Paul Collier
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value-based judgments.
Like everyone else, I came to the subject of migration with value-based prior opinions. But in writing it I have tried to suspend them.
From my discussions, migration is a subject on which almost everyone seems to have strong views. People can usually support their views with a smattering of analysis. But I suspect that, consistent with the research of Jonathan Haidt, in large part these views are derived from prior moral tastes rather than from superior command of the evidence. Evidence-based analysis is the strong suit of economics. Like many policy issues, migration has economic causes and economic consequences, and so economics is at the forefront of assessing policy. Our toolkit enables us to get better technical answers to causes and consequences than can be achieved simply
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by common sense. But some of the effects of migration that most concern ordinary people are social. These can be incorporated into an economic analysis, and I attempt to do so. But more commonly economists have been glibly dismissive of them.
The political elites who actually set policy are caught in the crossfire between the value-laden concerns of voters and the lop-sided models of economists. The result is confusion. Policies not only vary between countries, they oscillate between the open door favored by economists and the closed door favored by electorates.
For example, in Britain the door was opened in the 1950s, partially closed in 1968, flung open again in 1997, and is now being closed again. They also migrate between political parties: of these four policy changes, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party are each responsible for one door-opening and one door-closing. Often politicians talk tough and act soft, and more rarely the opposite.
Indeed, sometimes they appear to be embarrassed by the preferences of their citizens. The Swiss are unusual in that ordinary people have the power to force referenda on their government. One of the issues on which people used this power was, inevitably, migration. The vehicle for popular concern was a referendum on rules for mosque building. It revealed that a substantial majority of the population opposed mosque building. The Swiss government
was so embarrassed about these views that it promptly tried to have the result declared illegal.
Moral positions on migration are confusingly bound up with
those on poverty, nationalism, and racism. Current perceptions of the rights of migrants are shaped by guilty reactions to different past wrongs. It is only possible to have a rational discussion of migration policy once these concerns have been disentangled.
There is a clear moral obligation to help very poor people who live in other countries, and allowing some of them to move to rich
16 THE QUESTIONS AND THE PROCESS
societies is one way of helping. Yet the obligation to help the poor cannot imply a generalized obligation to permit free movement of people across borders. Indeed, the people who believe that poor people should be free to move to rich countries would likely be the first to oppose the right of rich people to move to poor countries: that has uncomfortable echoes of colonialism. Arguing that because people are poor they have a right of migration confuses two issues that are better kept distinct: the obligation of the rich to help the poor, and the rights of freedom of movement between countries.
We don’t need to assert the latter to endorse the former. There are many ways of fulfilling our obligation to help the poor: if a society decides not to open its doors to migrants from poor countries, it might opt for more generous treatment of poor societies in other domains of policy. For example, the government of Norway imposes relatively tight restrictions on immigration, but it adopts an aid program that is correspondingly generous.
While the moral obligation to help the global poor sometimes
spills over to views on the right to migrate, a more potent spillover is revulsion against nationalism. While nationalism does not
necessarily imply restrictions on immigration, it is clearly the case that without a sense of nationalism there would be no basis for restrictions. If the people living in a territory do not share any greater sense of common identity with each other than with foreigners, then it would be bizarre collectively to agree to limit the entry of foreigners: there would be no “us” and “them.” So without nationalism it is difficult to make an ethical case for immigration restrictions.
Unsurprisingly, revulsion against nationalism is strongest in Europe: nationalism repeatedly led to war. The European Union has been a noble attempt to put this legacy behind us. A natural extension of revulsion against nationalism is revulsion against
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borders: a defining achievement of the European Union is the free movement of European people anywhere within the Union. For
some Europeans national identity is now passé: one of my young relatives will not admit to a geographic identity beyond that of Londoner. If national identity is best discarded, then there seems little ethical justification for preventing the entry of migrants: why not let anyone live anywhere?
The acceptability of national identity varies enormously. In
France, America, China, and Scandinavia national identity remains strong and politically neutral, while in Germany and Britain it has been captured by the extreme political Right and is consequently taboo. In the many societies that have never had a strong national identity, its absence is usually a matter of regret and concern. In Canada, Michael Ignatief recently ignited a storm by admitting that the long attempt to forge a translinguistic sense of common identity
between the Quebecois and anglophone Canadians had failed.3 In Africa, the weakness of national identity relative to tribal identities is widely regarded as a curse that it is the task of good leadership to rectify. In Belgium, which currently holds the world record for the longest period without a government—because the Flemish and
Walloons could not agree on one—there has not even been an
attempt to forge a common identity. One of Belgium’s ambassadors is a friend of mine, and over dinner the issue of his own identity arose. He cheerfully denied any sense of feeling Belgian, but not because he felt either Flemish or Walloon. Rather, he regarded himself as a citizen of the world. Pressed on where he felt most at home, he chose a village in France. I cannot imagine a French ambassador volunteering an equivalent sentiment. Both Canada and Belgium manage to sustain high incomes despite their weak national identities, but their solution has been complete spatial segregation between the different language groups, combined with radical decentralization
18 THE QUESTIONS AND THE PROCESS
of political authority to these subnational territories. For practical purposes of public service delivery, Canada and Belgium are four states with cohesive identity, not two states without it. In Britain the acceptability of national identity is confused because of the relatively recent multinational composition of Britain from its component parts: nobody in Britain, except for some immigrants, thinks of themselves as primarily British. In Scotland national identity is openly promoted as part of mainstream culture, whereas English nationalism is subversive: there are far fewer officially flown English flags than Scottish flags.
Nationalism has its uses. Its potential for abuse cannot be forgotten, but a sense of shared identity turns out to enhance the ability to cooperate. People need to be able to cooperate at various different levels, some below the level of the nation and some above it.
A shared sense of national identity is not the only solution to achieving cooperation, but nations continue to be particularly salient.
This is evident from taxation and public spending: although both functions occur at many levels of government, overwhelmingly the most important is national. So if a shared sense of national identity enhances the ability of people to cooperate at that level, it is doing something truly important.
A shared sense of identity also predisposes people to accept
redistribution from rich to poor and to share natural wealth. S
o the revulsion against national identity is liable to be costly: leading to a reduced ability to cooperate and a less equal society. But despite these benefits, it may nevertheless be necessary to forsake national identity. If nationalism inexorably leads to aggression, then the costs of abandoning it must surely be accepted. Since the decline in European nationalism, Europe has enjoyed a prolonged and unprecedented period of peace. This association has led politicians such as Chancellor Angela Merkel to promote the symbols
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of European unity, notably the euro, as a defense against the return to war. But the inference that the decline in nationalism has caused the decline in violence gets causality wrong: the revulsion against violence has caused a decline in nationalism. More important, the revulsion against violence has radically reduced the risk of violence.
Attitudes to violence have changed so profoundly that European warfare is now unthinkable.
I will suggest that it is no longer necessary to discard national identity in order to guard against the evils of nationalism. If a shared national identity is useful, then it can safely coexist with a nation at peace. Indeed, the Nordic countries surely bear this out. Each society is unashamedly patriotic, extending to rivalry with its neighbors. The region has a history of warfare: Sweden and Denmark have both had long periods of belligerence at the expense of Finland and Norway, respectively. But continued peace is now beyond question. Nor is that peace underpinned by Europe’s formal institutions for cooperation. Indeed, those formal institutions have inadvertently divided rather than united the Nordic countries. Norway is not in the European Community, though the other three countries are. But of these three only Finland is in the eurozone. So Europe’s institutions of unity split these four countries into three distinct blocs. The Nordic countries have achieved among the highest living standards on earth: not just high private incomes, but social equity and well-functioning public services. The contribution of patriotism and a sense of common identity cannot be quantified, but is surely there.
While the responsibility to the poor and fear of nationalism may both have contributed to confusion over whether societies should have the right to restrict immigration, by far the most potent spillover to support for freedom of movement between countries as a natural right comes from opposition to racism. Given the histories
20 THE QUESTIONS AND THE PROCESS
of racism in both Europe and America it is both unsurprising and fully warranted that opposition to racism is so impassioned. Most migrants from poor countries are racially distinct from the indigenous populations of rich host countries, and so opposition to immigration skates precariously close to racism. In Britain, one high-profile anti-immigrant speech in the 1960s clearly crossed this line: opposing the immigration of people of African and South Asian origin in lurid terms of impending interethnic violence. That foolish speech by a long-dead minor politician, Enoch Powell, closed down British discussion of migration policy for over forty years: opposition to immigration became so indelibly linked to racism that it could not be voiced in mainstream discourse. Powell’s manifestly ridiculous prediction of “rivers of blood” not only closed down discussion, it came to define liberal fears: the great lurking danger was supposedly the potential for interracial violence between immigrants and the indigenous. Nothing that could conceivably awaken this dormant dragon was permissible.
The taboo only became breakable in 2010 as a result of mass
immigration from Poland. British immigration policy toward the Poles had been distinctive in its liberality. When Poland joined the European Community, transition arrangements gave member countries the right to restrict Polish immigration until the Polish economy had itself adjusted. All major countries except Britain duly imposed entry restrictions. That the British government decided not to do so may have been influenced by a forecast made by the British civil service in 2003 that very few east Europeans—no more than 13,000
a year—would want to migrate to Britain. This forecast turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Actual immigration to Britain from eastern Europe in the following five years was around one million. 4 Immi-
gration on this scale, though warmly welcomed by households such as my own who found the influx of skilled, hardworking artisans
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very useful, was also widely resented, often by indigenous workers who felt threatened. While both the welcome and the opposition were manifestly self-serving, neither could reasonably be seen as racist: Poles happened to be white and Christian. A decisive and indeed comic moment in the 2010 election was when the prime minister, Gordon Brown, was recorded by a forgotten microphone following a staged talk with an ordinary citizen selected by his staff. Unfortunately, the citizen had chosen to complain about the recent wave of immigration. Brown was recorded berating his staff about their choice, denouncing the woman as “a bigot.” The spectacle of a prime minister so manifestly out of touch with concerns widely perceived to be legitimate contributed to Brown’s resounding defeat. The new leadership of the Labour Party has apologized, stating that the previous open-door policy was wrong. At last it may have become possible in Britain to discuss immigration without connotations of racism.
But it may not. Since race is correlated with other characteristics such as poverty, religion, and culture, it remains possible that any limitation on migration based on these criteria is viewed as the Tro-jan horse for racism. If so, then it is still not possible to have an open debate on migration. I only decided to write this book once I judged that it is indeed now possible to distinguish between the concepts of race, poverty, and culture. Racialism is a belief in genetic differences between races: one for which there is no evidence. Poverty is about income, not genetics: the persistence of mass poverty alongside the technology that can make ordinary people prosperous is the great scandal and challenge of our age. Cultures are not genetically inherited; they are fluid clusters of norms and habits that have important material consequences. A refusal to countenance racially based differences in behavior is a manifestation of human decency. A refusal to countenance culturally based
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differences in behavior would be a manifestation of blinkered denial of the obvious.
While relying on the legitimacy of these distinctions, I am acutely conscious that my judgment may be wrong. The issue matters
because, as will become apparent, much of consequence for migration policy turns on income and cultural differences. If this is assumed to be code for racism, then it is best that debate not be attempted, at least in Britain: we may still not be free of the long shadow of Enoch Powell. So my working assumption is that the right to live anywhere is not a logical corollary of opposition to racism. There may be such a right, and I will turn to it, but it does not follow simply from the legitimate concerns about poverty, nationalism, and racism.
Think of three groups of people: the migrants themselves, the people left behind in the country of origin, and the indigenous population of the host country. We need theories and evidence as to what happens to each of these groups. The first of these perspectives, that of migrants, I leave until last because it is the most straightforward. Migrants face costs of overcoming the barriers to movement that are substantial, but they reap economic benefits that are much larger than these costs. Migrants capture the lion’s share of the economic gains from migration. Some intriguing new evidence suggests that these large economic gains are partly, or perhaps substantially, offset by psychological losses. However, although this new evidence is striking, there are as yet too few reliable studies to judge the overall importance of the effects it identifies.
The second perspective—that of the people left behind in impoverished countries of origin—was my original motivation in writing this book. These are the poorest societies on earth, which over the past half-century have fallen behind the prospering majority. Does emigration drain these societies of the abilities of which they are
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already desperately scarce, or does it provide a lifeline of support and a catalyst for change? If the benchmark for the effects of migration on those left behind is the completely closed door, then they are much better off as a result of migration. The same could be said of the other economic interactions between the poorest societies and the rest of the world: trade is better than no trade, and the movement of capital is better than complete financial immobility.
But the benchmark of autarchy for the poorest societies is an undemanding and irrelevant hurdle: no serious policy analyst proposes it. The pertinent benchmark, as with trade and capital flows, is the status quo relative not to autarchy, but to either faster or slower emigration. I show that in the absence of controls, emigration from the poorest countries would accelerate: they would face an exodus.
But migration policies are set not in poor countries but in rich ones.
In determining the rate of immigration into their own societies, the governments of rich countries also inadvertently set the rate of emigration experienced by the poorest societies. While recognizing that current migration is better for these societies than no migration, is the current rate ideal? Would poor countries gain more were migration somewhat faster or somewhat slower than at present? Posed in such a way the question was until recently unanswer-able. But new and highly rigorous research suggests that for many of the bottom billion, current emigration rates are likely to be excessive. A decade ago an analogous academic effort laid the ground-work for a policy rethink on capital flows. There are long lags between research and policy change, but in November 2012 the
International Monetary Fund announced that it would no longer regard the open door for capital flows to be necessarily the best policy for poor countries. Each of these nuanced assessments will outrage the fundamentalists who derive their policy preferences from their moral priors.