The next option for gaining access is to cheat, acquiring the permission for legal migration by illegal means. The most straightforward way of doing this is to bribe a visa official in the local embassy of the host country. Most of these officials are relatively junior, not particularly well paid, and living temporarily in the country of origin where they will inevitably get to know some local people
socially. Nor is their job particularly enriched by intrinsic rewards: their role is to keep back a tidal wave of demand while granting a hugely valuable entitlement to a few fortunate applicants who happen to meet a set of byzantine, apparently arbitrary, and rapidly changing rules. In this situation it would not be surprising if some officials accepted payment for favors. There are many ways in which an official might reconcile this behavior with his conscience: the rules are unfair; the needs are acute; the personal payment merely compensates for the danger of punishment. The upshot of the
160 MIGRANTS: GRIEVANCE OR GRATITUDE?
evident difficulties of administering a visa system is that in many instances there is a “going rate” for an illegally acquired visa. Because the gains from migration are so large, the going rate is typically
several thousand dollars. 9
Another way of cheating is by masquerading as a member of a
category that is eligible for entry. For example, in the 1980s Sweden initially had a very generous policy of granting citizenship to asylum seekers from Eritrea, then a province of Ethiopia beset by civil war. However, as the numbers grew, the policy became less generous. In response, some of the Eritrean immigrants who had acquired Swedish citizenship lent their passports to similar-looking friends and relatives: in the days before bio-recognition Swedish immigration officials found it difficult to challenge identity just on the basis of a passport photograph. Swedish officials then hit on a nonphotographic way of discriminating: Eritreans who were Swedish citizens had inevitably learned some Swedish, whereas those attempting to misstate their identity had not. But just as would-be immigrants can acquire the education, or the spouse that makes them eligible, so they can learn Swedish: in the midst of civil war and famine desperate Eritreans were learning Swedish in order to masquerade as Swedish citizens. A further version of masquerading is to pose as an asylum seeker. The ugly pattern of repression in many poor countries creates an evident need for asylum. In turn, the willingness to grant asylum creates an opportunity to cheat.
Falsely posing as an asylum seeker is doubly reprehensible because it undermines the legitimacy of a vital humanitarian institution, but such ethical considerations may cut no ice with desperate people.
The number of asylum seekers is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than legitimately met needs, reflecting the extreme difficulty of refuting claims of abuse at the hands of authority. Further, the standards of governance that are required by the host country
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courts before a country of origin is considered nonrepressive appear almost insultingly high: for example, only four out of the fifty-four African countries meet the standards required by the British courts for their citizens to be returned involuntarily to them.
The ultimate option is both expensive and risky: it is to travel without permission to enter the host country and try to evade physical restrictions. As barriers have become more sophisticated, their evasion has come to require specialist knowledge, generating a profession of people smugglers. As with crooked visa officials, they can sell places on boats, places hidden in a container truck, or places on a fence-crossing party, for several thousand dollars. But the key difference with illegitimately acquired legal entry is the risks. One evident risk is of detection. People caught attempting to enter Australia illegally are currently held in detention centers off the mainland: they can be stuck there for a long time. Illegal migrants to the United States are deported in very large numbers: in 2011 a remarkable 400,000. The costs of detection are humiliation, a period of restricted living, and the loss of the costs incurred in the attempt.
The second risk is of the physical hazards of the enterprise: boats sink and stowaways suffocate or freeze to death. But the final and potentially most troubling risk comes from the people smugglers themselves. By its nature, this is an unregulated industry run by criminals in which the client-enterprise relationship is one-off.
Having paid their money up front, would-be migrants have no
recourse if the smuggler defaults or underperforms. Cash-strapped illegal migrants may be attracted by offers in which part of the payment is deferred until after successful arrival in the host country.
But smugglers who offer such deals must build mechanisms for
enforcing the obligation: in effect, illegal immigrants become temporary slaves to their smugglers. Among the limited options for profitable and enforceable slavery, the most obvious is prostitution:
162 MIGRANTS: GRIEVANCE OR GRATITUDE?
illegal immigrants who dreamed of becoming secretaries end up as sex slaves. Once smugglers have such a mechanism of enforcement, why should they stop merely at recovering the notional debt? Slaves are likely to remain slaves until they escape or perish. Once arrived, even if illegal immigrants escape dependence upon people-smugglers, they have few options. To survive they need an income that they cannot legally earn. So illegal immigrants are either driven into the hands of tax-evading employers or must find extralegal self-employment such as crime. Policies for dealing with the problem of illegal migration have been inept even by the dismal standards of overall policies toward migration. I will suggest better ways of managing it in the final chapter.
The Lifeline
From the perspective of the would-be migrant, the combination of the need to finance migration as a costly investment and the need for a nonrisky means of overcoming legal restrictions has one dominant solution: family members who have already migrated.
Diasporas turn out to be overwhelmingly important in determining the pattern and scale of migration. Diasporas facilitate migration through many distinct routes.
Because family ties are privileged in the allocation of visas, diasporas create opportunities for the legal access of subsequent migrants. Unsurprisingly, established migrants come under intense pressure from their family in their country of origin to facilitate the legal process. It is much easier to do this from within the host country, than by visiting its beleaguered embassy in the country of origin. Further, once migrants are citizens, they acquire voting rights and so can lobby their local political representatives to write to officials on their behalf. For example, in high-immigrant constituencies
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in Britain as many as 95 percent of the surgery visitors to members of Parliament concern the immigration of family members.
Diasporas can also provide local information about opportuni-
ties. For example, in a recent experimental study mobile phones were provided to households in Niger to discover whether they affected subsequent migration. Because workers now had better connectivity with relatives and friends in foreign jobs markets, emigration significantly increased. 10 The information provided by relatives abroad may, indeed, inadvertently be somewhat gilded because of the natural tendency of the migrant to exaggerate his own success. Diasporas generate not just information about opportunities but the opportunities themselves: many migrants establish small businesses, a natural consequence of the conjunction of the aspirations associated with migration and the discrimination they often encounter in the jobs market. Their businesses can find temporary room for newly arrived relatives even if they are not very productive, since minimum wage laws can easily be evaded. In
addition to information and opportunities, diasporas directly lower the costs of arrival: while searching for work migrants can live with their established relatives.
Perhaps above all, diasporas can facilitate the financial costs of the investment in migration. Often, established migrants will be in the best position to pay
for travel tickets: they are earning far more than their relatives in countries of origin. If the money is provided as a loan, they are in a strong position to enforce repayment: they can observe success, and they can make life difficult for defaulters.
Deals are less liable to be time-inconsistent. Even if the money is provided by the family remaining in the country of origin, the diaspora social network provides pressure on the new migrant to meet the obligation to remit, and so makes the provision of finance less risky.
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All these forces converge to make diasporas critical. As a result immigrants tend to concentrate in a few cities, as I described in chapter 3. Not only do diasporas affect the locations that subsequent immigrants choose, they are the single most important influence that determines the scale of migration. That is what is captured in the workhorse model. The accumulated stock of migrants increases the flow, so that migration tends to accelerate. The first migrant must overcome a far more challenging set of barriers than the mil-lionth migrant. With my colleague Anke Hoeffler, I have tried to estimate the typical effect of diasporas on migration from poor countries to rich ones. Our results, which are only provisional, illus-
trate why diaspora-fueled migration is liable rapidly to accelerate. 11
Ten extra diasporas at the start of a decade induce seven extra migrants during the decade. In consequence, the next decade begins with seventeen extra diasporas that therefore induce twelve extra migrants during the decade. Following such a process through from 1960 to 2000, an initial addition to the diaspora count of 10 would grow to 83 by 2000.
But the effect of diasporas that is now receiving the most attention from economists is not that they increase the rate of migration; it is that they change its composition. From the perspective of indigenous populations it is better to attract highly educated workers than poorly educated workers and people who are dependents.
Points systems that ration access are designed to have this effect.
But diasporas enable migrants to override points systems. Their effect is so powerful that whenever family connections are deemed to confer entitlements to entry, they will dominate the effect of
education and skill-based rationing. 12 This message from recent
research gives rise to a sharp potential collision between a perspective based on the individual rights of migrants and one based on the rights and interests of the indigenous population.
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Current immigration policies typically reinforce the tendency of migration to accelerate and undermine points-based systems, because through family reunification programs they privilege the relatives of existing immigrants. But does the right to immigrate necessarily confer on the migrant a right to grant others the right to immigrate? If so, do those others in turn have the right to confer the same right? Evidently, if rights are structured in such a way, educational points systems become largely moot: relatives will crowd out the skilled.
We now come to the most important ethical choice in this book. I have already introduced the distinction between group and individual rights in the context of social housing. Since migrants have greater needs than the indigenous, individual-based rights will allocate them a larger share of social housing than the indigenous, whereas group-based rights will allocate them the same share. But social housing pales into insignificance when compared with the right to bring in relatives. Only a small minority of the indigenous population wishes to bring in a foreign spouse or other relative: that is why it became a right. In contrast, a substantial proportion of the diaspora wishes to bring in a foreign relative. So if migrants are granted the same individual rights as the indigenous, then the composition of migration is skewed heavily toward dependents. There is thus a strong practical case, and perhaps a legitimate ethical one, for defining equal treatment at the level of the group: migrants should collectively benefit from excludable public goods such as social housing and the right to bring in a relative to the same degree as the indigenous population.
The allocation of social housing is already sometimes based on group-based equity, depending upon the practices adopted by local authorities. In contrast, the allocation of entry rights for relatives is currently scarcely based on any clear principles. However, the mechanics of operating group-based equity to the entry rights would be straightforward. Some countries already assign some categories
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of entry rights through quota-bound lotteries. They are an internationally standard way of reconciling fair access with a fixed target.
Societies may choose to structure their immigration rules so as to confer unrestricted rights for each individual immigrant to bring in relatives. But while such a policy is generous, it is not the only rule consistent with an ethical approach. Limiting the rights of the diaspora to bring in relatives and prospective relatives is not primarily about controlling the total amount of migration, it is about controlling its composition. Educational points-based systems can only be effective if the individual rights of members of the diaspora are bounded by the objectives set by the system.
A Dramatic Implication
Where we have got to is that migration from poor countries to rich ones generates a massive windfall gain resulting from a productivity gap, and this gain is captured by migrants. There are two major barriers to accessing this gain: financing the initial investment in migration and overcoming a myriad of legal restrictions on entry.
Diasporas reduce both of these barriers, so that as migration proceeds and the stock of migrants accumulates, more people are able to realize the gain from migration: the annual flow of migrants will tend to accelerate. Other changes in the world economy are also tending to increase migration: technical progress has substantially reduced the costs of travel, phone charges have fallen massively so that it is much easier for diasporas to remain connected to their country of origin, and rising incomes in very poor countries will enhance the ability to finance migration, while the absolute income gap will remain massive. The big brute fact remains those huge gains in productivity that migrants capture, which are inhibited by sizable barriers.
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The barriers to migration lead to a prediction: actual migration should considerably understate desired migration. For evidence on desired migration the standard source is a Gallup Poll that covers a large sample of people from around the world. In total, around 40
percent of the population of poor countries say that they would
choose to migrate to rich ones if they could. 13 Even this probably understates what would happen in the absence of financial and legal barriers. Imagine if 40 percent of the population indeed emigrated from a country. The resulting diaspora would be enormous and most likely highly concentrated in a few high-income cities.
These cities, with their radically higher income than the capital of the country of origin, would quite possibly become the new cultural locus of the society: for those young people who had stayed behind, life would beckon from elsewhere.
Economists are rightly wary of intentions stated in surveys such as the Gallup Poll. Intentions may not translate into actual decisions. A rare natural experiment in which a relatively low-income society found itself with unrestricted access to a high-income society is therefore of interest. That natural experiment is Turkish Cyprus, which has been in economic terms similar to Turkey and therefore very poor by European standards. However, due to a
complex political history, Turkish Cypriots have had privileged migration access to Britain. Did they make use of this access? Recall that the economic theory of migration predicts that for such a case there would be no equilibrium. Since Turkish Cyprus is in the middle-income range that is most conducive to migration, and is relatively close to the host country, clusters of the Turkish Cypriot diaspora would build up rapidly, and this would in turn accelerate until the original population of Turkish Cyprus nearly emptied.
This is a very stark prediction that does not take into account many potentially offsetting factors. So how does it stand up when confronted
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with what actually happened? Unfortunately, British immigration statistics are paltry, but as of 1945 there were probably only around 2,000 Turkish Cypriots in Britain. The current Turkish Cypriot population in Britain is variously estimated at 130,000 to 300,000, the upper figure being the official estimate of the British Home Office. Meanwhile the number of Turkish Cypriots actually resident in Cyprus has declined from 102,000 as of the 1960 census, to around 85,000 as of 2001. So, there are now approximately
twice as many Turkish Cypriots in Britain as in Cyprus. While Cyprus did not literally empty, the Gallup survey figure of 40 percent of people wanting to migrate does not appear exaggerated. But Northern Cyprus has not depopulated: instead it has had its own massive influx of immigrants, from Turkey: the indigenous Turkish Cypriots have become a minority in Northern Cyprus.
The evidence that but for the barriers the low-income societies would empty implies that for better or worse the barriers really matter. From the perspective of the indigenous population of potential host countries, the continued existence of some barriers that over time will tend to rise to offset the tendency of migration to accelerate is probably for the better. They are all that prevents massive inflows that would probably drive down wages and endanger mutual regard. From the perspective of the people who would
remain in countries of origin, a massive and prolonged exodus would also have major effects, which I will discuss in part 4. But from the utilitarian universalist and libertarian ethical perspectives the barriers are a frustrating disaster. Huge gains in income for several hundred million poor people who would like to earn them are being denied. The utilitarian laments the avoidable reduction in well-being; the libertarian laments the restriction on freedom.
Paul Collier Page 16