Almost everybody can agree that, over the long run, the world is better off because of human migration. Think about North America. And they can also agree that people should be able to leave a place without opportunity like Buffalo, NY and move to a place like San Jose, CA where they can have a better life. But the rational agreement ends when the immigration is happening now and the immigrants are foreign. At an emotional instinctive level people don't want strangers in the neighborhood. This discordance between people's philosophy and their politics is one of the themes of Philippe Legrain's excellent book about Immigration. In Immigrants Your Country Needs Them he looks at immigration trend and issues around the world and systematically refutes the anti-immigrant arguments. He takes apart the standard arguments about cost, jobs, welfare and acculturation rates and shows alternative ways of looking at the same data that support the argument for more immigration.
Legrain also makes very good arguments in favor of immigration. He shows the needs of the developed world for more people, how migration helps the sending countries and the tremendous benefit it gives to migrants. He uses examples from around the world to make these powerful arguments but they are not the best part of the book. Philippe Legrain is also passionate about immigration. In almost every chapter after he makes the rational argument he also makes the emotional arguments. After taking about the border control situation in the EU and the USA he writes, "all our immigration controls have is a veneer of decency, which conveniently allows us to turn a blind eye to their terrible consequences."
At the end of his introduction Legrain writes "If you believe that the world is an unequal place and that the rich should do more to help the poor, then freer international migration should be the next front in the battle for global economic justice." He then makes a compelling case to show the truth of this assertion. Well done.
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