by Suketu Mehta
This is true even in non-Western countries. A provocative 2014 article in The New Republic argues that global inequality would be sharply reduced if only the Western countries became more like the Gulf countries. The inequality in the UAE is vast: 85 percent of the population, who are resident foreigners, live on under $5,000 a year; their Emirati overlords make over $300,000 a year, “greater economic inequality than existed even in Apartheid South Africa or the antebellum South.”
But, as the law professor Eric Posner and the Microsoft researcher Glen Weyl point out, the migrants make five times as much as they might in their home countries, even as they are being stripped of their dignity. By allowing in workers from the poorest countries, the Gulf nations get cheap maids, construction workers, and prostitutes; and also do more for the poor nations than the foreign-aid programs of the rich nations, because of the volume of remittances the migrants send back. The countries of the Gulf do not demand—in fact, actively discourage—assimilation. You can be who you are, work—however degrading the work conditions may be—make money, and go back; or stay and have children, who will never be citizens. You will always be inferior to the Emiratis, who can always go straight to the front of a line in a supermarket or bank, but your family back home will live in dignity, even if you don’t.
* * *
Migrants are the creators of some of the biggest and most liquid capital flows anywhere. They send back some $600 billion in remittances every year, which amounts to three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all trade barriers, four times more than all the foreign aid, and 100 times the amount of all debt relief.
Migrants from poor countries alone sent $481 billion in remittances to the global south in 2017, mostly in $200 and $300 payments, which make up an average of 60 percent of the family income back home. Almost half of this—$240 billion—is sent to people in poor rural areas. But this is almost certainly an underestimate, because many migrants carry money back in cash or use unofficial networks to transfer it, rather than using banks or Western Union.
Between 2015 and 2030, remittances sent to developing countries are projected to be over $6.5 trillion. With each year, migrants send even more back. Over the past decade, while migration from the developing countries has increased by 28 percent, remittances have risen by 51 percent.
For many migrants, the reason they moved was not to enrich themselves but to support those left behind. Ronaldo, the middle-aged Mexican deportee whom I met in Tijuana, told me that most of what he did in the United States was work so that he could send money back to his grandmother, whom he was closer to than his mother and refers to as Mom. “I sent one hundred dollars every week to my mom until the day she died,” he said with some pride. He lived every week on the hundred dollars he had left over. His grandmother kept saying, “Come on! Come back! No more! I don’t want you to stay there no more! Come back!”
But Ronaldo knew why he’d stayed on in the United States for twenty-five years and led a brutally hard life. “I helped my mother till the day she died. That was my goal. That’s why I left my country.”
Almost one in every seven humans—a billion people—receives or sends remittances. So significant are remittances that the United Nations has declared June 16 the International Day of Family Remittances. In the Philippines, its 10 million overseas workers are celebrated as national heroes. The wire-transfer company MoneyGram even has an awards ceremony, the MoneyGram Idol Awards, during which a group of overseas workers are flown to Manila to be reunited with their families, “to recognize the everyday struggles of families living and working abroad.”
One of the best ways of reducing global poverty is to reduce the fees on money transfers, which exceed $30 billion annually. Lacking the deposits needed for proper bank accounts, migrants pay an inordinately high percentage of the money they send back in fees to places like Western Union. They are disproportionately high for the poorest countries and remote rural areas. But the Trump administration is now considering extorting the poor: it is looking at ways to tax remittances sent to Mexico, to pay for a wall to keep Mexicans out.
It’s not as if the migrants are just taking from the host countries and sending it all back. Total migrant earnings are estimated at $3 trillion annually, of which 85 percent stays in the host country. The money sent home averages out to under 1 percent of the host countries’ GDP.
One of the most important forms of remittances isn’t money, but knowledge transfer and charity. A U.S.-trained doctor goes back to India for a spell and sets up a rural hospital. Muslims in Germany fund schools in Syria through zakat, the charity that every Muslim is religiously obligated to perform. This, too, is a kind of ordinary heroism.
* * *
Because of their history, are the rich countries obligated to take in any and all comers from the ones they have despoiled? There are reasonable opponents of open borders—of increased immigration in general—who are not motivated by white fear or bigotry. Philosophers such as Michael Walzer and David Miller point out that a collective has a right to accept or decline members based on criteria that it formulates. As Walzer puts it, “The state’s right to control immigration derives from a cultural group’s right of cultural preservation.” Miller has a theory of “weak cosmopolitanism,” which holds that while a state should demonstrate moral concern for, say, refugees, it does not have an obligation to let in anybody who asks. Members of a nation who have enhanced the value of the nation through their hard work and talent are entitled to reject migrants from other nations that have not been similarly enhanced.
There are serious arguments against open borders: that a nation is defined by its borders. That the United States is a lifeboat in an ocean of poor nations, and we can’t let too many people into the lifeboat, otherwise it sinks and everyone dies. That, even if we owe reparations to people we’ve dispossessed, those reparations can come in the form of cash payments, or to resettlement in another territory.
But there are no serious arguments that demonstrate long-term economic damage to countries that accept immigrants, even large numbers of them all at once. During the age of mass migration, for example, a quarter of Europe moved to the United States—and the United States survived, and thrived. A world with more open borders would have a brief spasm of mass movement, and then migration might actually decrease, because money and happiness would be more equitably spread around, and more people would stay home.
The long-term benefits of migration accrue not just to the countries people are migrating from (in the form of remittances), but also to the countries they’re migrating to, and not just because immigrants work harder. (Migrants are 3 percent of the world’s population but contribute 9 percent of its GDP.) Yet few people think of the long term when they see a sudden mass of foreigners at their borders.
To avoid paying the “migration tax,” and not be swamped by migrants from the countries they’ve ruined, the rich countries should, for their own good, be nicer to other countries. They should stop propping up dictators. They should keep a check on their own corporations, stop them from amassing profits through bribing local officials, stop them from starting polluting factories and mines. They should make sure that trade is more equitable.
You want to go in and start a war that costs, according to The Lancet, six hundred thousand Iraqi deaths? Okay, the consequence should be that you’ll be taxed; you’ll have to let into your country an equal number of living persons—six hundred thousand Iraqis. For each person that you kill on an overseas adventure, you give one person a chance at a new life. If implemented, this would very rapidly lead to better international behavior on the part of powerful countries. No more savage and unnecessary wars, because the bill in terms of migrants from the devastated country would be prohibitive.
The question of what is good immigration policy for America as a whole is separate from what is just and moral for the world and its peoples whose destiny America, past and present, has affected. It may make sense for America to let in
more skilled Indians and fewer unskilled Latinos; but America has hurt Latinos much more than it has hurt Indians. America owes them more, and so it should open its doors more to them. History is not “bunk” in the words of that famous American and anti-Semite Henry Ford. History is what has happened and can never un-happen; history is happening right now. Attention needs to be paid.
* * *
The whole system of visas and borders is less than a hundred years old; it only came into force in most places after World War II. Why not reclaim the right to travel, the right to migrate?
It is every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans and Britons in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian embassy, begging for a residence visa. My mentor, the distinguished Kannada-language writer U. R. Ananthamurthy, was once invited to Norway to give a talk at a literary festival. But the Norwegian government wouldn’t give him a visa until the last minute, demanding that he produce testimonials and bank statements and evidence that he wasn’t going to stay in the country. When he finally got to Oslo, the Indian ambassador threw a party for him.
“Is it easy for Norwegians to get an Indian visa?” Ananthamurthy asked the ambassador.
“Oh, yes, we make it really easy for them.”
“Why should it be easy?” my mentor demanded. “Make it difficult!”
* * *
Perhaps the most selfish reason that Americans or Europeans should keep their borders permeable is that someday soon—or even today—the traffic of people in search of economic opportunity might reverse. The fiercest debate that is raging in the nation these days is about immigration into America—whether it takes jobs away from people already here. But maybe one solution is emigration from America. Today, there are 9 million Americans living abroad, not counting those in the military—up from 4 million in 1999. In the twenty-first century, America’s greatest export could be … Americans.
Just as India’s greatest export has long been Indians. In 1990, fewer than 7 million Indians lived overseas. By 2017, more than 17 million did. When my grandfather was sixteen, he had to support his five younger siblings in a village in Gujarat. So, in 1936, his father sent him to Nairobi, to join his uncle’s accounting office. In turn, his children moved, to America, to England, to Australia, going where the work took them, and it wasn’t easy for them either. In the 1970s, my father stood for nine hours a day at the Diamond Dealers Club on Forty-Seventh Street because he couldn’t afford an office. My grandfather’s descendants are doctors, lawyers, public servants, and corporate executives. We kept in mind the lesson he learned at an early age: mobility is survival.
Somehow, Americans have always thought that the rest of the world should want to come here; many recoil at the idea that they should have to go out there, for anything more taxing than sightseeing. The number of Americans working abroad is very low compared to that of other developed countries. A little over a third of Americans own a passport; three-quarters of Brits do, and 60 percent of Canadians. If you were to believe Trump, and even some of the Bernie supporters, you would think that this is because every American has a God-given right to a well-paid job, right here in the country.
The twentieth century was the American century; the twenty-first, not so much. A young person in Denmark or New Zealand has a better quality of life, by almost any metric, than a young person in America. If you’re fortunate enough to live in those advanced countries, you can go to college for free, not have to worry about money when you’re sick, and enjoy two months’ vacation even if you’re only an intern. Part of the reason for this differential is a massive underinvestment by the American state in education, health care, and the arts.
When I’d just arrived at my American high school from Bombay in the 1970s, I was surprised at how ignorant my American classmates were about world history. That ignorance, I later realized, was an American luxury, like a Cadillac, the grandest car in the world in the 1960s. Americans competing with Chinese, Nigerian, and Brazilian youths for the same multinational jobs can’t afford the same luxury.
Americans who work abroad do quite well; American pilots working in Chinese airlines, for example, make $300,000 a year. All around the world, legions of Americans make a good living as engineers, corporate executives, English teachers.
There is much talk these days about the American resistance to losing “home,” and its ancillary concern, the white fear of being replaced, re-placed. I certainly understand why Americans might be attached to their house, their friends and family, their home country. I’ve made New York my home, the last home for those who have no other. It’s a beautiful country, a safe country, and, for most people, a comfortable country. It’s true that we should fight for better-paying jobs at home; companies that are relocating their plants abroad are engaged in a race for the bottom dollar.
But nobody asked my family how they felt about losing “home.” After Trump’s election, there have been endless stories about the plight of the small-town American who’s forced to give up his town, where his ancestors are buried, and move to the cities of the plain, New York or Los Angeles. What they are demanding is the right not to change. They gave the rest of us no such choice.
American jobs are disappearing not so much because they’re moving to Mexico or China, but because they’re being done by robots rather than humans of any nationality. What we need is not a tariff, but training. We also need to gently teach our children: You have a right to a home, but not to a fixed abode. You might prefer to stay in the house you were born in all your life, but it’s not a constitutional right.
Immigrants know this. According to Berkeley’s Giovanni Peri, immigrants are more willing to move to fast-growing, high-income, dense cities than natives are. If the native-born lose jobs, they tend to stay where they are. If immigrants lose jobs, whether they’re skilled or unskilled, they move. Once you’re set in motion, you get used to moving.
As my family’s example has shown, you can leave home and take it with you; find other homes, without losing your own. We had to move because there was no future in rural Gujarat; two hundred years of British colonialism had left the Indian economy in ruins. When we moved, we missed the trees, the language, the spicy vegetarian food of Gujarat; the festival of the winter millet; the dance of the nine nights in the autumn; the sweetened fragrance of the earth after a heavy rainstorm.
Some of it we could take with us—no Gujarati travels anywhere without a stack of flatbreads and mango pickle. Some of it we couldn’t, and so we went back to Gujarat as often as we could, or not at all. My aunt in England, whose family moved from India to Uganda three generations ago, has never been to India and still speaks fluent Gujarati and eats mostly Gujarati food.
Americans are more fortunate; the whole world looks like America now. Americans who emigrate don’t have to go without McDonald’s or CNN, their language, their dress, their customs. When they are abroad, they are much better protected than my family was when we left India. When I had an Indian passport, border officials all around the world treated it like the mark of Cain. After I became an American citizen, I once lost my passport in London; the American embassy gave me a new one in an hour, in time to catch my flight. American embassies and consulates will take care of you, bail you out if there’s trouble; the Indian missions never had the money or clout to do the same for their citizens.
So go forth into the world with confidence, young American! Americans have a spirit of enterprise, efficiency, and honesty that is unparalleled in the world. If you don’t believe me, try going to a Chinese or Indian or Russian government office—and see how an American government office compares.
Some of my former American students are employed in the booming Indian media world, even though they don’t speak the local languages, because they have writing and editing skills honed at NYU. In India, their salaries can buy them an apartment, or a shared room, nice dinners, domestic help. Meanwhile, most of their peers in New York are still struggling in unpai
d internships, supported by loans or parents. The best way to start a journalistic career is to move to a small country and establish yourself as a local stringer for American news organizations who are ditching their foreign bureaus wholesale.
Many of my students have become accustomed, through a lifetime of vacations abroad and study abroad programs, to the possibility of making a life anywhere on this beautiful blue planet. It doesn’t mean they love their country less; it’s just that they see that other countries are lovable, and livable too. A globalist is a nationalist who’s bothered to get a passport.
So go east, young American! You will, literally, live longer if you do. People in countries that have furnished large numbers of immigrants to America, such as Ireland and South Korea, now enjoy longer life spans than Americans, who can expect to live no longer than Mexicans or Croatians. You will also be happier in seventeen other countries, such as Finland, Canada, or Costa Rica, according to the UN’s 2018 World Happiness Report. The United States dropped four places from 2017, because even though the economy seems to be doing well, life expectancy has declined, suicides have risen, the opioid crisis is in full swing, and inequality is increasing. “There really is a deep and very unsettling signal coming through that U.S. society is in many ways under profound stress, even though the economy by traditional measures is doing fine,” one of the report’s authors, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, said in an interview with The New York Times. “The trends are not good, and the comparative position of the U.S. relative to other high-income countries is nothing short of alarming.”
