A world of free movement would be poorer as mass immigration would overwhelm developed societies, increase conflict and eventually lead to even more protectionism than existed before (Brexit).
Rule of law and institutions in developed countries will suffer and mass migration would also destroy the economies of the migrant exporting societies (Puerto Rico).
Free movement will drive down wages and labor costs. Labor will lose value while capital will increase in value.
Combine this dynamic with our current world in which the gulf between a small elite class and everyone else is widening with the middle class in between deteriorating, and you have a recipe for disaster. The modern welfare state that exists in Europe and to a (much) lesser extent in the US would crumble from the stress of millions of new individuals flooding the economy at the low end and being stuck there because of economic dynamics beyond anyone's control.
Rather than importing the impoverished from poor nations to rich nations, we should be working together as a community of nations to establish law and order where there is lawlessness. Once law, order and in particular property rights are followed and enforced, wealth can and will grow as it has in places like China and Vietnam.
Encouraging freedom of movement will result in poor regions becoming even more destitute. As one of my wealthy friends from Pakistan lamented to me once when considering whether she should move to Canada or stay in Pakistan, "if people like myself flee Pakistan, who will stay to build it into a strong and prosperous nation?"
Overall, free movement would be a terrible idea for most people. This article does a really poor job of considering the issue.
Agreed, if anything more migration opportunities would be much better for those who are poor. A semi-recent article put the value of free movement globally at an additional $78 Trillion for the global economy
On the other hand, people are perfectly willing to argue that capital markets must be both global and open, and that markets can't operate effectively without free movement of capital. Any country that institutes currency controls is heavily restricts capital inflows is regarded as an economic basket case.
ISTM that if you want a proper free market you have to allow free movement of both labor and capital. Willingness to work is what the poor have instead of capital, and it's their only option for accumulating some capital. Furthermore, if you have open immigration that means migrant labor is also free to leave during times of low demand because departure isn't necessarily a one-way ticket, which means that labor markets can be more flexible and responsive to economic conditions.
I am extremely distrustful of free market advocates who say that their principles suddenly shouldn't apply where labor is concerned. Last time we tried that inside the US, with towns posting signs telling economic migrants to keep going and using vagrancy laws to criminalize the poor, it didn't work out well for anyone. We shouldn't be looking to go back to that.
Really, we're approaching an era of increasing wage equalization as more and more of the world falls out of abject poverty, such that wealthy countries like the US may well face demographic problems from about 2030 onwards due to an inability to attract sufficient numbers of younger migrants to offset the fiscal costs of looking after retirees.
There would be little reason to migrate if those European nations didn't exploit corruption and poor labour/environmental standards in other countries. Allowing free movement of goods and services without free movement of people entrenches inequality and makes the problem worse. Time to look at whether global capitalism is culturally "good", rather than shifting the blame to desperate people seeking safety or a better life for their family.
We globally have (relatively) free movement of money, goods and services. What we don't have globally is (relatively) free movement of people (for work).
I do believe, that if the world were to add free movement of people to the first lot, within a generation you'd get normalisation of incomes and lots more besides (laws relating to workplace rights, OHS, environmnental etc).
Of course that pain that would be suffered in that generation would be pretty huge as entire populations started moving. It's a pretty big perturbation to settle into a new stable state.
Idealistically yes.
But you should focus on financial inequality first(for example with global remote work accepted as the norm).
If all of a poor third world country move to a first world country overnight this is just the same poor country on another continent.
I'm 100% for immigration, but realistically if you just allow everyone to move overnight, it's just going to make a big mess unless we first focus on financial inequality.
No, migration programmes worldwide currently lack logic. They often make no economic sense.
Unions across the EU historically opposed free movement of labour for a very simple reason: it is used by employers to create surplus labour and drive down the cost of wages. This is not actually a bad reason to oppose it. But that aside, almost every other reason is bad, regressive, and grounded in culture, racism, or fear.
Angela Merkel, who I abhor politically otherwise, was very sensible when she accepted 1.5m migrants. Germany needed them, because the birthrate in the developed economies has been shrinking. They need them for labour replacement not for wage dilution. It is why Germany needed turkish labour post ww2.
Britain needs labour. The opposition to EU free movement was based in little englander nightmares, the reality is that having closed the door to europe, Britain is opening the door to other economies like India. There will be no end of migration to the UK, simply migration "on their terms"
If you want somewhere with open door migration policy, Uruguay isn't bad. Its a local IT hub for the region of south america, it's an interesting place. It is very insular, high italian migration and medium-to-low levels of english competency and it has a lot of poverty, but its a long way from its nightmare of the 1980s.
Ireland isn't open door but its a nice place. As is estonia, the digital passport isn't citizenship but they have roads to citizenship. It's a bit close to mother Russia if you ask me!
Vietnam is a cool place for westerners who are prepared to accept the planned economy. It has remarkably good infrastructure in the cities. Less outside of the city, but not bad overall. I don't think they have open door citizenship.
Germany is well worth committing to, but has high barriers to entry. That said, free tertiary education.
One of the most positive political changes we could hope to see in the 21st century would be more free movement of people across borders. Not just for tourism. For work.
We're all better off if people can legitimately move to where their labor productivity is higher. The numbers are fairly clear on this. I've seen estimates that you could double global GDP just by letting people migrate to where there's more productive capital available.
Climate change makes this even more important. Mass migration is almost certainly going to happen -- we can let it happen in an orderly way, or we can let it be chaotic.
If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand.
Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state.
As with any prohibition, the economic opportunity gets colonized by criminals. People seeking a better life will be taken advantage of and some of them will even wind up worse off than they started. But the root problem isn't the criminals, and it isn't customers who want cheap electronics. It's the prohibition of migration.
And it's not a simple issue. Free movement works well for people who are comfortably off, but tends to trash the economies of those left behind. I don't think FoM is a full solution.
The end state is the end of nation states, and especially competitive nation state economies. Not only would this create a multi-trillion dollar peace dividend which could be spent on original R&D and social investment of all kinds, it would also create a massive wealth equalisation, end many of the more obvious and pointless kinds of wealth speculation, and create a global wealth boom, as location became much less important than talent and imagination.
Thanks for raising some really valid counterpoints to my argument, while framing this as a contest of ideas and not people. I really appreciate it. I imagine others on HN do too.
Regarding "I don't see how it is a (globally-speaking) bad thing to have migration make it so that enough people decide to move there to make it less feasible." - to be honest I tend to agree in principle, but I worry that the practical effect would be far more negative. Making the decision to move less feasible seems to mean making the destination country less desirable, which sucks and is a bummer for those who live there. Then again, there's nothing fair about me being paid ten times as much as someone in India to work with databases. I just happen to like the stuff I can buy by making 10x as much cash.
I want to live in a liberal democracy with a high standard of living and low carbon emissions (so apartments close to amenities with lots of bike lanes and very few automobiles) with a steady or slowly decreasing population, because there are too many people in the world for it to support. If such a place existed (Denmark comes to mind, or perhaps Japan), it would probably be a desirable target for migrants from all over the world, which would strain the systems that could make such a place possible. How do you build schools to house families with 4+ children when your budget was built on the idea that you would need to build no more, or slowly downsize them with time? How do you allocate land?
Governments don't have to be competitive if they mutually limit migration - and this is one problem.
People need the option to leave a system that doesn't work for them, or that system won't see a need for change. The same competitive forces that are so important to capitalism should apply to nation-states as well.
"although I know that according to economic theory freedom including the freedom to migrate would allow greater efficiency and wealth for all"
More likely it just pits the most vulnerable against each other in a race to the bottom, and gives those with power in the system even greater power.
The argument from 'economic freedom' or 'liberal democrat' types is that the system would be more efficient overall, which might be true - but it's not very good at the 'distribution of surpluses' problem.
We have plenty of productivity in the world, the struggle is how to get it spread around fairly.
The answer to the 'economic desperation migration' problem mostly has to do with solving the host of problems from whence these people have come. Surely there will always be calamity causing a bump in migration, just as surely as regular migration will go on (regular ex-pats changing jobs, getting married to someone from another country etc.) ... but the 'greatest good' will definitely surround getting dysfunctional places to be somewhat more functional.
Also, once countries reach ballpark parity with one another, the rate of migration normalizes quite a lot, to numbers that nobody is going to be bothered about and there'll be nothing to get all populist about.
But the law itself is ridiculous ... for a so-called populist government ... this must be one of the most utterly 'un-populist' concepts imaginable.
This would be political suicide in any country, any regime, and flag, any political stripe.
Truly what were they thinking?
Edit: for some numbers: Italy has over 5 million foreign nationals residing there (8.3% of the population), the largest group among them are Romanians. Italy has also received 700 000 irregular migrants (only those that are counted) from the Med. [1] They have an unemployment rate of 11%.
Spain has also about 5 million for a total of 10% [2] of the population and a whopping 20% unemployment rate.
When unemployment rates are high and the economy is unable to absorb newcomers, supply and demand dictates that labour market will be favourable to employers, ie downward pressure on wages, with the surpluses going either to consumers, or the company/investors. Aside from some possibly lower prices for people in the middle and upper classes, and better returns in their portfolios (!), a reasonable economic argument for all of this can't be made 'in the name of freedom'.
The point of the parent is to demonstrate how silly zero-sum arguments against immigration are, not to compare. A similar anecdote is to point at the open border policy inside the EU. Allowing free migration of people within the EU states (i.e. open borders) has had tremendous economic benefits for every member state, except perhaps the countries that are loosing workers.
Consider also that free migration is allowed within the US borders. Everyone in South Carolina is currently leagally allowed to migrate to California. Is California loosing money to South Carolina because of this?
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