The value of immigration

Jeffery Jones gets it. He is Mexico's undersecretary of agriculture and agribusiness, and he delivered a message in Utah this week that cuts to the heart of the global immigration debate.

Simply put, it is this: The flow of workers from poor to rich countries is a good thing.

Naturally, the rich nations need to find ways to control and monitor this flow, preferably through the use of guest-worker permits. But global migration is a good thing, not a drain.

That's the same message economist Lant Pritchett has been spreading since leaving the World Bank. Pritchett, like Jones, once studied at BYU. His belief is that one day the world will understand the value of labor migration the way a lot of people now understand the value of free trade.

A 2005 World Bank report said the 30 richest countries of the world could provide the equivalent of $300 billion in real and effective aid to the citizens of poor countries if they would only loosen their immigration restrictions. That aid would come to those people in the form of money earned from jobs. By comparison, those countries now hand out a combined $70 billion in aid to poor countries. That money comes from taxpayers and provides little, if any, real benefit.

Poor countries, in return, would benefit from having fewer unskilled workers competing for jobs. Ultimately, the loss of workers would put pressure on those countries to enact reforms that make them competitive in the labor market. Pritchett told Reason Magazine recently that he compares immigration restrictions to Apartheid. Poor people become hostages in their own countries, doomed to poverty because of where they happen to have been born.

By now the value of free trade ought to be beyond question. The North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, has tripled the amount of trade among member nations, according to figures from the office of the U.S. trade representative. During that time, unemployment has gone down in the United States, wages have increased and both manufacturing and agriculture have benefitted.

There is no reason to doubt that the free and orderly movement of laborers among nations would be any less beneficial. The sooner more leaders in the United States understand this the way Jones does, the better.

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