IMMIGRANTS
Your Country Needs Them
By Philippe Legrain
Princeton University Press,
374 pages, $29.95
Philippe Legrain, a British journalist, economist and writer, is an unrepentant free trader in goods and commodities. Intriguingly, in this new work - a contentious and very readable book on migration patterns in the globalizing 21st century - he brings these laissez-faire views into the arena of social justice.
Legrain, previously a correspondent for The Economist and a special adviser to the director-general of the World Trade Organization, sees unrestricted free trade as a means to improve the lot of all the world's people. A quote from his last work, Open World, aptly articulates this philosophy: "Globalization offers a richer life - in the broadest sense - for people in rich countries and the only realistic route out of poverty for the world's poor."
In his new tome, Legrain audaciously expands his initial thesis of the world as marketplace to one that includes the liberated global movement of humans. As he asks: "Why can computers be imported from China duty-free, but Chinese people not freely come to make computers here?"
For Legrain, immigrants are not an invading army but rather individuals in search of a better life. They are no different from people moving in search of employment from St. John's to Calgary, or Idaho to Indiana, except that a border obstructs their path.
He views the U.S. government's Operation Hold the Line, on the Mexican frontier, and similar efforts by the EU along its eastern and Mediterranean approaches, as part of a cruel, undeclared war on the Third World's poor, and identifies those who die in ill-fated attempts to reach his economic Utopia as "war dead."
A fiscal libertarian, Legrain is surprisingly altruistic. For him, the world is unfair and the rich should do more to help the poor. Therefore, unfettered international migration should be next on Bob Geldof's agenda for global economic justice. An aging population of guilt-ridden First World baby-boomers may soon dutifully see the light and follow suit, demanding open migration and, in so doing, truly making poverty history.
In Legrain's opinion, warehousing people from poor countries within their national borders like medieval serfs is indefensible. His solution is crude yet straightforward: Let the market decide. After all, he says, "Someone has to clean toilets, collect rubbish and do casual labour [because]even natives with no qualifications refuse to do certain dirty, difficult and dangerous jobs."
Immigration currently allows rich countries to import low-cost, labour-intensive services from poorer countries. Canada is a sterling example of this phenomenon. It has the fastest-growing population among G8 countries, adding 1.6 million people since 2001. Domestic births fuel only a third of this number, immigration the remainder. Stats Canada estimates that by 2030, our population growth will depend solely on immigration.
In Legrain's Brave New Vision, such numbers might increase, even dramatically, with no long-term detriment perceived by the host country. Newcomers already naturally migrate and remain in huge global centres that capture the entire world in one place - and this is good. For him, metropolises such as London, New York and Canada's MTV -- Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver - are creative, cosmopolitan places because of their cultural diversity and their capacity to draw from it.
What Legrain does not sufficiently articulate are the true fiscal and societal costs of assimilation. While the natural market might rapidly adjust to migrant flows, societies and their complex social infrastructures do not. Governments need time and money to enhance public services, from education to health to social housing, to buffer what might be serious paradigm shifts in population. Even though immigrants pay their fair share of taxes, the cost of evolution is often a substantial burden on an unsuspecting host community.
Legrain retorts that such dramatic migration change generates a creative buzz that translates into very real economic vibrancy. He uses the example of the raw energy generated at Fabric, a nightclub situated in London's trendy Clerkenwell district, an area previously home to such distinct personalities as Cromwell, Lenin and Daniel Defoe, creator of that ultimate immigrant, Robinson Crusoe. Fabric hosts DTPM, which is advertised as "a poly sexual night of pure hedonism & good music - the perfect conclusion to the weekend." For Legrain, the excitement of DTPM is the ultimate metaphor for the latent energy to be found in his New Age cosmopolitan city.
Legrain believes individuals are willing to pay higher rents to live in places like London and New York. Unfortunately, this does not translate well for the immigrant who waits tables, guards vacant offices or is a children's nanny, forced to live in rental accommodation made more costly by the same market forces that attract those who go clubbing.
Compounding these suppositions are rather naive assumptions about human behaviour. Because remittances sent from migrant workers to families in their home nations are so great, Legrain claims that migration helps poor countries.
According to World Bank estimates, in 2005, such remittances totalled $167-billion (U.S.); of this, $45-billion went to low-income countries such as India and $88-billion to lower-middle-income nations like China and the Philippines. That total is more than the $79-billion that developing countries received in formal aid. Legrain postulates that official aid is typically wasted by host governments on bureaucracy and corruption. He would rather it were remitted directly to recipient families.
His response to criticism that such money is frittered away on consumer goods such as televisions and MP3 players is telling: "What is wrong with consumption? If poor people prefer to spend their money on televisions that's up to them. ... Privileged westerners ... should not be criticizing poor peoples' perfectly valid spending choices."
Such arguments are trickle-down economics at their worst. They encourage individuals to assume that formal government aid has little or no tangible positive effects on a recipient Third World community, and, conversely, that all is well as long as the local person has his colour television.
Intriguingly, Legrain would encourage some immigrants to return home after a period of working abroad. If immigration were temporary, a host nation's citizens might tolerate it more easily. So why not let immigrants post an arrival bond or have part of their salaries withheld until they leave?
The difficulty with this notion is that such immigrants may have far more compelling reasons to stay than to return to their countries. Financial gains for even menial labour are huge. A Sierra Leonean doctor makes $50 per month; a South African physician, $1,242. Life is much easier in a world with social compassion, less corruption and a better health-care system than one that may exist at home.
On a more positive note, Legrain applauds immigrant "hometown associations," which have sprung up in the First World to support rural-development projects in Latin America, the Caribbean and Philippines.
Another encouraging development he describes is "globalization from below," a phenomenon involving migrants such as the indigenous Otavalan, from Ecuador, who market their ponchos and woollens at many Canadian fairs.
Legrain confronts the issue of the Brain Drain with startling facts: All three of Albania's AIDS experts have migrated to Canada. Ghana has six doctors for every 120,000 people and has lost 30 per cent to the English-speaking First World. Pakistan loses half of its medical-school graduates every year, as does South Africa. More Ethiopian doctors practice in Chicago than in Ethiopia. Jamaica has to train five doctors to keep one.
Yet this crisis should be balanced against the reality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom to emigrate is a fundamental human privilege. As Legrain cautions: "Poor countries have no automatic right to their citizens' labour, or indeed their allegiances. ... If the mighty Soviet Union couldn't stop its people emigrating, a tin-pot dictatorship like Zimbabwe or a desperately poor country like Haiti certainly can't."
Ultimately, Legrain finds one country that seems to get it, and his answer is pleasantly surprising: "Stripped of the myths of ethnic nationhood and confronted with the reality of the diversity of globalized individualism, Canada leads the way for other nations to follow."
The provocative issue of accelerated immigration from have-not communities into the more affluent First World is not going to disappear, either here, in Europe or with our neighbours to the south. Immigration is, and will be, integral to the Canadian experience for many years to come. Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them should be required reading for any individual who wishes to engage in informed discourse about human migration in the changing 21st-century world.
Chuck Konkel is an immigrant, now a naturalized Canadian, whose family first landed at Halifax's Pier 21 as displaced persons.