Book Review
Exodus:
How Migration Is Changing Our World.
By Paul Collier. Oxford University Press, 2013, 309 pp. $27.95.
On
May 29, 2013, British immigration officers raided the Alternative Tuck Shop, a
café just down the road from Oxford University’s economics department, where
South Asian and Middle Eastern employees serve tea, scones, and sandwiches.
The
agents seized two young men, one from Bangladesh and one from Algeria, under
suspicion of working in the United Kingdom without authorization. And they
shuttered the business temporarily, meaning that hungry Oxford economists would
have to walk farther down Holywell Street for their midday panini.
One
of their number, Paul Collier, has just published an extended apologia for the
tight strictures on immigration that led to this raid, arguing for a global
system of coercive quotas on people moving from poorer countries to richer
ones.
Such quotas, he writes in Exodus,
would serve the “enlightened self-interest” of immigrants’ host countries and
constitute an act of “compassion” for immigrants and their countries of origin.
Collier argues that at a certain point, immigration begins to harm both host
and origin countries, that many countries are near or past that point, and that
even in countries that have so far remained unharmed, “preventative policies
are greatly superior to reactive ones.”
It
is refreshing to see the grand case against immigration served up by someone of
Collier’s intelligence and credentials. But although Collier styles his book as
a balanced review of the research literature, it is in fact a one-sided polemic
that stands mostly outside academic research -- by Collier or anyone else. Far
from advancing a convincing case for a moderate middle path, the book offers an
egregious collection of empirical and logical errors about the sociological and
economic consequences of immigration. And they lead Collier to propose policies
that would greatly harm, not help, the millions of people seeking to escape
their homelands in search of a better life.
THE
MASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Although
Collier is best known for his work on Africa, Exodus is preoccupied with the social
costs of immigration for rich countries, such as the United Kingdom and the
United States. According to Collier, “culturally distant” immigrants threaten
“the mutual regard on which high-income societies depend.”
To make his case, he
takes readers on a fascinating tour of recent research into the political
economy of Africa, tracing the roots of modern-day corruption and conflict in
the region to centuries-old patterns of war and slave trading. He concludes,
"Migrants are essentially escaping from countries with dysfunctional
social models. It may be well to reread that last sentence and ponder its
implications.
For example, it might make you a little more wary of the
well-intentioned mantra of the need to have 'respect for other cultures.' The
cultures -- or norms and narratives -- of poor societies, along with their
institutions and organizations, stand suspected of being the primary cause of
their poverty."
Unlike
bad institutions or economic conditions, Collier asserts, bad culture is not
just a characteristic of poor countries; it is embedded in their people.
“Uncomfortable as it may be . . . migrants bring their culture with them,” he
writes. For example, he adds, “unsurprisingly, Nigerian immigrants to other
societies tend to be untrusting and opportunistic.”
But
if you buy the argument that immigrants come from culturally inferior
countries, it leads to some strange historical conclusions. For example,
between 1850 and 1913, more than a fifth of the populations of Norway, Sweden,
and the United Kingdom emigrated en masse, landing in countries with wages
several times higher, such as Argentina and Canada.
Yet it would be difficult
to claim that the United Kingdom and Scandinavia possessed broken social models
at the time or that immigrants from these places infected their adopted
countries with dysfunction they brought from home.
Another
core premise of the book is that diversity per se is bad. In Collier’s view,
Bangladeshi immigrants in London are dangerous not only due to their allegedly
dysfunctional culture but also because they are “culturally distant” from most
people in the United Kingdom.
Collier pins his fear of diversity on one study
by the political scientist Robert Putnam, which found that residents of
racially mixed U.S. neighborhoods trusted one another less than their
counterparts in more homogeneous neighborhoods, even after controlling for
poverty levels, crime rates, and demographic factors. The statistics in
Putnam’s study pertain exclusively to race, not national origin.
Thankfully,
Putnam chose not to interpret this finding as evidence in favor of keeping
blacks and Hispanics out of white neighborhoods. Collier, however, offers this
same data on race relations in the United States to justify limiting the entry
of immigrants into wealthy countries. Although he no doubt opposes racial
segregation, his conflation of race, culture, and nationality invites this
analogy, and he offers no reason why promoting local homogeneity through the
use of immigration barriers is any more defensible.
In
fact, immigration has been widely shown to have many positive effects. For
example, economists have found that crime is significantly lower in the English
and Welsh neighborhoods in the United Kingdom with the largest immigrant
inflows and that immigration raises local property values in Spain and the
United States. But Collier makes no mention of such research.
Nor
does he account for the evidence that undermines his assertion that “culturally
distant” immigrants from poor countries fail to assimilate in rich countries.
And such evidence is abundant. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think
tank, has compiled an “assimilation index” of immigrants in the United States
that measures such factors as labor-force participation, earnings, English
fluency, intermarriage, legal naturalization, and military service.
After
Canadians, it turns out that the highest-scoring groups come from the
Philippines, Cuba, and Vietnam -- hardly countries with social institutions
mirroring those of the United States. Indeed, as U.S. immigration has
accelerated, so has integration: the institute’s researchers found that
“immigrants of the past quarter-century have assimilated more rapidly than
their counterparts of a century ago, even though they are more distinct from
the native population upon arrival.”
VALUE
ADDED
If
you ask entry-level economics students what they would expect a large influx of
low-skilled immigrants to do to the economic prospects of natives, most will
reason that the increase in the labor supply will reduce wages and increase
unemployment, perhaps especially for poorer, less-educated locals.
But
professional economists have found something very different: study after study
has shown that opening up labor markets to more people has not only increased
the supply of labor but also raised the return on capital investments,
accelerated economic growth, and thus increased the demand for labor --
improving the lives of natives as well as those of the immigrants.
Collier
deserves credit for embracing the consensus on this question. But the embrace
is fleeting. His argument quickly leaves empirical evidence behind as he
speculates about unprecedented bad economic effects that might happen in the
future. He argues that although some rich countries do need more immigrants,
others can absorb only a few and so should impose caps.
The tipping point, he
claims, hinges on a country’s population density. It would be “selfish” for
countries with lots of open land, such as Australia or Canada, to shut their
doors, he writes, yet justifiable for high-density countries, such as Denmark
and the United Kingdom, to do so. But it makes little sense to use overall
population density as a measure of a country’s ability to absorb new people,
since those who immigrate to Australia or Canada these days disproportionately
flock to Sydney or Vancouver, not vacant homesteads.
Collier’s
fears that immigration will someday doom dense countries are also undermined by
evidence showing that even massive inflows of people constitute an economic
boon. The most dramatic modern example is the desegregation of South Africa.
With the fall of apartheid in 1994, black migrants who had been exiled to
remote areas flooded to major cities, where they began competing with white
workers for jobs. The scale of this change dwarfed Collier’s worst nightmares
of mass immigration to Europe.
Yet the results are a staggering rejection of
his simple analysis of supply and demand. As the economists Murray Leibbrandt
and James Levinsohn have shown, between 1993 and 2008, the average income of
black South Africans rose by 61 percent. And white South Africans suffered,
well, nothing. Their average income also rose over the same period: by a
staggering 275 percent.
Recent
U.S. history is not so different. From 1960 to 2011, the number of immigrants
in the United States rose from less than ten million to more than 40 million,
doubling the foreign-born share of the population. The question of whether this
enormous influx of labor has raised or lowered wages and employment has spawned
much debate among economists.
But the distance between the two sides is quite
small; estimates of the cumulative effect of decades of immigration on natives’
wages range from around negative three percent to positive one percent. No serious
economists have found evidence of the large hypothetical effects that worry
Collier.
Collier
compounds this error with another one: he confuses labor markets with the
overall economy. In market economies, he argues, the economic gains of
immigration accrue to the immigrants, in the form of higher wages, “rather than
to the indigenous population.”
But Collier forgets that the owners of capital
in host countries would never pay such higher wages to immigrants unless those
workers added even more value to their employers than what they cost. If one
believes that immigrants generally do not displace native workers -- as Collier
rightly does -- then one also has to accept that natives actually receive a
greater economic gain from immigration than do the immigrants themselves.
Collier gets this logic so wrong that he describes admitting immigrants as an
act of “charity.” But employers hire workers to make money, not to do good.
Nor
are governments providing charity to immigrants, as Collier contends. Ignoring
the large literature documenting the positive contribution of immigrants to
public coffers, he cites a single study that offers an entirely theoretical
model of how immigrants could strain the Scandinavian welfare state. But
Collier’s conclusions require empirical data.
These exist -- although not in
the pages of Exodus
-- and they suggest the opposite of what Collier asserts. In a 2013 study of 27
countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
found that immigrants contribute an average of $4,400 more per household to the
government than they receive in benefits each year.
For 20 of these countries,
immigrants’ net fiscal contribution was positive; in the United States, that
figure was around $11,000 per immigrant household. These numbers should not
come as a surprise, since immigrants tend to be younger than natives, and most
of them move to work, not to qualify for benefits. Their age alone means that
they will work longer (thus paying more in taxes) than natives and will remain healthy
longer (thus receiving less in benefits).
At
times, Collier seems to grasp for charges he can level at immigrants. He
complains that immigrants compete for the “glittering prizes” of affluent
societies, driving up the price of luxury apartments in London and capturing
most of the spots in elite high schools in Sydney and New York. But these
claims require readers to buy an odd pair of ideas: not only will immigrants
become a grubbing underclass that drains public coffers, but they will also
snatch up all the spots at the best colleges through their hard work and
intelligence.
MOVING
ON UP
The
median wage of immigrants in the United States is more than four times that of
comparable workers back home. Yet Collier describes governments’ putting
forcible limits on immigration, to the United States and elsewhere, as acts of
“compassion.” This is a strange type of compassion, involving armed agents
turning away desperately poor immigrants and deporting them if they somehow
slip in.
According
to Exodus,
however, immigrants gain little by leaving home. Collier supplies three
arguments for why this is so -- all of them misguided. The first is that new
immigrants “drive down the earnings of existing immigrants.”
Although this may
be true, all immigrants are still better off for having moved: economists’ best
estimate of how much new ones depress the wages of existing ones is on the
order of five to ten percent, whereas typical immigrants who have moved from
poor to rich countries raise their earnings by several hundred percent. If
there is a point at which job competition among immigrants in their destination
countries comes close to undermining the benefits of moving, the world is
light-years away from it.
Collier’s
second argument is that “although international migration responds to global
inequality, it does not significantly change it.” Here, his logic is circular,
since a key reason immigration has not reduced global inequality is that it is
so tightly constrained. According to the economist Branko Milanovic, 60 percent
of the variance in real incomes worldwide can be explained solely by one’s
country of residence. Yet immigration is a tiny phenomenon: 97 percent of all
people live in the country they were born in. Collier’s argument is akin to
claiming that freeing a slave will not improve his earnings because while
enslaved, he has earned little in the labor market.
Collier’s
third argument, about the plight of immigrants, deserves more consideration. He
points out that immigrants in Australia and India are not, on average, much
happier than the compatriots they left behind, despite having seen their
incomes skyrocket.
“The massive productivity gains from migration that so
excite economists and that migrants capture appear not to translate into
additional well-being,” he writes, adding, “the psychological costs borne by
migrants may well be enormous, wiping out the income gains that accrue to
them.” If future research confirms this point, Collier argues, “migration would
not be an investment, it would be a mistake,” and governments should act on
that information by preventing such migration from happening in the first
place.
This
reasoning is bizarre. Using the same logic, one could make the case for barring
mothers from working outside the home, noting, accurately, that women with
children who work report more sadness and stress than those who do not work. To
be blunt: polls showing that immigrants are no happier after leaving home do
not justify taking away people’s right to move freely.
Yet
the survey evidence Collier cites does reveal a dark side to immigration. In
many countries, especially in the Persian Gulf, immigrant workers enjoy few
legal protections, have their passports seized by their employers, and are
locked into a single company, making them easy targets for exploitation.
Collier recognizes the risks that immigrants of precarious legal status face
and makes a persuasive case for granting legal amnesty to undocumented workers
in rich countries. That conclusion is correct and should be extended further:
aiding the victims, not punishing them with quotas and deportations, is the
right response to abuse in the labor market.
LEFT
BEHIND
Having
dismissed the enormous gains to immigrants as small and possibly illusory and
immigration itself as a mistake, Exodus
then asks whether immigration harms the people left behind. Collier notes that
from an economic perspective, immigrants’ remittances likely trump any
downsides of their leaving.
Indeed, the World Bank has estimated that in 2012,
the developing world received over $400 billion in remittances; in a handful of
smaller economies, such as Liberia and Nepal, such flows accounted for over 20
percent of GDP. “We can therefore safely conclude that migration is good for
those left behind,” Collier writes.
But
once again, Collier is not satisfied to let historical experience guide policy.
He speculates that increased emigration from poor countries could someday prove
harmful and concludes that rich governments should cap immigration as an act of
compassion.
In making that argument, Collier first claims that retaining
skilled and motivated workers is necessary to boost the economic prospects of
those who do not emigrate, but his policy recommendation rests on a
fundamentally different claim: that blocking immigration will lead to economic
development in the countries immigrants leave. He offers no evidence to support
this claim, because he cannot: there is no country, region, district, or city
on earth where coercive policies to restrict departure have been shown to
trigger economic growth.
Consider
Haiti, which Collier offers as the quintessential case study of the downsides
to emigration, since the country “has lost around 85 percent of its educated
people.” In fact, the true figure is closer to 75 percent; Collier
inappropriately counts university-educated Haitians who left as children and
were educated abroad.
The bigger problem with this example, however, is his
logical leap. It is obviously true that if Haiti is to have a
twenty-first-century economy, it will need to convince skilled workers not to
leave. But it is wrong to slip from that claim to a different one, for which
there is no evidence: that if skilled people born in Haiti were coerced into
staying there against their will, because of immigration caps abroad, then the
country’s economy would modernize.
Eighty percent of Haitians who earn more
than $10 per day live in the United States, not Haiti. In other words,
emigration is the main way to escape poverty in Haiti. Yet Collier would deny
poor Haitians this opportunity on the baseless grounds that forcing them to
remain in Haiti will cause the country to prosper.
Elsewhere
in the book, Collier appears to reject the ethics of his own proposal. He
writes that Afghanistan, Haiti, and Zimbabwe would benefit from coercive
policies to forcibly prevent departure but admits that “of course these are
neither practicable nor ethical.”
Yet he justifies forcible restrictions on
immigration to rich countries from these same countries on the grounds that
such limits will keep people from emigrating. He cannot have it both ways; the
policy prescriptions in Exodus
are explicitly designed to undermine the right to leave one’s home country.
ANOTHER
BRICK IN THE WALL
Collier’s
foregone policy conclusion is that countries need higher walls. The main
question, then, is which select few to let in. Collier proposes four criteria:
skills, employability, cultural distance, and vulnerability. With the exception
of vulnerability, all pose problems.
The first two criteria suggest that rich
countries should skim the cream of the crop from poor countries’ labor markets
-- an odd conclusion for a book that devotes a full chapter to the supposed
deleterious effects of the emigration of skilled workers from poor countries.
Collier fails to explain the incongruity between his analysis and his policy
conclusions, leaving readers to assume that he has chosen to prioritize the
preferences of policymakers in rich countries over the fate of workers in poor
ones.
The
third criterion, by which rich countries would weed out the immigrants who
would be unlikely to assimilate, is particularly troubling. Collier writes that
the rules determining which nationals to admit should be designed to offset the
effects of cultural distance “to the extent possible without transgression into
racism.”
But such policies have a long history of exactly such transgression.
The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 fixed quotas for immigration in part according
to the representation of origin countries among the national origins of the
U.S. population and was intended to limit the inflow of immigrants who were
deemed less likely to assimilate, such as Asians and eastern Europeans,
particularly Jews. The result was that over 85 percent of U.S. immigration
slots were reserved almost exclusively for white northern Europeans.
Curiously,
even though Collier admits that in many countries, far fewer people emigrate
than ideally should, he never grapples with policies that would help would-be
emigrants in these places. For every Haiti (with 10.2 percent of its
native-born population living abroad), there is a Tanzania (with about 0.7
percent). There is no reason Tanzanians should be denied the enormous increases
in income, health, and opportunities for their children that come from moving to
a richer country. Yet Exodus
never devotes a single line to policies that would help such groups emigrate.
To
get a sense of just how big the gains that Collier brushes aside are, consider
the following back-of-the-envelope calculation. Assume for a moment that
everything Collier says is correct. He argues that there is an optimal level of
emigration from low-income countries and that it lies somewhere between
Bangladesh’s rate of around four percent, which he deems beneficial, and
Haiti’s level of around ten percent, which he deems harmful. Many low-income
countries have emigration rates far below four percent.
If those rates were
raised to four percent, that would mean about 13 million new immigrants (using
the World Bank’s definition of low-income countries and its 2010 estimates of
cross-country migration numbers). If all of them moved to OECD countries, the
foreign-born population of the OECD countries would rise from 12 percent to 13
percent -- the same level found in the United States and far below the 20
percent share in Canada and the 27 percent share in Australia.
Those
people would move from countries with average annual incomes of about $600 to
countries where average incomes are over $30,000, transforming their lives and
adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the world economy every year. In
other words, even if one concedes Collier’s dubious moral and empirical claims
about immigration, his own analysis suggests colossal potential gains from new
immigration without substantial offsetting harm. But somehow, in his policy
conclusions, Collier preoccupies himself exclusively with restricting
immigration.
FACT
AND FICTION
Soon,
the young sandwich-makers incarcerated and then deported from Collier’s
doorstep will have arrived in Algeria and Bangladesh, if they have not already.
Some of the effects of their removal have been proved by stacks of economic
studies; others are hypothetical.
What research shows is that the economic
value of those men’s labor will decline by 60 to 80 percent or more, reducing
the size of the world economy; the job prospects of British workers will be
essentially unaffected, given how little interest they have in low-wage service
work; the British government will collect less tax revenue; Collier and his
colleagues will pay slightly more for tea and cakes; and Algeria and Bangladesh
will lose whatever money those men may have been sending home.
Beyond
those well-documented effects, Collier posits other, wildly hypothetical
effects: that the Oxonians strolling down Holywell Street will be able to gaze
at one another with more trust and mutual regard, and that somehow people
working in Algeria and Bangladesh will become more motivated to improve their
lots and their countries.
British national identity will also be protected,
like an endangered species, for were England to become “an extension of
Bangladesh,” Collier writes at one point, “it would be a terrible loss to
global cultures.” Social science may one day prove all this speculation right,
but not before other and better books arrive to lift the heavy burden of proof,
serving up evidence in place of portentous insinuations and fearful
“preventative policies.”
Collier
laments the fact that the immigration debate has been marked by “high emotion
and little knowledge.” That is true, yet Exodus
exemplifies the problem. This book could have seriously engaged with the large
literature on immigration and helped people without Collier’s training and
position think through the complexities of the issue. Instead, Collier has
written a text mortally wounded by incoherence, error, and overconfident leaps
to baseless conclusions.
Source: http://www.foreignaffairs.com
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