April 20, 2008
An "easy" solution to the food crisis
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute. “It makes your stomach quiet down."...But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.
Well, I've got a quick fix. Give every Haitian a green card. Invite the world's most precious resource - human labor - to leave a dirt-based economy and get an entry-level job in the modern economy. It's called doing well while doing good. And unlike everything else the world has ever done for Haiti, it works.
It certainly would raise income per natural.
Posted by Dingel at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2008
Delicious gains from trade
In the UK, you need immigrants if you want good food:
The Immigration Advisory Service, a British NGO urged British ministers to ease the new immigration points-based system for Bangladeshi migrant workers in a bid to avert a potential staff crisis in the nation's curry houses.
Posted by Dingel at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2008
Binding quotas
Cato's Ilya Shapiro reports on the binding H-1B quota:
April 1st is the day each fiscal year when employers are allowed to begin filing petitions with the US Citizen and Immigration Services for highly skilled workers to be given what are known as H-1B visas. For the second consecutive year, the quota of these visas was reached on this first day of eligibility...As for the vast majority of employers and employees who will be out of luck, the immigration laws say, like so many “rebuilding” baseball teams this opening week, “wait till next year.” Except, in this case, next year means putting your business or career on hold until October 1, 2009—the day people who secure H-1Bs for fiscal year 2010 can start work.
Posted by Dingel at 02:21 PM | Comments (0)
Poor immigrants raise income inequality?
Will Wilkinson gives nationalist analyses of immigration's effects on inequality a cosmopolitan smackdown.
Posted by Dingel at 01:25 AM | Comments (0)
March 31, 2008
Income Per Natural
As usual, excellent and exciting work from Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett:
Income Per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than PlacesIt is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural -- the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. If income per capita has any interpretation as a welfare measure, exclusive focus on the nationally resident population can lead to substantial errors of the income of the natural population for countries where emigration is an important path to greater welfare. The estimates differ substantially from traditional measures of GDP or GNI per resident, and not just for a handful of tiny countries. Almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident. For 1.1 billion people the difference exceeds 10 percent. The authors also show that poverty estimates are different for national residents and naturals; for example, 26 percent of Haitian naturals who are not poor by the two-dollar-a-day standard live in the United States. These estimates are simply descriptive statistics and do not depend on any assumptions about how much of observed income differences across naturals is selection and how much is a pure location effect. Our conservative, if rough, estimate is that three quarters of this difference represents the effect of international migration on income per natural.
The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.
Hat tip to Wilkinson.
Posted by Dingel at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2008
Rich country doctors' stupid moral claims about poor country doctors
Pablo spots stupidity:
Rich countries are poaching so many African health workers that the practice should be viewed as a crime, a team of international disease experts say in the British medical journal The Lancet...“The resulting dilapidation of health infrastructure contributes to a measurable and foreseeable public health crisis,” the article said. “The practice should therefore be viewed as an international crime.”
If anyone contributing to a phenomenon that might impede economic development is a criminal, we're going to need a few more jails. Michael Clemens has already refuted this brand of moral nonsense:
"Ethical recruitment", the mis-named practice mentioned in the BBC article of taking steps to block the hiring of African professionals, treats Africa as a homogenous mass because it applies to all countries indiscriminately.If you think that limiting the movement of Ghanaian doctors is justified by the fact that Ghana doesn't have enough doctors, ask yourself: Does Ghana have enough entrepreneurs? Does it have enough engineers? Does it have enough wise politicians? The answer is 'no' across the board, so the logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is that we will somehow develop Ghana if we stand at the airport and prevent all Ghanaians with any kind of skill from leaving, preventing them from accessing the very high-paying jobs to which most of us living in rich countries have access by birthright alone. That is ethically problematic at a minimum, as well as ineffective -- trapping entrepreneurs in Ghana would not produce an efflorescence of investment.
In addition to being ethically questionable, the Lancet's claim is factually incorrect. Clemens' post also explains that the international movement of health care professionals is not a binding constraint on improving African health.
Posted by Dingel at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2008
Lant Pritchett at Reason
Why did Reason wait five months to run this interview with Lant Pritchett, Harvard economist and author of Let Their People Come (free pdfs)? It's great!
On institutions and migration:
[T]he beautiful thing about institutions that create property rights is that they’re a free good. If we allow in another 10 million, 20 million, 30 million people, then what has created American wealth—its economic institutions that allow entrepreneurship, that allow free markets, that allow people to innovate, that allow people opportunity—none of that is eroded by letting in more people.America isn’t Kuwait. The wealth of Kuwait is that they’re sitting on this pool of oil. The wealth of America is that we have developed fantastically successful economic institutions. Those institutions are not zero sum. No one has suggested we should have limited America’s natural population growth because with 300 million people there are fewer benefits of our institutions of property rights to go around. It’s the same thing with migration.
On moral philosophy:
Right now all kinds of things that cause much smaller differences in human welfare get much more attention. If we say we are going to discriminate against ethnic Indians in Mexico vs. other citizens of Mexico, there would be a hue and cry across the world. But if we say we’re going to discriminate in favor of people of Mexican descent born in the United States vs. people of Mexican descent born in Mexico, this creates absolutely no moral outrage.
Posted by Dingel at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2007
It's not economics
Esther Duflo says immigration fears are driven by populist paranoia, not economic impacts.
Posted by Dingel at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2007
We need migration data
CGD's Michael Clemens says that discussions of migration are seriously hampered by the unavailability of data.
Posted by Dingel at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2007
Do free traders neglect immigration?
At the end of a post about Social Security, Dean Baker implies free traders are lax in supporting freer immigration to the United States. At the risk of taking his closing quip too seriously, here's why I am not fully persuaded.
Most economists who support freer trade also support freer immigration. Heck, Jagdish Bhagwati even has a version of his biography tailored to focus on immigration. And 500 economists signed a petition supporting more open immigration. So, although they could always do better, I think free traders are fulfilling their responsibility of advocating freer immigration. (One reason their contribution may be underappreciated is that economics is less central to the debate about immigration policy than trade policy.)
Then there are non-economist free traders. Here, Baker's case holds up better. For example, the Heritage Foundation has used the argument that trade and migration are substitutes as a reason to support trade deals. On the other hand, Cato's free traders are staunchly pro-immigration.
Two questions:
(1) Can anyone name an economist who is a notable free trader but opposes more liberal immigration policy?
(2) Are economists devoting too much of their policy influence to trade and not enough to migration?
Posted by Dingel at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2007
Immigrant poverty
"[I]t takes a special kind of brazenness to propose a reduction of the national poverty rate at the expense of ensuring that more people stay poor by denying them opportunity to set foot in the nation." - The Economist on Heritage's Robert Rector.
Posted by Dingel at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2007
Cheap "fixes" for migrant problems
Thousands of migrants try to enter Europe illegally each year and hundreds die on often perilous sea journeys.
Solution:
A $6bn development package for West Africa has been revealed which it is hoped will help halt the emigration of young people from the region.
Solution that might actually work:
Sadly, there is no quick-fix way to keep Africans from attempting the deadly journey to the Canary Islands and Lampedusa in unseaworthy craft, as there is no quick-fix way to keep Mexicans and Central Americans from attempting the risky crossing of America's southwest desert. But among the highly imperfect solutions, Harvard's Lant Pritchett has the best: give many of them a humane and dignified path to a substantial degree of economic opportunity through expanded guest worker arrangements.
Posted by Dingel at 07:47 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2007
Immigrant Criminals
A new NBER paper shreds an old stereotype, reports Bryan Caplan:
Kristin Butcher and Anne Piehl shows that, despite their demographics, immigrants are drastically less criminal than native-born Americans... [G]iven their demographics, we should expect immigrants to commit crimes at double the native rate. But for some reason(s), demographics yield a massive overprediction; immigrants commit crimes at one-tenth the expected rate given their demographics. Yes, if immigrants acted like otherwise similar natives, they were be ten times as criminal as they actually are.
See Caplan's post for more commentary and an ungated link to the working paper.
Posted by Dingel at 09:48 PM | Comments (1)
June 20, 2007
TNR gets it all backwards
CGD's Michael Clemens eviscerates The New Republic editors for patronizing non-Europeans migrant workers and opposing the liberalization of labor flows.
Posted by Dingel at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)
May 24, 2007
Immigration, Interpersonal Utility Comparisons, and Weighted Utilitarianism
Suppose we transfer one person from Mexico to United States (illegally or otherwise). As a result his wages increase compared to what he was making in Mexico. Let us also suppose that as a result of this transfer the wages of some unskilled worker in US fall. Furthermore we will ignore the aggregate gains from immigration that occur and which all economists, including Borjas admit exist. We do this to make our job harder, not easier.How much do you have to weight the native's welfare relative to that of the Mexican immigrant in order to oppose moving this migrant into US?
YouNotSneaky assumes that utility is a CES function of the wage and goes from there. It's an interesting back of the envelope calculation. His result: "Clearly one doesn't need to be a rootless cosmopolitan to reject these kinds of weights. One only need not be a jerk."
After checking out YouNotSneaky's calculations, head over to Marginal Revolution to check out the hostile exchanges in the comments section.
Posted by Dingel at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2007
Don't underestimate migrant workers
Michael Clemens:
You might have seen a recent New York Times Magazine cover story (subscription req.) about Filipinos working overseas... The author, Jason Deparle, recognizes the comparatively enormous salaries that Emmet Comodas and all five of his children have earned abroad, but urges us to remember that “competing with the literature of gain is a parallel literature of loss.” Any good journalist lays out the pros and cons of phenomena, inviting readers to reach their own conclusions. But one straightforward fact should stare any reader directly in the eyes: The Comodas family has reached its own decision about whether the gains are worth the losses. They have decided that the losses do not even come close to paralleling the gains, and their conclusion matters infinitely more than yours or mine...Emmet Comodas’ salary in Saudi Arabia was ten times what he could have earned at home. He and his wife Tita invested the extra pay in food, medicine, and school supplies for their children. Though neither Emmet nor Tita had finished high school, four of their five children now have college degrees. Deparle grimly notes that “Emmet, overseas paying the bills, missed every graduation”. So what? Evidently Emmet and Tita decided that it would be better for their children if Emmet were absent at their children’s college graduations than present to watch them drop out of high school only to perpetuate their family’s poverty. Who are you and I to tut-tut them for this decision?
Do read the full post.
Posted by Dingel at 08:33 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
Immigration and efficiency
…from a purely economic perspective, illegal immigration is arguably preferable to legal immigration. …the illegal route is for the moment vastly more efficient than the cumbersome legal system. Illegal immigration responds to economic signals in ways that legal immigration does not. Illegal migrants tend to arrive in larger numbers when the U.S. economy is booming and move to regions where job growth is strong. Legal immigration, in contrast, is subject to bureaucratic delays, which tend to disassociate legal inflows from U.S. labor-market conditions. The lengthy visa application process requires employers to plan their hiring far in advance. Once here, guest workers cannot easily move between jobs, limiting their benefit to the U.S. economy.
Posted by Dingel at 07:48 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2007
Life on the US-Mexico border
US Border Patrol Agent Elizier Vasquez:
We're fortunate enough to live in a country where there are lots of opportunities. And most of the people who we run into out here want to make that dream happen. Unfortunately, it's our job to stop that dream. That's what we do on an everyday basis.
Read Malia Politzer's Reason piece on the US-Mexico border experience.
Posted by Dingel at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2007
Odd solutions to labor movement restrictions
In Colorado, crackdowns on illegal immigration have caused a shortage of agricultural labor. So farmers have contracted with the state's Corrections Department to have prisoners bring in the harvest , at the slave wage of about 60 cents per day.
NY Times story here.
Posted by Dingel at 03:36 PM | Comments (1)
September 11, 2006
Lant Pritchett - "Let Their People Come"
Lant Pritchett, currently at the World Bank and previously at Harvard, has written a book on global labor mobility.
Posted by Dingel at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2006
Dukakis on immigration
This strikes me as a terrible argument:
If we are really serious about turning back the tide of illegal immigration, we should start by raising the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to something closer to $8. The Massachusetts legislature recently voted to raise the state minimum to $8 and California may soon set its minimum even higher. Once the minimum wage has been significantly increased, we can begin vigorously enforcing the wage law and other basic labor standards.Millions of illegal immigrants work for minimum and even sub-minimum wages in workplaces that don’t come close to meeting health and safety standards. It is nonsense to say, as President Bush did recently, that these jobs are filled by illegal immigrants because Americans won’t do them. Before we had mass illegal immigration in this country, hotel beds were made, office floors were cleaned, restaurant dishes were washed and crops were picked — by Americans...
However, Americans won’t work for peanuts, and these days the national minimum wage is less than peanuts. For full-time work, it doesn’t even come close to the poverty line for an individual, let alone provide a family with a living wage. It hasn’t been raised since 1997 and isn’t enforced even at its currently ridiculous level.
Yet enforcing the minimum wage doesn’t require walling off a porous border or trying to distinguish yesterday’s illegal immigrant from tomorrow’s “guest worker.” All it takes is a willingness by the federal government to inspect workplaces to determine which employers obey the law.
I'll outsource the fisking to other folks.
Posted by Dingel at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)
July 01, 2006
500 Economists vs a Heritage guy
Don Feder spews forth ignorant bile:
The Times claims “500 economists have signed an open letter to Mr. Bush arguing that immigration is a net plus for the nation’s economy.” Doubtless, the same 500 economists believe that tax hikes are a net plus for the economy, increases in the minimum wage are a net plus for the economy and signing the Kyoto Treaty on so-called global warming would be a big boost for the nation’s economy.Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation analyst who – unlike the Times standard-issue 500 economists – is invariably right about the impact of legislation on the economy, tells us the following...
It was cruel of Feder to pit Mr. Rector, who holds a M.A. in political science, against five Nobel laureates and two former chairmen of the CEA, but it was outright laughable to imply that these 500 PhDs are a bunch of leftists. I'm sure Deepak Lal and Pete Boettke would be a bit surprised to be labeled as such.
[Hat tip: the letter's author, Alex Tabarrok]
Posted by Dingel at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2006
Neat Idea on Immigration
In part because people flows are smaller than trade and capital flows, the dispersion of pay for similarly skilled workers around the world exceeds the dispersion of the prices of goods and cost of capital. This suggests that policies that give workers in developing countries greater access to advanced country labor markets could raise global economic well-being considerably. The economic problem is that immigrants rather than citizens of immigrant-receiving countries benefit most from immigration. The paper considers "radically economic policies" such as auctioning immigration visas or charging sizeable fees and spending the funds on current residents to increase the economic incentive for advanced countries to accept greater immigration.
Interesting...
Posted by Dingel at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2006
Enter At Your Own Risk
Jesse Walker explores the links between guest worker programs, illegal immigration, and exploitation.
[Hat tip: Ivan Janssens]
Posted by Dingel at 07:40 AM | Comments (0)