Exodus

In 2007, Paul Collier published The Bottom Billion, which is still the single best book for the non-expert to read if one wanted some idea about why there are still so many people living in incredibly poor countries.  There are other books which have more detail, there are other books with interesting explanations, but Collier’s book is a nice mix of theories, written in a way that one does not have to understand all the details of economic growth modeling or empirics in order to walk away having learned quite a bit about a very complicated problem.

Paul Collier just wrote another book like that.  It too is not the most exhaustive treatise on the matter.  It too will not drive all other books off the shelf.  But, if you want to know something about a rather complicated issue and want to think about the implications of a big problem, this is a rather good book.

The book?  Exodus: How Migration is Changing our World.  It deserves to be widely read, not because it provides a definitive answer (it doesn’t), but because after reading it, there is no way to think that this is an easy problem, easily solved.

Interestingly, this is not a book I would have ever just picked up on my own.  I thought I knew about the issue of migration.  But, it was a Christmas gift from Janet, who, as I have noted here before, somehow always manages to pick out books I will enjoy.  And while the book didn’t have anything I had not ever seen before, the arrangement of all the pieces brought the whole matter into focus in a fascinating way.  Collier organizes the book around the three sets of people affected by migration: the Host Society, the Migrants, and the People left behind in the country of origin.  He also frames the question not as “Is Migration Good?” but “Should there be more or less migration than there currently is?”  The reframing is incredibly important—most of the public debate on this matter is beween those who say “Migration has benefits” and those who say “Migration has costs.”  The people who talk about the benefits imagine the migrants who bring the most benefit; the people who talk about the costs imagine those who bring the fewest benefits.  So, if we simply acknowledge that some migration provides a net benefit, but eliminating all barriers to migration results in a net cost, then the question isn’t “Are there benefits?” or “Are there costs?”  but “Where are we on the range of benefits and costs?”

Best guess after reading Collier’s book—a little less migration would be good.  And what is interesting is that a little less migration would probably help all three of the sets of people affected.  The Host societies may be suffering from too much migration now.  As Robert Putnam’s much neglected work has shown, too much diversity actually lowers people’s happiness.  As migrant communities get larger, the numbers of unassimilated immigrants increases, and society becomes less cohesive, which reduces happiness levels.  If the goal of society is to increase happiness, then this is clearly a problem.  On the economic front, migrants are a bit of a wash—they bring both economic benefits and economic costs—but on the societal well-being front, best guess is that we have a bit too much migration in the world right now.  What about the migrants themselves?  They also would benefit from a little less migration.  Obviously, the migrants benefit, but the real question is not just “Do the migrants benefit from their own personal migration?’ but “Do the migrants benefit from the combination of their own personal migration and the migration of the other people who are also currently migrating?”  Framed that way, once you have migrated, you are probably better off if there were fewer migrants following in your footsteps.  This is a tricky issue: I migrate, so I benefit.  I also want to bring in my family and others who are close to me because I will benefit from that.  But, I would like to prohibit all the other people from migrating because then the benefits to me and my family and friends will be even larger.  It seems so selfish to say that, but best guess is that this is actually true.  And what about the countries of origin?  Here too, there is probably too much migration; there are too many people leaving and the people leaving are not some random cross-section of the population, but the people you would most like to have staying to help build your society.

So, if all of that is right (and, let’s be clear, those are the conclusions I draw from the book—your mileage may vary when (not if, when) you read the book), the whole world would benefit if there was less migration going on.  But, now comes the difficult part.  Imagine you are in a society which decides to reduce migration.  How do you go about doing that?  Here, the devil is in the details.  After all, some migration is good, so just closing your borders may not be beneficial.  But, which migration do you want, and how do you stop the migration you don’t want.  And if you live in a democratic society, how do you build a broad consensus for our view on the matter?  I am convinced after reading this book that those sorts of questions are much harder than I thought and that nobody really has a good answer.  I suspect an expansive Guest Worker program will be part of the solution—allow temporary migration, but reduce permanent migration.  But that is a pretty tentative conclusion.

In the end, while this isn’t a Great Book by any stretch of the imagination, and while it has flaws and could be better in all sorts of way, this is a book which if you are concerned with large public policy issues, you really ought to read.  In fact, while it isn’t as good and comprehensive as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, it is the best social science book I have read since Murray’s book came out.

A song?  Easy. There are endless from which to choose.