"In a truly globalised world, immigration must be free"

[ninwa]

With its quotas, plodding bureaucracy, and, more obviously, all the smuggling, immigration today looks strikingly like the restricted and protectionist global trade of yesterday.

Indeed, over the last century, migration has de-liberalised - the relatively open borders of the 19th century have become the closed and rigid borders of the 21st century.

All the same principles which make free trade a win-win apply to free movement of people - large scale immigration allows people to work where they can be most productive, further facilitating the economic specialisation that has boosted global prosperity.

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Eliminating the planet’s remaining trade barriers would increase global GDP by around $US100 billion.

Eliminating immigration barriers, by comparison, would as much as double world income: that is, increase global GDP by $US60 trillion.

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So the question - repeatedly posed in discussions of economic development - of whether we should focus on foreign trade or foreign aid is badly incomplete. The biggest idea in development no-one has really tried (in the phrase of economist Michael Clemens) is allowing large scale immigration from the third world to the first.

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None of the standard arguments against immigration hold up to careful scrutiny. Immigrants do not steal jobs. They do not erode living standards. Those who move for work contribute more tax than they take in public services. Migrants - for all the tedious polemic and hyperbole - have never managed to undermine the political and social cultures of host nations.

(We can debate the merits of multiculturalism later, but for now it will suffice to say nobody agrees what the word actually means.)