Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility

by Lant Pritchett

In Let Their People Come , Lant Pritchett discusses five "irresistible forces" of global labor migration, and the "immovable ideas" that form a political backlash against it. Increasing wage gaps, different demographic futures, "everything but labor" globalization, and the continued employment growth in low skilled, labor intensive industries all contribute to the forces compelling labor to migrate across national borders. Pritchett analyzes the fifth irresistible force of "ghosts and zombies," or the rapid and massive shifts in desired populations of countries, and says that this aspect has been neglected in the discussion of global labor mobility.

Let Their People Come provides six policy recommendations for unskilled immigration policy that seek to reconcile the irresistible force of migration with the immovable ideas in rich countries that keep this force in check. In clear, accessible prose, this volume explores ways to regulate migration flows so that they are a benefit to both the global North and global South.

Genres: Economics, Politics, Nonfiction, Social Science

151 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2006

About the author

Lant Pritchett (born 1959) is an American developmental economist. He worked for the World Bank from 1988 to 2000 and from 2004 to 2007. From 2000 to 2004 he was a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is currently a professor of the practice of economic development at the Kennedy School of Government.

Reviews

[Mic · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew my mind shooting brain shrapnel out of my ears. Rather than write a review I'll let Lant speak for himself:

“World bank study (2005a) has estimated that the benefits of the rich countries allowing just a 3 percent rise in their labor force through relaxing restrictions. The gains from even this modest increase to poor-country citizens are $300 billion—roughly four and a half times the magnitude of foreign aid (pg3)”

“Wage gaps of between 2 to 1 and 4 to 1 between immigrant-sending and receiving countries were sufficient to cause massive migration flows, even with the conditions of transportation and communication in the nineteenth century. The real wage gaps between potential sending countries and receiving countries are much larger today than a hundred years ago—often as high as 10 to 1. These wage gaps create pressure for migration because they are not primarily explained by differences in their characteristics of people. Wage rates are predominately characteristics of places (pg 6).”

“However, if labor demand falls in a region and labor is trapped in that region, by national boundaries for instance, the labor supply is inelastic and all the accommodation has to come out of falling wages. A region that cannot become a ghost (losing population) becomes a zombie economy—the economy might be dead, but people are forced to live in them (pg 7)”

“Let us not be squeamish: The real barrier to the movement of people across national boundaries is coercion—people with guns to stop them. The fact that the coercion is civilized, legal, and even polite should not prevent us from naming it coercion. The exercise of nation-state coercion to prevent labor flows is under the complete and total control of the democratic process in rich countries. (pg 7-8)”

“No one is more vulnerable than a person far from home who does not understand the language and legal system, and who is often outside any social support network (because migrants often work alone) and is seen as ripe for exploitation by employers and traffickers. To be politically acceptable in rich countries, programs need to emphasize that people coming to perform unskilled labor are not making “tragic choices” from economic desperation (as they at times are when migration is made illegal) but are making positive choices in which their dignity and rights are maintained. (pg 12)”

“Nearly all of the earnings gap between workers in poor countries and rich countries appears to be due to their location, not their personal characteristics. (pg 15)”

“The ratio of incomes between the top and bottom countries has increased from 10 to 1 in 1870 to something like 50 to 1 today. (16)”

“The ratio of wages of Salvadoran male workers with a secondary degree in the United States is exactly the same as the average for the U.S. population, whereas it is 8.5 times higher (unadjusted for PPP) than for workers with the same degree in El Salvador. This is just confirming the obvious, which is that the U.S. and Salvadoran labor markets are integrated within borders, so that equivalent workers make the same amount, while they are sharply separated by national borders, so that equivalent workers on different sides of the border can make completely different amounts. (pg 21)”

“Because about the only thing known yet about pro-poor growth is that is it labor intensive, there is obviously a massive contradiction between rich countries pushing “pro-poor” growth via their rhetoric about development assistance while at the same time promoting massively anti-pro-poor technological change via their policies toward labor mobility.”

“I do not ask why people would prefer that people not cross national borders, but rather why people feel that it is morally legitimate to impose this preference. Why is it that people feel morally justified to use coercion to prevent people from crossing their national borders to pursue voluntary economic transactions? (pg 77)”

“So the question is not why is there a complete lack of moral concern in rich countries; rather, the question is how this concern for global poverty is compatible with the view that it is morally legitimate to use coercion to prevent the entry of workers from poor countries into rich countries. (78)”

“Crudely put, most people in most industrial countries think that tolerating excessive differential treatment of people within their national boundaries is “immoral” but have few qualms about the suffering of people outside their boundaries—and think it is acceptable to force people to stay outside. The level of deprivation in Haiti causes almost no direct concern in the United States, but if a Haitian manages to reach the united States, his or her very physical presence on U.S. territory creates an enormous set of obligations and political concern (83)”

“One of the intriguing features of the recent evolution of ideas is that it has become beyond the pale to think it morally legitimate to discriminate against human beings because of the conditions of their birth—except for nationality. At the same time, concern for animals has been increasing. This leads to the obvious conclusion that close animals deserve greater moral consideration than distant human beings,” (pg84)

“The rich world is comfortable purchasing products from people who make very low wages—why not purchase services from the same people at the same wages? Even more telling, people from rich countries travel as tourists and receive services from people making very low wages. So here is no consistent objection of rich-country citizens to buying goods and services from people who make very low wages. The objection is to doing so while the people are physically present in their country, which is extremely odd as a moral justification—particularly when the people would be present voluntarily. This is a truly selfish altruism because it uses restrictions to keep poor people out of one’s geographic, and hence, moral, vision.” (84)


“But this view ignores the fact that moves to these labor markets on the explicit terms and conditions the countries set is an entirely voluntary choice of the migrants (with of course some exceptions), that millions of other Arabs and South Asians have benefitted from access to these countries to provide labor on these terms, who otherwise would have faced even more difficult conditions, “exploitation” if you will, in their home-country labor markets. What could be more acknowledging of someone’s status as a “human being” than to offer them a clear choice and allow them to make it? (86)”

“But any nonmoney indicator of well-being—child mortality, malnutrition, schooling—suggests that the richest 5th of the population in poor countries has a much lower living standard than the poorest 5th in rich countries.” (91)

“It strikes me as remarkable that the well-justified moral concerns of the youth in rich industrial countries for the world’s poor are assuaged by not buying the products the world’s poor produce (for example, the antisweatshop movement). But the same rich-country protestors who want better conditions in sweatshops, buy fair trade coffee, and protest U.S. subsidies to cotton (as a means of changing the World Trade Organization, or WTO, agreements) also do not question that the most benign future they can imagine is one in which the poor must continue to grow cotton in the Sahel (for slightly better world prices). These rich-country youth do not seem to ask why the poor are prevented by the coercion of their own democratic governments from taking the single action that would most assuredly raise their income. (92)”

“Part of this is the idea, commonly repeated, that “open borders” and the “welfare state” are incompatible, which is true. But this has nothing to do with labor mobility, unless one presumes that every person who is physically present in a country necessarily acquires a set of claims on benefits. His is not true. (96)”…

“But this does not mean that a “welfare state” and “increased labor mobility” are incompatible. No one imagines that the welfare state and massively increased tourism are incompatible—because physical presence as a tourist creates no claims on social benefits.” (97)

“Abolitionists in the United States were a small, radical, and many thought lunatic fringe group almost right up until the time they completely changed history forever; and it is now almost impossible to believe that they were the fringe. (footnote says ‘John Brown was executed for treason and then celeberated as a hero within years’) pg 101

“To me, this concern for animal rights seems like the reduction ad absurdum of the view that all that matters to morality is physical proximity. There are human beings on the planet who do not live as well as do animals under the minimal, legally enforced, standards for animals in the United Stated.” (102)

“Third, the antiglobalization movement gives me great hope—although I believe it is almost entirely wrongheaded. The movement gives great hope because it generates political impetus around actions to improve the well-being of the poor.” (102)

“The United States has always had a mechanism for allowing persons of “extraordinary ability” to obtain citizenship (which many argue has been key to the rise of American universities to their global position).” (107)

“… a very strong point in favor of allowing high-skill migration is that is reduces income inequality in rish countries (primarily by lowering the wages premium on skills). But, by exactly the same logic, the departure of skilled labor should increase the skill premium in the immigrant-sending countries.” (111)

“The restrictions about who can work where are based on conditions of birth, not on any notion of individual effort or merit. The current international system of restrictions on labor mobility enforces gaps in living standards across people that are large or larger than any in apartheid South Africa. It is even true that labor restrictions in nearly every case explicitly work to disadvantage people of “color” against those of European descent.
The obvious response is that with apartheid people of the same nation-state were treated differently while the apartheid of international barriers to mobilityi is treating people of different nation-states differently. People subject to the same laws should be treated the same based on conditions of birth. The fact that people are, by whimsy of birth, allocated to different nation-states and hence treated differently has no moral traction. In nearly all modern theories of justice and ethical systems, most conditions of birth—one’s sex, race, and ethnicity—are excluded as morally legitimate reasons for differences in wellbeing, and yet discrimination on the basis of nationality is allowed.
The case of sex is instructive. Tremendous attention is given to differences in schooling between boys and girls, in part because these are thought to be the result of morally illegitimate discrimination. Yet the differences in educational attainment between boys and girls within a poor country are often an order of magnitude smaller than those between boys in the poor country and girls in rich countries. For instance, in India, a country widely known for having a severe gender bias in schooling, the fraction of boys age fifteen to nineteen years in a survey in 1998–99 who reported completing at least grade nine was 44 percent, while among girls this fraction was only 33.5 percent—a shocking and, to many people, morally outrageous 10.5-percentage-point sex gap. But in nearly every OECD country, essentially 100 percent of girls complete at least grade nine—so the gap between rich-country girls and Indian boys is 56 percentage points.
Amartya Sen has popularized the notion of “missing women” in Asia due to differential death rates and (increasingly) sex-selective abortion. Because the child mortality rate in India is about 100 per 1,000 while it is 8 per 1,000 in the United States, this implies that 92 per 1,000 more Indian children than U.S. children die before age five. This means there are 2.2 million missing Indian children each year. However, while the “missing women” is a standard refrain, I have never heard the term “missing Indians” to describe the results of the child mortality differentials between the rich world and India.8 This is not to say that the problem of sex discrimination is not a serious global issue of unfairness. But what gives the sex comparisons such greater traction in the public mind—particularly in rich countries and in the development community—than the differences by nationality? Presumably, there is some sense that differences in well-being between the sexes within a country are “unfair” in a way that the massively larger measured differences in well-being across countries are fair. An Indian girl not having life chances equal to those of an Indian boy is widely regarded as morally unacceptable,
The idea of “nations” that legitimates border restrictions is socially constructed or is an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991). That scholars have a hard time even defining what a nation is (Gellner 1983) makes the idea no less powerful. Nationalism and the distinct but related nation-statism retain a powerful hold on the international system—even are the system. Moreover, the idea of a nation has broad and wide popular appeal. People take it for granted that nationality is a morally legitimate criterion for differential treatment of people. But having a powerful hold on the popular imagination is not immutable—religion, race, sex, and ethnicity were considered legitimate grounds for discrimination for thousands of years.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book convinced me that letting more people in developed countries is the best policy to directly improve global human welfare. It also opened my eyes on how unfair, and also somewhat hypocrite the approach to improving developing economies is in the OECD (i.e. we will send you quite some money which will end up in a very inefficient and corrupt system, and clearly not trickle down to the people, but please do not come to our country even though it will improve your people's livelihood way more).

The article crafts a very careful argument around this point, analyzing all the pros of migration, and what is blocking the opening of borders. It does not try to hide some inconvenient truths about immigration (for example, it most likely reduces the salary of people with the same occupation in the host country), and then proposes pragmatic ways to deal with the blockers of open borders to instill pro-immigration policies.

The book is short, but still manages to craft a careful and thought-provoking argument. This is a must read.

[Henri Tournyol du Clos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent primer on the economics of international migrations is downloadable free of charge from: http://www.cgdev.org/publication/9781...

[Lucas Büarque · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both the moral and pragmatic arguments in favor of a less bureaucratic (freer, if you will) policy towards labor mobility are genuinely thought-provoking and worth-reading. It's important to note that some of the moral arguments presented in this book can be (and are) seen as radical, but it would be absurd to claim that he is wrong ipso facto. Pritchett presents a good amount of data and draws interesting conclusions. It's easy to read and everyone concerned with the topic should give it a try.

[Tallie Hausser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been one of the most insightful reads I’ve ever experienced in my global development studies. It really challenges the status quo of development actors and the number of “aha” moments experienced were insane - it has aged well despite its recommendations for the MDGs and I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in a different perspective on how to diminish global poverty within the existing system.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lant Pritchett concludes “Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility” not by talking about amnesty, but bilateral temporary work agreements. In just 151 pages (available for free), Pritchett not only presents a convincing argument for the reduction of labor movement restrictions, but also thoughtfully and respectfully engages the anti-immigration ideas that keep labor mobility reform off the agenda. While unafraid to voice disagreement with these ideas, Pritchett is careful to acknowledge their political import, and -in a welcomed bow to pragmatism- produces his final recommendations in the context of these realities. This post will be the first in a series to explore Pritchett’s arguments, beginning with an introduction to the matter at hand and the morality of the foreign labor debate.

The great distortion in the international marketplace is not found in trade or capital, but in labor, probabilistically damning billions to lives of poor health, wealth, and education. While it has become easier for goods and money to find their most attractive market, regardless of country, labor laws have made it increasingly difficult for the world’s poor.

At a historically unique time of global consciousness, with tens of billions of dollars spent on development assistance and tens of thousands protesting perceived exploitation of the world’s poor, the world’s democratic powers are making it harder than ever to live and work within their borders. In the 19th century, the wage gap (adjusted for PPP) between Ireland and the US was 2.3:1; today the gap between the US and many countries is three times as great, and the distance between the enterprising foreign worker and the US has commensurately widened.

Pritchett notes that “a recent World Bank study has estimated the benefits of the rich countries allowing just a 3 percent rise in their labor force through relaxing restrictions. The gains from even this modest increase to poor-country citizens are $300 billion—roughly four and a half times that magnitude of foreign aid.” Not only does such reform promise great benefit to the worker, but “the current rich-country residents benefit from this relaxation on distortions to labor markets—so the net cost is in reality a net benefit of $51 billion. It would seem that the choice between spending $70 billion on foreign aid for an uncertain magnitude of gains versus a policy change with a net benefit to rich-country residents of $51 billion for gains to the world’s poor of $300 billion would, naively, be an easy one.”
...
The benefit to the migrant worker is clear, a 2003 Jasso, Rosenzweig, and Smith paper found an increase of $17,000 to $37,989 (in PPP) for the same worker upon moving to the US. Even a marginal increase in migrant workers to industrial countries could have an enormous impact (far greater than development aid) on the well-being of the world’s poor. Future posts will address the obstacles to labor mobility that emerge from the perceived self-interest of the industrial world’s general public and false notions of development. The final post will look at Pritchett’s proposal to reconcile the great potential of labor mobility with these obstacles.

(This is an excerpt from a larger post, the first in multi-post series on this book. I'll link to the complete version for those interested: http://publiusnapkin.wordpress.com/20...)

[Lelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this after listening to Lant teach about the virtues of open borders at the Kennedy School. As a migrant and an aspiring economist I can say this is perhaps one of the most important works ever written on the subject.