Alex Massie Alex Massie

The 3% Solution & the Case for More, Not Fewer, Foreign Workers

So the Tories have announced their new international development policy. Apparently it’s going to be “results-based” and fit for a “post-bureaucratic age” (this latter being, mind you, the kind of phrase coined by bureaucrats). Iain Dale likes the sound of it and so does Tory Bear. I’m sure there are plenty of good ideas lurking in the new paper, but I’m also pretty sure that there’s not much sign of the Tories moving towards a truly radical approach to international development: open borders.

Actually, it’s not quite open borders, more a question of creating a worldwide guest-worker programme. Harvard’s Lant Pritchett is perhaps the leading proponent of this sort of idea. He calculates that increasing the developed world’s labour force by 3% could be worth more than $300bn to citizens of the Third World and their families. That’s a hell of a lot more than OECD countries spent on foreign aid last year. It’s also a lot more than would be produced by eliminating trade barriers (though this too would be a good thing and a subject worth pursuing.)

Pritchett was profiled by the New York Times a couple of years ago and the question asked in the paper’s headline is a good one: Should We Globalize Labor Too? This is no panacea, for sure, but then nor is any other approach to international development. However, since the single most important factor in anyone’s life is the country and society into which they are born, chipping away at the barriers to international mobility and migration at least does something to help poor people and, in the end, poor places.

Politically, this is a tough sell, not least because, as Fraser’s latest post outlines, there are plenty of people who think foreigners make up too large a part of the workforce now and not many, I suspect, who wonder if the problem might be that we don’t have enough foreigners working in this country.

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