EXODUS
Also by Paul Collier
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It
The Plundered Planet: Why We Must—and How We Can—Manage
Nature for Global Prosperity
Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
Exodus
How Migration Is Changing Our World
P A U L C O L L I E R
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© Paul Collier 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collier, Paul.
Exodus : how migration is changing our world / Paul Collier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539865-6
1. Emigration and immigration—History—21st century.
2. Multiculturalism—History—21st century.
3. Developing countries—Emigration and immigration. I. Title.
JV6033.C65 2014
304.8—dc23 2013006809
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Pauline, my rootless cosmopolitan
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Contents
Prologue
3
Part 1
The Questions and the Process
Chapter 1: The Migration Taboo 11
Chapter 2: Why Migration Accelerates 27
Part 2
Host Societies: Welcome or Resentment?
Chapter 3: The Social Consequences 57
Chapter 4: The Economic Consequences 111
Chapter 5: Getting Migration Policy Wrong 135
Part 3
Migrants: Grievance or Gratitude?
Chapter 6: Migrants: The Winners from
Migration
145
Chapter 7: Migrants: The Losers from
Migration
169
viii CONTENTS
Part 4
Those Left Behind
Chapter 8: The Political Consequences 179
Chapter 9: The Economic Consequences 195
Chapter 10: Left Behind? 217
Part 5
Rethinking Migration Policies
Chapter 11: Nations and Nationalism 231
Chapter 12: Making Migration Policies Fit for
Purpose
245
Notes
275
References
283
Index
293
EXODUS
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Prologue
HE FACES ME AS I WRITE THIS: KARL HELLENSCHMIDT. No
longer the penniless young immigrant, by the time of the photograph he has a suit, an English wife, and six young children. He looks confidently into the camera, unaware that his family is about to be wrecked by the anti-immigrant racism of the First World War.
Britain is soon fighting to defend civilization from the barbaric Huns.
He is one of them. Civilization, in the guise of the gutter rag John Bull, includes Karl Hellenschmidt in its trumped-up list of enemy agents. By night a civilized mob attacks his shop. A representative of civilization tries to strangle his wife. He is interned as an enemy alien; his wife succumbs to terminal depression. Twelve-year-old Karl Hellenschmidt Jr. is pulled out of school to run the shop. And then, barely twenty years later, another war: Karl Hellenschmidt Jr.
moves home and changes his name. He becomes Charles Collier.
Many of us are the descendants of immigrants. Natural senti-
ments of belonging can easily be tipped into the visceral cruelty of
4 EXODUS
which my family was a victim. But such responses to immigrants are not universal. By chance this year I met someone whose father had been on the other side at that anti-German riot. The recognition that innocent immigrants had been wronged had descended
down his family as it has down mine.
My grandfather migrated from a poverty-stricken village in Germany, Ernsbach, to what was then the most prosperous city in
Europe: Bradford. That move, not just country to country but village to city, typifies modern migration from poor countries to rich ones. But once he arrived in Bradford, my grandfather’s sense of youthful adventure reached its limit: he went straight to a district already so packed with other German immigrants that it was known as Little Germany. The same limits to adventure characterize today’s migrants. A century on, Bradford is no longer the most prosperous city in Europe: in a reversal of fortunes it is now far less prosperous than Ernsbach. It has remained a city of arrival, and it has remained a city of tensions. Elected by immigrant votes, Britain’s only member of Parliament who belongs to the Respect Party, essentially a party of Islamic extremists, is from Bradford. This time, some of the immigrants really are enemy agents: four of them committed the terrorist suicide bombings that killed fifty-seven people in London.
Immigrants can be perpetrators of visceral cruelty as well as its victims.
This book is in part a continuation of my work on the poorest societies—the bottom billion. People’s struggle to migrate from these countries to the rich West is both of professional and personal moment. It is a difficult but important question whether the resulting exodus is beneficial or harmful to those left behind. These are the poorest societies on earth, and yet the West’s policies on immigration create effects on them that are both inadvertent and unrecognized. We should at least be aware of what, in an absence of
PROLOGUE
5
mind, we are doing to these societies. I also see my friends torn between their duty to remain home and their duty to make the most of opportunities.
But the book is also a critique of the prevailing opinion among liberal thinkers, a group of which I am a member, that modern Western societies should embrace a postnational future. In view of my own family circumstances, I might be expected to be an
enthusiast for that new orthodoxy. At borders we present three di
fferent passports: I am English, Pauline is Dutch but brought up in Italy, while Daniel, born in the United States, proudly sports his American passport. My nephews are Egyptian, their mother is Irish. This book, like my previous ones, is written in France. If ever there was a postnational family, mine is surely it.
But what if everyone did that? Suppose that international migration were to become sufficiently common as to dissolve the meaning of national identity: societies really became postnational. Would this matter? I think it would matter a great deal. Lifestyles such as that of my family are dependent, and potentially parasitic, on those whose identity remains rooted, thereby providing us with the viable societies among which we choose. In the countries on which I work—the multicultural societies of Africa—the adverse consequences of weak national identity are apparent. The rare great leaders such as Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, have struggled to forge a common identity among their people. But is national identity not toxic? Does it not lead back to that anti-Hun riot? Or worse: Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s preeminent leader, has voiced fears that a revival of nationalism would risk a return not just to race riots but to war. I recognize that in espousing the value of national identity I must credibly allay these fears.
Even more than with my other books I am dependent upon an
international array of other scholars. Some are my colleagues and
6 EXODUS
partners in research; others I have never even met but can benefit from through their publications. Modern academic endeavor is
organized into a vast array of specialists. Even within the economics of migration, researchers are highly specialized. For this book I needed the answers to three clusters of questions: What determines the decisions of migrants? How does migration affect those left behind? How does it affect indigenous populations in host countries? Each of these questions has distinct specialists. But I came increasingly to realize that migration is not primarily about economics: it is a social phenomenon, and as for academic specialism, this opens Pandora’s box. Surmounting these different analyses was an ethical question: by what moral metric should the various effects be judged? Economists have a glib little ethical toolkit called utilitarianism. It works a treat for the typical task, which is why it has become standard. But for a question such as the ethics of migration it is woefully inadequate.
The resulting book is an attempt to generate a unified analysis of a wide array of disparate specialist research, across social science and moral philosophy. Within economics my key influences have been the writings of George Akerlof through his innovative ideas on identity, and Frédéric Docquier for his rigorous investigation of the migration process, and especially discussion with Tony Venables both on economic geography and as a sparring partner for the
model that is the analytic workhorse of this book. In social psychology I have drawn on discussions with Nick Rawlings and the works of Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and Paul
Zak. In philosophy I have learned from discussions with Simon Saunders and Chris Hookway and from the writings of Michael
Sandel.
The book is an attempt to answer this question: what migration policies are appropriate? Even to pose this question requires a
PROLOGUE
7
degree of courage: if ever there was a hornet’s nest it is migration.
Yet while the topic is regularly around the top of voter concerns, with rare exceptions, the literature on it is either narrow and technical or heavily filtered by advocacy for some strongly held opinion.
I have tried to write an honest book that is accessible to all: it is therefore short and the style is nontechnical. Sometimes the argument is speculative and unorthodox. Where this happens I say so.
My hope at such stages is that it will both provoke and stimulate specialists to do the work that is needed to determine whether these speculations are well founded. Above all, I hope that the evidence and arguments in this book will open popular discussion of migration policy beyond views that are theatrically polarized and stri-dently expressed. The issue is too important to stay that way.
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PART 1
The Questions and the Process
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CHAPTER 1
The Migration Taboo
MIGRATION OF POOR PEOPLE TO RICH COUNTRIES is a
phenomenon overloaded with toxic associations. The persistence of mass poverty in the societies of the bottom billion is an affront to the twenty-first century. Aware of a richer life elsewhere, many young people in these societies are desperate to leave. By means legal and illegal, some of them succeed. Each individual exodus is a triumph of the human spirit, courage and ingenuity overcoming the bureaucratic barriers imposed by the fearful rich. From this emotive perspective any migration policy other than the open door is mean-spirited. Yet that same migration can also be cast as selfish: responsibilities to others in yet more desperate circumstances are being ignored, as workers abandon dependents and the enterpris-ing desert the less able to their fate. From this emotive perspective, migration policy needs to bring back into account the effects on those left behind that migrants themselves discount. The same migration can even be cast as an act of imperialism in reverse: the
12 THE QUESTIONS AND THE PROCESS
revenge of the once-colonized. Migrants build colonies in host countries that divert resources from, compete with, and undermine the values of the indigenous poor. From this emotive perspective, migration policy needs to protect those who remain in place. Migration is emotive, but emotive reactions to presumed effects could drive policy in any direction.
Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed. The movement of people from poor countries to rich ones is a simple economic process, but its effects are complex. Public policy on migration needs to come to terms with this complexity. Currently, policies toward migration vary enormously, both in countries of origin and host countries. Some governments of countries of origin actively promote emigration and have official programs maintaining connections with their diasporas, whereas others restrict exits and regard their diasporas as opponents. Host countries vary enormously in the overall rate of immigration they permit, from Japan, which has become one of the richest societies on earth while
remaining completely closed to immigrants, to Dubai, which has also become one of the richest societies on earth by means of immigration so rapid that its resident population is now 95 percent non-indigenous. They vary in how selective they are in the composition of migration, with Australia and Canada being much more educationally demanding than America, which is in turn more demanding than Europe. They vary in the rights of migrants once in the country, from granting them legal equality with the indigenous, including the right to bring in relatives, to being contract workers, subject to repatriation and without any of the rights of citizens.
They vary in the obligations of migrants, from being directed to live in particular locations and required to learn the local language, to being free to congregate in own-language clusters. They vary in whether assimilation should be encouraged or cultural differences
THE MIGRATION TABOO 13
preserved. I can think of no other area of public policy where differences are so pronounced. Does this diversity of policy reflect sophisticated responses to differences in circumstances? I doubt it.
Rather, I suspect that the vagaries of making policy on migration reflect a toxic context of high emotion and little knowledge.
Migration policy has been fought over using competing values
rather than competing evidence. Values can determine analysis in both a good sense and a bad sense. The good sense is that until we have resolved our values, it is not possible to make normative assessments, whether concerning migration or anything else. But ethics also determines analysis in a bad sense. In a revealing new study, the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt demonstra
tes that although
people’s moral values differ, they tend to cluster into two groups. 1
Devastatingly, he shows that depending upon the cluster of values to which people belong their moral judgment on particular issues shapes their reasoning, rather than the other way round. Reasons purport to justify and explain judgments. But in fact, we grasp at reasons and pull them into service to legitimize judgments that we have already made on the basis of our moral tastes. On no significant issue is all the evidence exclusively lined up on only one side of the argument: it certainly isn’t on migration. Our ethics determine the reasoning and evidence that we are prepared to accept.
We give credence to the flimsiest of straws in the wind that are aligned with our values, while dismissing opposing evidence with a torrent of contempt and vitriol. Ethical tastes on migration are polarized, and each camp will entertain only those arguments and facts that support its prejudices. Haidt demonstrates that these crude biases apply on many issues, but for migration these tendencies are compounded. In the liberal circles that on most policy issues provide the most informed discussion, migration has been a taboo subject. The only permissible opinion has been to bemoan
14 THE QUESTIONS AND THE PROCESS
popular antipathy to it. Very recently, economists have gained a better understanding of the structure of taboos. Their purpose is to protect a sense of identity by shielding people from evidence that
might challenge it. 2 Taboos save you from the need to cover your
ears by constraining what is said.
Whereas disputes about evidence can in principle be resolved by one party being forced to accept that it is mistaken, disagreements about values may be irresolvable. Once recognized as such, differences in values can at least be respected. I am not a vegetarian, but I do not regard vegetarians as deluded morons, nor do I try to force-feed my vegetarian guests with foie gras. My more ambitious aim is to induce people to reexamine the inferences they draw from their values. As Daniel Kahneman has explained in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, we tend to be reluctant to undertake the effortful thinking that uses evidence properly. We prefer to rely upon snap judgments, often based on our values. Most of the time such judgments are remarkably good approximations to the truth, but we over rely upon them. This book is meant to move you beyond your snap
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