. If those
rates were raised to four percent, that would mean about 13 million new
immigrants (using the World Bank’s definition of low-income countries and
its 2010 estimates of cross-country migration numbers). If all of them moved
to OECD countries, the foreign-born population of the OECD countries would
rise from 12 percent to 13 percent -- the same level found in the United
States and far below the 20 percent share in Canada and the 27 percent share
in Australia.
Those people would move from countries with average annual incomes of about
$600 to countries where average incomes are over $30,000, transforming their
lives and adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the world economy every
year. In other words, even if one concedes Collier’s dubious moral and
empirical claims about immigration, his own analysis suggests colossal
potential gains from new immigration without substantial offsetting harm.
But somehow, in his policy conclusions, Collier preoccupies himself
exclusively with restricting immigration.
FACT AND FICTION
Soon, the young sandwich-makers incarcerated and then deported from
Collier’s doorstep will have arrived in Algeria and Bangladesh, if they have
not already. Some of the effects of their removal have been proved by stacks
of economic studies; others are hypothetical. What research shows is that
the economic value of those men’s labor will decline by 60 to 80 percent or
more, reducing the size of the world economy; the job prospects of British
workers will be essentially unaffected, given how little interest they have
in low-wage service work; the British government will collect less tax
revenue; Collier and his colleagues will pay slightly more for tea and
cakes; and Algeria and Bangladesh will lose whatever money those men may
have been sending home.
Beyond those well-documented effects, Collier posits other, wildly
hypothetical effects: that the Oxonians strolling down Holywell Street will
be able to gaze at one another with more trust and mutual regard, and that
somehow people working in Algeria and Bangladesh will become more motivated
to improve their lots and their countries. British national identity will
also be protected, like an endangered species, for were England to become
“an extension of Bangladesh,” Collier writes at one point, “it would be a
terrible loss to global cultures.” Social science may one day prove all this
speculation right, but not before other and better books arrive to lift the
heavy burden of proof, serving up evidence in place of portentous
insinuations and fearful “preventative policies.”
Collier laments the fact that the immigration debate has been marked by
“high emotion and little knowledge.” That is true, yet Exodus exemplifies
the problem. This book could have seriously engaged with the large
literature on immigration and helped people without Collier’s training and
position think through the complexities of the issue. Instead, Collier has
written a text mortally wounded by incoherence, error, and overconfident
leaps to baseless conclusions.
Received on Sun Oct 19 2014 - 17:48:24 EDT