Migration is complicated. Don’t pretend it’s not

I expect you’ve already noticed it, but in case you’ve been living in a cave or an economics faculty for the past ten years, I’ll repeat it. Goods are not like people. Goods only move wherever they are needed. They don’t come laden with an attachment to a homeland or a social network. Your Bosch dishwasher doesn’t pine for its washing-machine mates back in Stuttgart. Your Ikea sofa doesn’t claim benefits. If you buy a Mercedes, you don’t suddenly find two Audis and a Volkswagen turning up on your drive claiming to be close relatives and demanding to live in your garage.

So, looked at dispassionately, the principle that the free movement of goods is somehow linked with the free movement of people is quite an odd idea. Goods don’t mind emigrating; people often do. (Even in the US, where you can travel 1,000 miles in a straight line and find yourself in a town pretty much indistinguishable from the one you left, most people lead their entire lives in the state where they were born).

Yes, people value freedom of movement, but they value the freedom of non-movement too. In many ways, the euro was an assault on the freedom to stay put. Since eurozone countries with lower productivity can no longer devalue their currencies to become competitive, and since efficient countries are full of grim Lutherans who are unwilling to subsidise inefficient ones, the only remaining solution is for people from low-productivity countries to move to countries where they can become more productive themselves.

‘Free movement of labour’ rests on the normative economic assumption that people, just like goods, should be happy to move countries on the basis of economic expediency alone. But if you assume this, you end up extending privileges towards the few (mostly young) people who can and will emigrate — at the expense of the majority who can’t or won’t.