Paul Collier
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comparable to Alabama, at the very bottom. The public universities, once world-class institutions, have been starved of funding. In part, the collapse in public services is a consequence of a change in spending priorities away from redistribution toward prisons. California used to educate its poor, whereas now it jails them. But the core of the problem is not the composition of spending but the lack of revenue. Despite its prosperity, California is acutely short of revenue because of a tax strike by higher income groups who suc-
ceeded in placing a cap on property taxes. Given the scale of the problem in California, it would be foolish to attribute it to any one cause. However, a plausible contributing factor is that mass immigration has undermined the empathy of fortunate indigenes for poor people. Perhaps in previous times those Californians who were well off saw the less well off as people like themselves who had had less good fortune, whereas now they see them as a distinct group to which neither they nor their children belong.
Just as the indigenous can fail to recognize immigrants as members of a common society, so immigrants can fail to recognize the indigenous. It is time for another anecdote: exhibit B is a grim British court case of 2012 in which a group of middle-aged Asian men ran a sex ring abusing indigenous children. Commentaries on the case tended to polarize into anti-immigrant arguments that such behavior typified Asian culture and politically correct comments that the case had nothing to do with immigration but showed that all middle-aged men are pigs given the chance. But such behavior is far from normal in Asian societies. Indeed, none of the abused children were Asian, and Asian families are noted for the sexual protection
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of their young people. Nor is it credible to dismiss the immigrant aspect of the case: middle-aged men are not pigs. These men were evidently applying radically different standards of conduct toward children according to their ethnicity: the children of the indigenous were “the other” and of less account.
So mutual regard is valuable in a society both for cooperation and for equity. It is challenged by the introduction of culturally distant groups. Immigrants from very different cultures are likely to arrive with less sense of trust in others. Their societies of origin are not immoral, but the basis of morality is different, reflecting the honor of a clan or family. As Mark Weiner shows in The Rule of the Clan (2011), honor codes used to be the global norm. They are remarkably persistent, and breaking them has been one of the triumphs of Western societies. On arrival, immigrants from honor societies may be seen by the indigenous population as “the other”
and to see that population as “the other.” If these behaviors persist, then the society will become less cooperative and less equal. So the key issue becomes whether they persist or erode: do immigrants absorb the norm of trust, and do both immigrants and the indigenous come to see each other as members of a common society?
The Absorption Rate of Diasporas
The rate at which diasporas are absorbed into society has powerful repercussions, and so the forces that determine it are themselves of interest. In chapter 2 I introduced one important influence: as the size of the diaspora increases, the additional interaction within the group crowds out interaction with the indigenous population, and so absorption slows down. I now introduce three other influences: the composition of the diaspora, the attitudes of migrants, and the attitudes and policies of host countries.
88 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
Absorption and the Composition of the Diaspora
For a given size of the diaspora, its composition is likely to affect how rapidly its members merge into the indigenous mainstream
culture. Cultural distance is a meaningful concept: you may remember that we can measure it objectively by the number of steps of separation between the languages of two cultures as shown by
a language tree. What is more, so measured, cultural distance has significant consequences. A reasonable presumption is that the wider the cultural distance is between migrants and the indigenous population, the slower the rate of absorption will be. I do not propose this as an iron law, but rather as a tendency. Recall that absorption can occur both by migrants adopting aspects of indigenous culture and by the indigenous population adopting aspects of the culture of migrants. But by either means, for a given set of policies, the wider the gap initially separating cultures is, the longer it is likely to take before they merge.
This innocuous-sounding presumption is going to have a surprising implication. As before, if you are an intuitive genius you will leap to it in one bound, but for the rest of us the workhorse model provides a helpful bit of scaffolding. To remind you, the diaspora schedule shows the combinations of the diaspora and migration at which the inflow into the diaspora from migration equals the outflow from the diaspora due to the merger into mainstream society. The rate at which the diaspora merges with the indigenous population is depicted by the slope of the schedule. The slower the rate of absorption, the smaller the increase in migration needed to sustain a given increase in the diaspora, so that slow absorption implies a flat schedule. In Figure 3.1, I compare two diasporas that are at different cultural distances from the indigenous population. For purposes of illustration I have chosen Poles and Bangladeshis in Britain, but it could equally
THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 89
Diaspora Schedule
(Poles)
Diaspora Schedule
(Bangladeshis)
M’
Rate of Migration
M
0
Polish
Bangladeshi
Diaspora
Diaspora
Size of Diaspora
Figure 3.1 Diasporas and Migration in Equilibrium: Poles and Bangladeshis in Britain
have been Mexicans and Eritreans in the United States, or Algerians and Chinese in France. For any given common size, the one that is more distant will have the flatter sloping schedule.
The natural equilibrium for these two inflows is where their
diaspora schedules cross the migration function. This shows what would happen in the absence of any policy interventions such as migration restrictions or strategies for changing the absorption rate of particular groups. As I discussed in chapter 2, the two lines may not cross, in which case there is no equilibrium and the natural rate of migration keeps increasing. So one possibility is that the culturally more distant migration process has no natural
90 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
equilibrium: migration accelerates until stopped by policy intervention. But now consider another possibility: both culturally proximate and culturally distant migration have natural equilibria. To keep things as simple as possible, I am going to assume that other than for differences in their diasporas, the impetus for migration is the same for Bangladeshis as for Poles. That is, in terms of the diagram they have a common migration function,
M-Mc. Of course, this is not realistic, but for present purposes I want to focus exclusively on a single influence on migration: that of diasporas.
Suppose, probably reasonably, that Bangladeshis are more dis-
tant from English culture than Poles. This has a simple yet important implication. Following the previous argument about the effect of cultural distance on how rapidly a diaspora merges into the mainstream, the Bangladeshi diaspora will have a slower rate of absorption than the Polish diaspora. In terms of the diagram, the slope of the Bangladeshi schedule will be flatter than the Polish.
Now the value of the diagram comes into its own, because the
punch line leaps off the page. In equilibrium, the culturally more distant group, Bangladeshis, will have a larger diaspora. This much is unsurprising: being culturally more distant, Bangladeshis will merge less rapidly and so, for a common rate of migration, the stock of people who identify as Bangladeshi will end up larger than that of people who identify as Poles. But the more remarkable difference between the Bangladeshi and the Polish equilibria is that the rate
of migration will end up permanently higher for Bangladeshis than for Poles.
While the first implication is intuitively obvious, this second one—that the rate of migration of the culturally more distant group will be permanently higher—is decidedly not obvious. Indeed,
the opposite might have been the intuitive expectation. The model
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shows why intuition is wrong. So we get the paradoxical result that for a given income gap between countries of origin and a host country, the sustained migration rate will be greater the more culturally distant is the country of origin from the host country. As far as I can tell, this result has not previously been known. If that is so, then it vin-dicates why a model is valuable. Recall that the purpose of a good model is not to do our thinking for us, but to provide supporting scaffolding that enables our understanding to reach further than we could achieve by unaided reasoning.
So, armed with a new understanding that the greater cultural
distance of a group increases its equilibrium rate of migration, think how this in turn feeds back onto the composition of the diasporas that build up in a host society. Over time, those migrants that are culturally proximate to the indigenous population absorb into it, while those that are culturally distant remain in the diaspora. As a result, as diasporas accumulate, on average they become more
culturally distant. This in turn has consequences for the rate of absorption. Because a larger diaspora is on average more culturally distant from the indigenous population, the average rate at which it is absorbed slows down. Suppose, for example, that there are two countries of origin: one culturally proximate—“AlmostUsLand”—
and the other distant—“Mars.” Migrants from AlmostUsLand are
absorbed more rapidly than those from Mars. As the diaspora builds up, a higher proportion of it is from Mars and so the average rate of absorption declines. This then is a further reason that the overall schedule—representing the sum of all the individual diasporas—
becomes flatter as the diaspora increases. Later in this chapter we will see why such a flattening might have important consequences.
The effects discovered by Robert Putnam and others suggest that for a given rate of migration the social costs in terms of reduced trust within groups and increased tensions between them are higher
92 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
the wider the cultural distance is. Hence, we have arrived at a paradox. The economics of migration is driven by the individual maximizing decisions of migrants and their families. Diasporas reduce the costs of migration, and so the larger the diaspora from a country of origin, the higher will be the rate of migration from it. But the social costs of migration are driven by the externalities that these privately maximizing decisions happen to generate. The paradox is that the economic logic of private maximizing decisions, which by definition reap the maximum economic benefit for decision takers themselves, appears also to increase the social costs.
Absorption and Attitudes of Migrants: Emigrants or Settlers For a given size of diaspora, the psychology of migrants is also likely to affect the rate of absorption. I have suggested that popular cultures can be thought of as menus of downloadable stereotypes.
The attitudes that migrants adopt may be shaped not just by the conventional individual economic variables such as income and skill, but by the stereotypes they adopt. Stereotypes of migration are not set in stone; they change, sometimes quite rapidly.
Just such a change in how migrants define themselves occurred following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Thanks partly to the fall in shipping costs and the pent-up demand after a long war, mass emigration from Britain and Ireland to North America took off. There was a solid economic rationale for migration: the fertile lands of North America were available for settlement. But migration at this time was still a momentous decision: North America was not paradise—conditions were harsh. The economic historian of this migration, James Belich, recently spotted something fasci-
nating about how migration was conceptualized.
25 By carefully
counting the words used in hundreds of newspaper articles year by
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year he discovered that between 1810 and 1830 a subtle change occurred in the language used to describe migrants. Around 1810
the term most frequently used in newspapers was “emigrants.”
But by 1830, “emigrants” had given way to a new term, “settlers.” I think that this change was not innocuous; the two terms imply radically different narratives. Emigrants are, essentially, leaving their society of origin behind them to join a new one. Settlers, in contrast, are bringing their society of origin with them. Does this distinction matter?
The most celebrated research paper on economic development
of recent years, by the trio of Harvard- and MIT-based scholars Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, argues that migrants were historically valuable precisely because they were set-
tlers.26 What they brought with them, on this argument, was their
institutions such as the rule of law and the sanctity of contract. By bringing these institutions, settlers enabled the countries to which they migrated to escape the poverty that had until then been the lot of mankind. But while settlers are undoubtedly good for settlers, they also frequently come with some major negatives for the indigenous population. No one can credibly argue that the settlers to North America were good for the indigenous inhabitants of the continent; that settlers to Australia were good for aborigines; or that settlers to New Zealand were good for Maoris. Settlers may, in the long term, prove to have been good for black South Africans, but this did not begin until power shifted to a government intent on ensuring benefits for blacks by transferring income from the settler population. Currently, the most high-profile settlers are Jewish Israelis: while the rights of Jewish settlement of the Occupied Territories are hotly disputed—and entirely outside the scope of this book—no one attempts to justify Jewish settlement on the grounds that it is beneficial for indigenous Palestinians.
94 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
In the post-Napoleonic period, when mass migration to North
America took off, the group with the greatest appetite to become settlers was the Protestant community in the north of Ireland (emigration by Catholics from southern Ireland did not take off until after the potato famine of the 1840s). The most likely explanation for this propensity is that the Protestants in the north of Ireland were already settlers, brought in from Scotland and England by successive British governments to establish a loyalist population in the unruly colony. That early influx of settlers, now more than four centuries old, is still playing out in bitter divisions, and it is indeed unfortunately still just about meaningful to speak of a “settler”
population and an “indigenous” population. Were the “indigenous Irish” to be polled on whether they were glad in retrospect that settlement had taken place from Scotland, it is doubtful that a majority
would be positive. 27
Settlers not only bring their own agendas, but they also bring their own culture. History is replete with instances of settler minorities diffusing their culture onto indigenous populations: an obvious example is missionary activity, which unsurprisingly can be shown to have left a permanent legacy of altered religious affilia-
tion.28 Sometimes the process of cultural diffusion is straightforwardly brutal. In Latin America the ubiquity of Spanish reflects past settler cultural power. In Angola the ubiquity of Portuguese names among the indigenous population reflects past cultural dominance by settlers. But sometimes sweeping cultural diffusion occurs through a decentralized process rather than a gun barrel.
The most complete such cultural takeover by a settler minority that I have come across occurred in Britain. The settlers were Anglo-Saxons and the period was roughly A.D. 400–600. Before 400 there were few Anglo-Saxons in
Britain and at no time did they constitute more than around 10 percent of the population. Nor, as far as we
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can tell, did they violently conquer and subjugate the indigenous Britons: there is little trace of local violence in the archaeological
record.29 Yet the extent of Anglo-Saxon cultural takeover is appar-
ent from language and religion. Before 400 the languages spoken were probably Celtic, approximately like modern Welsh, and Latin.
By 600 the language was English. This new language contained no trace of the original Celtic language; instead it was an amalgam of settler dialects, influenced most heavily by Friesian. Similarly, the Christian religion, which in the early fifth century was the official religion of the country, had almost completely disappeared by the end of the sixth century. Christianity had to be reintroduced from Ireland and Rome. As far as we can tell from the inevitably scanty evidence, in the face of Anglo-Saxon settlement the indigenous Britons suffered a cultural collapse. Quite why the Britons suffered such an extreme loss of indigenous culture is unknown, but something evidently made it cool to imitate the Anglo-Saxons.
Whether we should lament the loss of an indigenous culture is debatable. If it happens, it is after all voluntary. But a culture is, par excellence, a public good: something that everyone values but no one in particular is rewarded for sustaining. At the global level we value the existence of other cultures even if we do not personally experience them: like many things we do not personally experience, they have existence value. At the individual level, parents usually want to pass on their culture to their children, but whether this is feasible depends not just on parental decisions but upon the choices of those around them. Thus, even if when viewed ex post, cultural change is welcomed by later generations, viewed ex ante, indigenous populations may reasonably be wary of the cultural challenge posed by settlers. The message that their grandchildren will take delight in having adopted someone else’s culture is not, necessarily, reassuring. Of course, cultural change driven by settlers