Immigration as mutually beneficial humanitarianism.

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor
Art Carden, 05.20.10, 3:00 PM ET

Oppressive governments crush the hopes and humanity of millions. There's a pretty simple way we can help these millions get richer and freer faster while making ourselves richer too: We can open our borders.

The gains for potential immigrants are enormous. In his excellent (and free) Let Their People Come, economist Lant Pritchett argues that the additional income people could earn from working in the U.S. for eight weeks would be the same as the additional income they could earn from a lifetime of access to microcredit programs. 


Immigration to rich countries beats all other forms of aid as a way to increase the incomes of the world's poor, and it makes the world's rich richer to boot.

Consider Haiti, the reputed "poorest country in the Western Hemisphere" and the location of an earthquake that has been one of 2010's greatest humanitarian disasters. Americans were swift to come to the aid of those whose lives were shattered by the earthquake. The American government was also quick to broadcast a message telling Haitians not to try to go to the U.S. because they would be stopped and returned to Haiti.

This is penny-foolish and pound-foolish. By denying Haitians access to American markets for goods and American markets for labor, we deny them access to higher incomes and greater opportunities. The irony is that this doesn't just hurt prospective migrants. It makes us worse off too: Restricting others' access impoverishes us financially, culturally and socially.

Immigration and trade opponents assume that jobs would not disappear if the borders were closed to free trade in labor, goods and capital. They assume that Americans would fill the same jobs in agriculture, construction or manufacturing. And they would earn higher wages.

This is a mistake. These jobs wouldn't exist without free trade in goods and labor. Consider an example. In the last few months my wife and I have had work done on our roof and had a fence installed. We also pay a lawn service. These are sectors in which competition from immigrants is especially strong. If the immigrants weren't there to compete, lawn mowers, roofers and fence-builders would just earn higher wages, right? I might be a little poorer for it, but it's a small price to pay to help Americans, isn't it?

Not necessarily. If fencing, roofing and mowing cost more, we might just do these things ourselves or simply do without. Because competition lowers prices, outsourcing fencing, roofing and mowing is more attractive. This allows me to specialize in research, teaching and writing. We owe much of today's Great Conversation to the leisure afforded by specialization, trade and technological progress.

Some argue that new immigrants won't assimilate where previous generations of immigrants did. People are offended by how Spanish- or Chinese-language newspapers and television cater to immigrant audiences, but this has happened in immigrant enclaves throughout American history (I encourage you to look up foreign-language newspapers in St. Louis, for example). Furthermore, some immigrants are worried that their children are forgetting their roots because they assimilate so rapidly.

Some argue that they are only opposed to illegal immigration and that those who wish to move to the U.S. should go through the legal channels. I'm afraid this is a dodge: American immigration law is cumbersome and wasteful; further, most of the people who wish to move here stand no chance of being allowed to (Reason offers these handy directions to legality). Perhaps you're proud that your ancestors "came here legally." I'm pretty sure they would be denied entry today.

What about immigrants who wish to harm us? First, I expect they are few and far between. Most people lining up for a chance to go to the U.S. probably aren't terrorists in the making. Second, tradeoffs are important. Yes, we probably prevent a few people from entering to harm us. But this comes at the price of lots of people just looking for a job.

Some economists refer to open immigration as "the development idea no one talks about" and "the idea no one has tried." Fortunately, this is changing. There is nothing we can do for the world's poor that would be better than to throw open our borders. As an added benefit, we would get richer in the process.