Paul Collier

by Exodus; How Migration is Changing Our World (2013) (pdf)

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  so although this question is hypothetical, it is pertinent. To orien-tate your thinking, my approximate answer is going to be that the effects of migration follow an inverse-U shape, with gains from moderate migration and losses from high migration. The important issue is therefore not bad or good but “How much is best?” In turn, I will argue that the answer to “How much?” hinges upon how

  rapidly migrants merge with the indigenous society.

  Since this part is about the effects on host populations, I should admit that some economists think that it is invalid even to pose the question, let alone to try to answer it. The most common ethical framework used in economics is utilitarian—“the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Applied to global issues like migration, it leads to a simple and striking answer: what happens to the indigenous populations of host countries is of no consequence as long as overall there are global gains from migration. Although this moral compass—utilitarian universalist—is standard in economic analysis, it bears little relationship to how most people think. I will turn to this later in the book. Another objection to posing the question, advanced by Michael Clemens, a prominent economic advo-

  cate for increased migration, is to say, “Who is ‘us’?” 1 He argues that

  viewed from the perspective of some future century, “us” will be the descendants of both those who are currently indigenous and immigrants. For him the pertinent question is whether immigration produces long-term benefits to these descendants. As you will see, I think that such imagined futures can be helpful. But in this instance the argument smacks of a sleight of hand. To see the limitations of an argument, it sometimes helps to guy it to an extreme. Suppose, entirely hypothetically, that mass immigration led to the exodus of most of the indigenous population, but that the remainder intermarried with immigrants and their joint descendants ended up

  better off. Knowing this ex ante, the indigenous population might

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  reasonably determine that mass immigration was not in its interest.

  Whether it would then be legitimate for this perceived self-interest to translate into restrictions on entry would depend upon whether freedom of movement is a global right.

  A related argument is that all indigenous populations are themselves mongrels, the result of previous waves of immigration. The extent to which this is the case varies considerably between societies. It is most obviously the case in the countries of nineteenth-century immigration: North America and Australasia. Since Britain is an island, it is evident that all indigenous people are at some point descendants of immigrants, but until the mid-twentieth century the population had been remarkably stable. Recent advances in the study of DNA have enabled genetic descent to be established for each gender: son-father-grandfather and so on back in time; and daughter-mother-grandmother and beyond. Astonishingly,

  around 70 percent of the current population of Britain are directly descended in this way from the people who inhabited Britain in pre-Neolithic times: earlier than 4,000 B.C.2 Since then Britain has periodically been enriched by waves of immigration. Neolithic culture and technology were most likely introduced by immigrants.

  The descendants of Anglo-Saxon and Norman immigrants between

  them forged the English language, its multicultural origins accounting for its incomparable richness of vocabulary. Huguenot and Jewish immigrants were important stimuli to commerce. But these

  migrations, stretching over a six-thousand-year period, were in total evidently quite modest. Stability has an implication: over such a long time span, repeated intermarriage results in a pattern in which anyone from the distant past who has descendants alive

  today is likely to be an ancestor of the entire indigenous population. In this sense the indigenous population literally shares a common history: both the kings and queens and their serfs are our

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  common ancestors. I doubt that Britain is exceptional in this respect.

  But for the moment the issue is whether the fact that indigenous populations are themselves descended from immigrants in the very distant past erases the right to restrict immigration. Those who have had the good fortune to ascend a ladder should not haul it up after them. But whether this is an appropriate analogy for migration depends upon context. The pre-Neolithic people who came to

  Britain were settling an unpopulated territory, just as with first settlement elsewhere in the world. They were not taking advantage of an income gap between established societies such as motivates present-day migrants. Indeed, for thousands of years after first settlement Europe was no more prosperous than other parts of

  the world. The initial settlers were not climbing a ladder, so their descendants cannot be hauling one up.

  But for now I ask you to park the issue of whether controls on migration are unethical. Whether or not host populations have the moral right to manage migration in their own interests, they currently have the legal right to do so. Since scarcely any governments claim the legal right to restrict exit, all controls on global migration flows are ultimately set by the perceived interests of host populations. However, although the high-income countries are democracies, their migration policies have often not reflected the views of the indigenous electorate. For example, in Britain 59 percent of the population (which includes immigrants) consider that there are already “too many” immigrants. Nevertheless, in the long term, in a democracy indigenous populations are going to permit migration only to the extent that they perceive themselves to benefit.

  So, without more ado, what are the effects of migration on indigenous populations, and how might these effects differ according to its scale? Fortunately, there has been considerable recent research.

  As an economist I naturally first explored those effects that are

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  economic. However, I came to realize that on this issue the economic effects are unlikely to be decisive. Despite the polemical claims on both sides of the immigration debate, the evidence suggests that the net effects are usually likely to be small. For most societies migration policies should not be determined on the basis of the economic effects. So I am going to put the social effects ahead of the economic effects and then try to assess them in combination.

  Mutual Regard

  The social consequences of migration depend upon how immi-

  grants relate to their host societies. At one extreme they are treated purely as workers and are not permitted to enter the society on any other basis. A few host societies adopt this approach, and for them the effects are indeed purely economic. But in most countries immigrants become part of the society, as opposed to merely members of its labor force, and so engage with other people in a variety of ways.

  Migrants increase the diversity of society. In some respects this is beneficial: greater diversity brings greater variety and so brings stimulus and choice. But diversity also brings problems. This is because in a modern economy well-being is greatly enhanced by what might be described as mutual regard.

  By mutual regard I mean something stronger than mutual respect.

  I mean something akin to sympathy or benign fellow-feeling. Mutual respect may be fulfilled by everyone keeping a respectful distance from others—the noninterference of the “Don’t dis me” society.

  In contrast, mutual regard supports two types of behavior that are fundamental to successful societies.

  One is the willingness of the successful to finance transfers to the less successful. Although such transfers have become heavily politicized and dressed up as a conflict between ideologies of libertarianism

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  and socialism, they are more truly rooted in how people regard each other. By this I do not mean how the welfare of other people anywhere on earth should be counted, as in the universalist version of utilitarianism common
in economics, but how we regard other members of our own society, and by extension, how we define the limits of what we recognize as the society to which we belong. Mutual regard, or sympathy, gives rise to feelings of loyalty and solidarity for those fellow members of our community who are less fortunate.

  The other key way in which mutual regard affects economic outcomes is through cooperation. By cooperating, people are able to provide public goods that would otherwise not be well supplied by a purely market process. Cooperation is enhanced by trust but, to be other than quixotic, trust must be underpinned by a reasonable presumption that it will be reciprocated. The bedrock of rational trust is knowledge that the society is characterized by mutual regard: because people have some sympathy for each other, it is sensible to presume that a cooperative action will be reciprocated.

  These cooperative outcomes tend to be fragile. The most pop-

  ular public institution in Britain is the National Health Service.

  Ostensibly the NHS requires a willingness to make transfers through taxation rather than cooperation, but in fact it needs both. One unwritten convention has been the willingness to be forbearing in the face of minor errors. This convention has recently eroded so that a growing proportion of the NHS budget is being eaten up by compensation claims. Once claims become common, it would

  be quixotic for people who suffer mistakes not to seek money in return. But inevitably, this reduces the quality of care that can be financed. A further consequence is that the NHS is now less willing to admit, and therefore learn from, its mistakes. The replacement of forbearance by lawsuits is an instance of the collapse of a fragile cooperative equilibrium.

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  The trade-off between the benefits of greater variety and the costs of reduced mutual regard has to be navigated by each society. But one principle is reasonably clear. The gains from greater variety are subject to diminishing returns: that is, like most aspects of consumption, each extra unit confers fewer extra benefits. In contrast, beyond some unknowable point the losses from reduced mutual

  regard are liable to increase sharply as thresholds are crossed at which cooperation becomes unstable. Cooperation games are fragile because if pushed too far they collapse. In fancier language, equilibrium is only locally stable. So moderate migration is liable to confer overall social benefits, whereas sustained rapid migration would risk substantial costs. The rest of this chapter substantiates those potential risks.

  Mutual Regard: Trust and Cooperation

  Through research in experimental economics we now understand

  what enables cooperative outcomes to persist. In a sense successful cooperation is a minor miracle, because if almost everyone else is cooperating, whatever is the objective will be achieved even if I don’t help: so why should I incur the costs of helping? In the vicinity of the fully cooperative outcome, each individual has a strong incentive to free ride, so cooperation should usually be unstable.

  The persistence of cooperation turns out to depend on more than just widespread benevolence. The vital ingredient is that there should also be sufficient people who go the extra mile. That extra mile is punishing those who do not cooperate. In most modern

  societies people have become increasingly reluctant to be judgmental about the behavior of others. But the comforting face of benevolence is dependent upon a tough-minded and judgmental minority.

  Punishment is costly, so people will only be prepared to do it if they

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  have sufficiently internalized not just benevolence, but moral outrage at those who free ride. Cooperative outcomes are fragile because if enough people back away from punishment, then noncooperation becomes the rational strategy. The role of hero performed by the people who punish noncooperation in turn creates the possibility of ultimate villains. The minor villains are the people who do not cooperate, but the supervillains are people who punish the heroes. Again, since punishment is costly, systematically to get satisfaction from punishing the heroes can only arise if some people feel moral outrage not against the people who undermine cooperation, but against the people who try to enforce it. Why might some people have such dysfunctional moral codes? Conceivably, some people might be ideologically opposed to cooperation, believing that the individual is all, so that those who try to enforce cooperation are enemies of freedom. But the more pertinent possibility is that some people regard being punished as an assault on their honor, even if they are guilty as charged. By extension, some people might feel an overriding personal loyalty to others even if they free ride and then are outraged by those who punish them for doing so.

  Trust and cooperation do not arise naturally. They are not pri-mordial attributes of the “noble savage” that get undermined by civilization: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was spectacularly wrong. The evidence suggests precisely the opposite: trust and cooperation beyond the family are acquired as part of the functional attitudes that accumulate in a modern prosperous society. One reason that poor societies are poor is that they lack these attitudes. Two brilliant new studies of Africa illustrate how a lack of trust has been perpetuated. One draws on the painstaking reconstruction of Africa’s deep past that historians have achieved over recent decades.

  Cumulatively, historians have now recorded over eighty violent intergroup conflicts that occurred prior to 1600. Timothy Besley

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  and Marta Reynal-Querol thought to code all these conflicts by their spatial coordinates and investigate whether they were corre-

  lated with modern conflicts.

  3 The correlation turned out to be

  remarkably strong: the violence of over four hundred years ago proved to be disturbingly persistent today. So by what mechanism has this persistence occurred? The researchers suggest that the transmission mechanism is the lack of trust created by violence that echoes down the decades. Noncooperation can be reinforced by its own moral code of honor: the vendetta, in which wrongs are repaid with wrongs. Vendettas are a normal aspect of clan-based societies.

  Historically, clans have been the most common basis for social organization, and in many poor countries they continue to be so. 4

  As Steven Pinker shows, vendettas are reinforced because wrongs are systematically exaggerated by victims and minimized by perpetrators, so that the retaliation regarded as justified by victims of the

  initial wrong creates a fresh wrong in the eyes of the new victims. 5

  Vendettas only end once the entire moral code of honor is abandoned. A classic instance of such a transition is the demise of duel-ing in western Europe during the nineteenth century: it was ended by a cultural revolution that made it look ridiculous.

  The other new study of Africa looks at the legacy of the slave trade. Whereas intertribal conflict leads to a collapse of trust between groups, the slave trade destroyed trust within them: often people sold their own family members to traders. Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon show how the intensity of the slave trade several

  centuries ago maps into reduced per capita income today. 6 The transmission route was again the persistence of a lack of trust.

  Among the societies with which I am familiar, the one with the lowest level of trust is Nigeria. I find Nigeria exhilarating and vibrant: people are engaged and witty. But Nigerians radically, deeply, do not trust each other. Opportunism is the result of decades, probably

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  centuries, in which trust would have been quixotic, and it is now ingrained in ordinary behavior. Nor is opportunism a reflection of poverty: in Nigeria I typically stay at good hotels where none of the occupants can be poor. My room routinely includes the notice

  “Honoured guest, before your departure all the contents of this room will be checked against our inventory”: the hotel has learned that otherwise its honored guests would run off with the contents.

  A more serious aspect of the society’s opportunism is that
it is not possible for Nigerians to get life insurance. This is because, given the opportunism of the relevant professions, a death certificate can be purchased without the inconvenience of dying. For a while this made it very attractive for those Nigerians who valued a large windfall more than a troubled conscience to take out life insurance policies. But as the numbers mounted, the fragile convention on which life insurance rests broke down. Clearly, the root of the problem here was the failure of doctors to internalize professional norms.

  If the level of trust differs markedly between societies, the tactics people adopt in games that require cooperation will also differ.

  This has indeed recently been tested through experimental games. 7

  A team of researchers arranged for the same game to be played under standard laboratory conditions by university students in sixteen countries. They found that in some societies supervillains were ruinously numerous. If heroes punished another player for free riding, the outraged response was to punish the heroes. The researchers then investigated whether these differences in behavior were related systematically to observable characteristics of the countries in which the students lived. Directly, the differences in behavior were related to differences in social capital, in other words to trust. But these in turn could be related to differences in the rule of law. In countries where the rule of law was weak, people were

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  opportunistic and so untrusting, and were inclined to be supervillains in cooperation games. I suspect that these differences in the rule of law can be traced yet further back to the difference between moralities based on loyalty to the honor of the clan, and moralities based on the Enlightenment concept of good citizenship. Supervillains should have a bad conscience according to the standards of the Enlightenment, but they are behaving morally according to the precepts of loyalty to the clan. Note that this does not exonerate supervillains. Moral relativism hits the buffers of an economic absolute: trust is conducive to the social cooperation that is valuable for prosperity.