Paul Collier
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The Right to Control Migration
Only from the wilder shores of libertarianism and utilitarianism can it be argued that migration controls are ethically illegitimate.
Extreme libertarianism denies the right of governments to restrict individual freedom, in this instance the freedom of movement.
Universalist utilitarianism wants to maximize world utility by whatever means. The best possible outcome would be if the entire world population moved to the country in which people were most productive, leaving the rest of the earth empty. A useful supplement to such mass migration would be if Robin Hood could rob all the rich people and transfer the money to all the poor people, although economists would caution Robin to temper robbery with concern for incentives. Evidently, neither of these philosophies provides an ethical framework by which a democratic society would wish to navigate migration policy. Indeed, they could be dismissed as the stuff of teenage dreams were they not the ethical basis for the standard economic models of migration.
Why might there be a right to control migration? To see why,
push the logic of unrestricted migration to its limits. As we have seen, it would be possible for the free movement of migrants to come close to emptying some poor societies and producing majority-immigrant populations in some rich ones. The utilitarian and the libertarian are unconcerned about such a prospect: if Mali were to empty, so what? The people who used to think of themselves as Malian can now reinvent their lives elsewhere and live much better.
If Angola were to become predominantly Chinese, or England to become predominantly Bangladeshi, the change of aggregate identity would be of no consequence: individuals are free to adopt any identity they choose. But most people would be uneasy with such consequences. Environmental economists have introduced the concept of
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“existence value”: while you may never see a panda, your life is enhanced by the knowledge that it exists somewhere on the planet.
We do not want species to become extinct. Societies also have existence value, arguably far more so than species and not just for their members but for others. American Jews value the continued existence of Israel, even though they may never go there. Similarly, millions around the world value Mali, the ancient society that produced Timbuktu. Neither Israel nor Mali must be preserved in aspic: they are living societies. But Mali should develop, not empty. It is not a satisfactory solution to Malian poverty if its people should all become prosperous elsewhere. Similarly, were Angola to become an extension of China, or England an extension of Bangladesh, it would be a terrible loss to global cultures.
The golden rule, do unto others what you would have them do
to you, is not an unreasonable ethical check on migration policy.
So, for unrestricted migration to be the moral principle for, say, African immigration to America, it must also be the principle for Chinese immigration to Africa. Yet most African societies are understandably extremely wary of unrestricted immigration. Africans experienced being taken over by the societies of others and would reject a repetition, albeit this time by the power of numbers rather than the power of the gun. In practice, even the economists who extol the billions of dollars to be gained from the free movement of labor between countries do not literally advocate unrestricted migration. They use the billions as an argument for migration restrictions that are somewhat more generous than at present. But always, at the margin of restrictions there will be economic gains left on the table; why it may be sensible to do so cannot be left implicit.
The essence of a country is not simply its physical territory. The underlying difference in incomes between rich and poor societies is
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due to differences in their social models. If Mali had a similar social model to France and maintained it for several decades, it would have a similar level of income. The persistence of differences in income is not inherent to differences in geography. Of course, differences in geography matter: Mali is landlocked and it is dry, both of which make prosperity more difficult. But both have been made more of a handicap than they need to be. Being landlocked is greatly compounded by the fact that Mali’s neighbors also have dysfunctional social models: the war currently raging in Mali is a direct spillover of the collapse of Mali’s neighbor Libya. Being dry is made more difficult by heavy reliance upon agriculture: Dubai is even drier, but it has diversified into a prosperous service economy where the lack of rainfall is of no consequence.
Functional social models are decisive, but they do not just happen: they are built as a result of decades, and sometimes centuries, of social progress. They are, in effect, part of the common property inherited by those born in the high-income societies. That that property is common to the members of a society does not imply that it must necessarily be open access to others: the world abounds in such club goods.
However, while most people might accept that the citizens of a country have some rights to restrict entry, such rights are limited and some societies have weaker rights of exclusion than others. If population density is extremely low, a right to exclude starts to look selfish. If the host population is itself recently descended from immigrants, then tough restrictions are indeed hauling up the ladder. Yet paradoxically, those countries most characterized by low density and recent occupation often have the most severe restrictions on immigration: stand forth Canada, Australia, Russia, and Israel. Canada and Australia are the recent immigrant societies, and both are
still hugely underpopulated. 1 Yet they pioneered the restriction of
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immigration to the highly educated, and the move to supplement educational points systems with interviews that assess other qualities. Russia only acquired the huge and empty territory of Siberia in the nineteenth century. Much of it borders on China, one of the most heavily populated societies of earth. Yet a core principle of Russian policy has been to keep the Chinese out of Siberia. Israel is an even more recent society of immigrants. Yet immigration is so restricted that indigenous émigrés do not have the right of return.
Even in densely populated countries with a long-established
indigenous majority, some rules of entry would be manifestly racist and so impermissible. Others would be inhuman. All decent societies recognize a duty of rescue, most obviously toward asylum seekers. Sometimes the duty of rescue becomes literal. Australia is currently the ultimate land of immigrant promise. As a result of the global boom in minerals its economy is booming, and a global survey of happiness has found that Australians are the happiest people on earth. Australia is far from crowded: an entire continent with a mere 30 million inhabitants, nearly all themselves the descendants of recent immigrants. Even the prime minister is herself an immigrant. Unsurprisingly, people from countries that are crowded and impoverished would like to move there, but the Australian government has imposed tough restrictions upon legal entry. The gulf between dreams and legal realities has created a market in organized illegal passage. Entrepreneurs sell people places on small boats bound for Australian territory. The results are tragically predictable. The people who buy illegal passage have no recourse against deceit and incompetence: boats sink and people drown.
A debate is currently raging in Australia as to how far the duty of rescue should extend. An evident dilemma is what economists
coyly term “moral hazard”: if getting on a leaky boat puts someone in a position where they have to be rescued by being given residency in
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Australia, then many more people will get on leaky boats. The duty of rescue can be abused. This does not release Australians from the duty of rescue: by its nature, this is a duty without an escape clause.
But, if Australians have the right to restrict entry, then they have the right to delink rescue from subsequent rights of residency.
A newly adopted policy is to hold rescued boat people outside Australian territory and deny them any advantage over other applicants in processing their applications for legal entry. A tougher, and arguably more humane, proposal is to tow apprehended boats back to their port of embarkation. But the game between the hopeful immigrant and the authorities need not stop there. Migrants can play dumb—literally—and destroy their papers, so that it is impossible for the authorities to identify either their country of embarkation or their country of origin. In effect, they raise the stakes: rescuing me lands you with a liability that you cannot exit except by granting me residence. Such a conscious abuse of the duty of rescue would warrant equivalent, though proportionate, responses that would not include the migrant getting what they want.
Migration is a private act usually decided primarily by the
migrant, perhaps with input from the family. Yet this private decision has effects both on host societies and on societies of origin that the migrant does not take into account. Such effects, which economists call externalities, potentially infringe the rights of others. It is legitimate for public policy to factor in these effects that migrants themselves ignore.
It is therefore legitimate for the governments of host countries to limit migration, but controls affect three distinct groups: immigrants themselves, those left behind in countries of origin, and the indigenous population of host countries. Migration policies need to take all three groups into account. The sleight of hand by which utilitarian economics glibly aggregates these three effects to produce
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net gains in the hundreds of billions of dollars is unreasonable. So too is the xenophobe’s exclusive concern for the indigenous: although the concern for others evidently weakens beyond borders, it does not evaporate.
The angry debate between xenophobes and “progressives”
addresses the wrong question: is migration good or bad? The relevant question for policy is not whether migration has been good or bad overall. Rather, it is the likely effects at the margin should migration continue to accelerate. In answering this question, three analytic building blocks that have been set out in different parts of the book are important. It is time to bring them together.
Migrants: The Acceleration Principle
The first building block concerns migrants and is about their decisions. Its key message is that, left to the decentralized decisions of potential migrants, migration accelerates until low-income countries are substantially depopulated. The acceleration principle follows from two indisputable features of migration. One is that for a given income gap, the larger is the diaspora, the easier and hence more rapid is migration. Frédéric Docquier, currently the foremost scholar of the migration process, describes this as the most power-
ful single influence on migration. 2 The other indisputable feature is that migration has only small, and indeed ambiguous, feedback effects on the income gap. Immigration, until it is massive, does not significantly drive incomes down; emigration, even if massive, may not significantly drive them up. The initial income gap is so wide that if emigration were the only equilibrating force, it would continue for many decades and involve huge relocations of people.
The acceleration principle itself is derived from these intrinsic characteristics of the migration process. However, in practice,
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acceleration is compounded by two other changes in low-income countries: rising incomes and rising education. Within the relevant range, rising income will tend to increase migration even though it narrows the income gap. This is because rising income makes it easier to finance the initial investment in migration: the truly poor cannot afford to migrate. Rising education implies that any given educational hurdle used as a criterion for migration policy will be met by an increasing number of people.
The implication is that either acceleration is offset by periodic tightening of the criteria of eligibility, or the rate of migration and the size of the diaspora will both increase until finally limited by depopulation in countries of origin.
Those Left Behind: The Happy Medium
The second building block concerns those left behind and is about education and remittances. Emigration has several effects on those left behind, but the clearest, and probably the most important, are on the resident stock of educated people and on remittances. Both of these effects have only recently been well understood, and both have yielded surprising results.
Emigration of the educated does not necessarily deplete the
stock of the educated. On the contrary, at moderate levels, which depend upon other characteristics of the society, emigration can lead to a net benefit—the brain gain. But whereas China and India have characteristics that naturally limit migration to rates at which there is a brain gain, the many small, poor societies face emigration rates that drain them of human capital, which is already extremely scarce. Worse, emigration of the innovative drains the society of the very skills it most needs to adopt and adapt to modernity. Similarly, in the absence of migration, remittances would be zero, so a modest
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rate of emigration is sure to increase them and thereby benefit those left behind. But beyond a point emigration becomes an alternative to remittances rather than a source of them. Thus, at some point the relationships between the rate of migration and their effects on education and remittances change from being positive to negative.
They rise to a peak and then fall away again. The evidence is that for most small, poor countries, even the current rate of emigration is probably beyond the peak.
The implication is that from the perspective of those left behind there is a happy medium, a moderate rate of emigration at which the combined effects of the incentive to get education and the receipt of remittances are at their maximum. The most beneficial migration is not permanent exodus but temporary migration for higher education. Not only does this enhance the skills that are in desperately short supply, students absorb the functional political and social norms of their host country. Not only that, on returning they transmit these norms to the many people still lacking an education. But the governments of countries of origin do not control either the emigration rate or the rate of return and so are dependent upon the controls set by the governments of host countries.
Indigenous Hosts: Trade-offs
The third building block concerns the indigenous population in host societies. It is partly about direct economic effects and partly about social effects: variety, trust, and redistribution. As with those left behind, migration has numerous effects, but these are probably the most important and potentially the most persistent.
The direct economic effects on wages depend upon the scale of migration. At moderate rates of migration the effects are usually modestly positive in the short term and nonexistent in the long
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term. Were migration to continue to accelerate, basic economic forces would set in and drive wages substantially lower. The economic effects of sharing scarce publicly provided services such as social housing are liable to be negative for the indigenous poor even at moderate rates of migration and would become substantially negative were migration to accelerate. Other economic effects, such as overpopulation and the accentuation of boom-bust cycles, may be important in particular contexts.
Migrants increase social diversity. Diversity enriches economies by bringing fresh perspectives for problem solving, and the variety it brings with it enhances the pleasures of life. But diversity also undermines mutual regard and its invaluable benefits of cooperation and generosity. The corrosive effects of diversity are accentuated if migrants are from countries with dysfunctional social models to which they remain attached. There is therefore a trade-off between the costs and benefits of diversity. In managing this trade-off, the key information concerns how precisely both the benefits and the costs increase with g
reater diversity. The benefits of variety are probably subject to diminishing returns, as with any other form of variety. That is, as variety increases, the benefits keep increasing but by less and less. In contrast, the costs of moderate diversity are likely to be negligible, but beyond some level greater diversity might begin to jeopardize cooperation games and undermine the willingness to redistribute income. So the costs of diversity are likely to rise at an increasing rate. At some point, the incremental costs of diversity are therefore likely to exceed the incremental gains from variety. So the right way of posing the diversity question is not whether it is good or bad—the xenophobe versus the
“progressive”—but how much is best. Unfortunately, social research is currently nowhere near the level of sophistication needed to estimate at what point diversity would become seriously costly. You
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may regard the implication of this ignorance as being that the concerns are scaremongering. Or you may see them as grounds for
caution. Regrettably, this judgment will probably be determined by your moral priors, as Jonathan Haidt predicts, rather than by your attitude to risk. For choices concerning migration policy, limited evidence collides with strong passions. But try, for the moment, to remain dispassionate.
A Policy Package
Now bring these building blocks together. They carry a message of responsibility to the governments of host countries. The rate of migration depends upon the individual decisions of potential