Immigrant populations everywhere outperform local peers, whether as street traders or entrepreneurs, students or labourers. They are productive and efficient, so they are resented. But this is why they should be welcomed, whether as legal immigrants, or illegal immigrants who ought to be legal.
Lamenting the brain drain whilst averting the brain gain is a self-defeating contradiction.
Those who choose to leave countries are usually their best people. With more than their share of enterprise and energy, they display an unusual willingness to risk all in pursuit of a better life. Emigrants are recognised as a loss to the ‘old country’ and should be seen to bring a corresponding gain to the new. Countries which try to keep their people from leaving should be welcoming immigrants.
Some countries permit immigrants who bring in enough wealth, but this approach underestimates the much greater capital embodied in human skills and energy. Before the First World War, many of the world’s countries had open borders and free trade. Great migrations of poor people, and easy flows of large quantities of capital, resulted in rapid economic growth. The rest of the twentieth century was but a short episode of world history with closed borders. Current globalisation, rather than creating a new situation, is allowing a slow and grudging return to the more normal world of open borders. Unfortunately, just as borders are being reopened to the free flow of goods, controls on the movement of people are being tightened.
USA allows Mexican clothing in but keeps out Mexican seamstresses, and South Africa buys Namibian beer but bars Namibian brewery workers. They ‘shoot themselves in the foot’, subjecting local manufacturing industry to product competition from abroad without getting the benefits the foreign workforce would bring. If Mexican workers sewed in the US, and Namibians brewed in South Africa, they would add value, spend wages and pay taxes in their new country too.
Many think immigrants only come for welfare benefits. Yet illegal immigrants, at least, make no demands on the host country’s welfare system or taxpayers. And there is no ‘fixed cake’, no static number of jobs, whereby each job an immigrant finds deprives a local worker. Say’s Law (‘supply creates its own demand’) summarises how extra people produce more and cheaper goods and services and also buy more, boosting demand for goods and services in a virtuous spiral of wealth creation and growth.
Greater numbers of productive people create more wealth. What could be simpler? Robinson Crusoe was obviously better off after Friday arrived, and would be worse off if Friday left again. Even an extremely depressed country such as Zaire or Chad would be much worse off if the top half of its population emigrated. Conversely, if all the world’s emigrants – other people’s best – moved to Zaire and doubled its population despite local resentment, what a fantastic economic boom would follow!
Some also worry about physical shortage of land, or urban over-crowding. Yet Hong Kong’s bare, rocky island and America’s empty wilderness were transformed by continuous immigration into densely populated and wealthy countries. Western Europe, the world’s most densely populated subcontinent, has the world’s highest living standards. London’s 20m people, and Mexico City’s 30m, remain uncrowded, partly by simply building upwards to create more and more inner-city ‘land’.
However many people choose to immigrate to a country, they then produce more resources and wealth, increasing demand and physical and intellectual capital – with a corresponding loss of similar blessings in the countries they chose to leave.
South Africa takes no specific measures to encourage whites to stay, and many such as exchange controls which encourage them to leave. Presumably this is not a deliberate Africanisation policy, but conversely it seems odd to keep out black Africans bringing the energies, skills and wealth to boost growth while redressing the demographics.
With globalisation we witness a natural selection amongst the world’s best and most productive nations. As Southern Africa’s powerhouse, South Africa should be scrapping all remaining immigration controls and standards. Even the most unskilled labourer and informal trader shows by the act of immigration that s/he will be enterprising and productive in their new home. Everyone benefits; the only loser is the country that failed to keep its people.
Source: Leon Louw is the Executive Director of the Free Market Foundation. This article may be re-published without consent but with acknowledgement. The views of the author of this article are not necessarily shared by the members, council or patrons of the Foundation.
