What if I told you I know how to add trillions of dollars to the global economy, and improve
the lives of billions of people with a single policy change? Sound too good to be true?
Well, I should warn you it's a policy that people in most rich countries oppose. What
is it? Open immigration.
The consensus among economists is that free trade between countries creates huge gains
in prosperity. The same thing happens when you have free trade in labor. In other words,
more open immigration.
We don't have to remove all of the barriers to immigration to start to see these gains.
If only 5% of the population in poorer countries immigrated to richer countries, global incomes
would rise by four to nine trillion dollars. These gains are possible because when you
allow workers to move to countries with more economic opportunities, they are able to produce
more wealth with the same skills by orders of magnitude. For instance, when an unskilled
Haitian moves to the United States, their pay rises by more than 1000%.
Some worry that increased immigration would harm native-born workers. However, most studies
show that on the whole these harms are non-existent or minor, temporary, and clustered only on
a small portion of the population. Free trade and labor bring economic gains to virtually
everyone in the long run.
There's plenty of room for debate about what a more open immigration policy should
look like, but our goal should be clear: to allow more workers to freely move around the
world, to where the can be as productive and prosperous as possible.