Is Migration Good for Development How Could You Even Ask

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Is Migration Good for Development?How Could You
Even Ask?

• Lant Pritchett
• Harvard Kennedy School
• Presentation at
• Columbia University
• Feb. 13, 2009

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Is Migration Good for Development?

• Ideas and their evolution Marx and Foucault
• Spatial Based versus People Based thinkingwhy
  does dirt matter in theories of justice?
• The movement of people leads to development gains
  orders of magnitude larger than anything else on
  the agenda
• For some places mobility may be the only
  development agenda
• Ideas and their evolution Crazy, Crazy, Crazy,
  Obvious

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The world that was lost in 1914

• He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap
  and comfortable means of transit to any country
  or climate without passport or other formality,
  could dispatch his servant to the neighboring
  office of a bank for such supply of the precious
  metals as might seem convenient, and could then
  proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without
  knowledge of their religion, language, or
  customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person,
  and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and
  much surprised at the least interference.
• JM Keynes

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Second Globalization as Farce

• Hegel remarks somewhere that all great
  world-historic facts and personages appear, so to
  speak, twice. He forgot to add the first time as
  tragedy, the second time as farce. Men make
  their own history, but they do not make it as
  they please they do not make it under
  self-selected circumstances, but under
  circumstances existing already, given and
  transmitted from the past. The tradition of all
  dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
  brains of the living.
• Karl Marx, remarks somewhere

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Deconstruction, the most powerful idea of your
time

• There is no reason or discourse or truth
  there is just power
• Power socially constructs reality such that the
  agenda is deeply controlled without explicit
  repressionsits common sense
• Deconstruction is the subversion of the
  socially constructions of established discourse
• So, where do we look for overwhelming power? Not
  to controversy but for silencewhat opposes the
  truly powerful is not controversial but just
  plain crazy

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has yet to tackle nationalism the most powerful
idea of my time

• God is dead
• All ..isms are mortally wounded (e.g. racism,
  sexism, sexualism)
• Truth and Reason have retreated into scare
  quotes
• And the imagined communities that are nations
  are all that is left

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Estimated wage gains to low skill workers of
crossing the US borderon average (from 42
countries), conservatively, P10,000
Wages of same workers 10,000 to 15,000 (in
PPP) By crossing the border
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Place based versus People based thinking

• A person moves from Peru to the US, his/her
  income increases by 10,000.
• Suppose no one else is affected.
• Assume they make above average wages in Peru and
  below average wages in the USA.
• The traditional, national place based measures
  (e.g. GDP per capita, average wages) of
  development go down in both places

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Output per natural (or wages per natural or
poverty per natural) is the more natural way to
think

• If person moves from rural to urban the wage
  gain counts, of the person moves from state to
  state the wage gain countsthe natural global
  measure of development has to count the movers
  somewhere.

Guyanese
Jamaicans
Guyana
Jamaica
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Labor Mobility is bigger than anything else on
the agenda

• The gain from a lifetime of microcredit is the
  same as 8 weeks working in the USA
• Total annual gain to Grameen Bank borrowers
  (around) 30 million
• If I get 3,000 Bangladeshi workers into the US,
  do I get a Nobel Peace Prize?

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Debt Relief

• Total foregone payments due to HIPC debt relief
  in Africaabout 2.5 billion (in 2005)
• About 150,000 Africans to the US--.1 percent of
  the labor force, about 1 percent of monthly gross
  job growth, about one (good) months net job
  growth
• If a labor mobility activist accomplishes that do
  they get to sing at the Super Bowl?

• Picture of Bono here

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From the top of the cliff at the borders that
faces labor you cannot see the gains from goods
or capital
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Stand the question on its head

• Not Is Migration Good for Development? but,
  since labor mobility is so good for proper,
  people based, measures of development why is
  there so much talk about things that have gains
  that are so much smaller?
• (Hint It has something to do with power)

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But it is worse

• The myth of the current international system, the
  world created to win the peace after WWIIthe
  Pax Americana is
• The world can be divided up spatially into
  arbitrary bits
• Each of those bits can achieve an adequate
  standard of living

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• Experiments been runits called the USA
• Same institutions,
• Same Policies,
• Free labor mobility
• What happened?
• People got out of Dodge

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Contiguous regions of the USA are a third their
counter-factual size
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There is no theory or evidence to rule out the
possibility of Ghost countries

• Persistent negative shocks to labor demand--the
  supportable population at any level of
  population
• If labor is mobile you get ghostsdeclining
  populations (e.g. rural midwest)
• If labor is not mobile you get zombiespopulatio
  ns trapped in a spiral of declining wages (e.g.
  Zambia?)

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Back to ideas

• Pax Romanaspatial integration (or sorts)
• Pax Britannicafull globalization (of
  sorts)labor, capital, goods
• Pax Americanajust goods and capital

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Globalization of the Pax RomanaNot a single
Roman emperor after 100 A.D. was born in Italy
20
Weekly food for a family in Bargteheide, Germany,
525 per person/month
Source Hungry Planet
21
Weekly food for a family in Tingo Ecuador, 14.72
per person per month
Source Hungry Planet
22
Food for a family in Chad, 86 cents per person
per month
Source Hungry Planet
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Shift in ideas, silly, controversial,
progressive, then obvious
33 increase in approval over 4 years
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Crazy, crazy, crazyhero