LANT PRITCHETT'S IMMIGRATION MANIFESTO!!!
My old prof Lant Pritchett is a brilliant man, despite his terrible spelling and total inability to remember people's names even after two years of class. If I had to name the smartest development thinker in the world, the most important and prolific, the one with his finger in every pot, I would say Lant Pritchett. Up to now, though, Lant has been a bit conservative. In this paper, he hurls down the gauntlet. (This link is a Word file from Lant's research page.) This is an economics paper, but it's written a very everyman style. It's in need of editing (it's still a "draft for comments.") But it's a great read.

Lant begins:

First, there are irresistible forces building in the international system for much larger labor mobility and migration flows across national boundaries. These irresistible economic, demographic, and technological forces for increased migration are being held back by ideas. I am no great student of the history of ideas, but it does seem that ideas are a bit like a large dam—they can hold against tremendous pressures for decades, even centuries, but, once breached, can disappear in hours. In 1914 nearly every European state was headed by a monarch—a form of government that had persisted in Europe for nearly a thousand years—20 years later all but a few the monarchies of Europe were gone. Colonialism persisted for centuries—and then essentially disappeared in the two decades from 1945 to 1965. Slavery had been a part of a multitude of civilizations for thousands of years—and disappeared in the blink of the historical eye . The ideas that support monarchy, colonialism, slavery in their day seem solid, impregnable, and yet, even a few decades later people wonder how otherwise rational and well meaning people could have been held in the thrall of such patently ludicrous, not to mention obviously morally despicable, notions. It is not inevitable, or perhaps even possible, but it is at least plausible that two key notions of the twentieth century--“nationalism” and that it is acceptable that restrictions on the movement of persons should hold human beings cruelly hostage to the place of their birth—will be seen in the twenty-first century as hopelessly wrong-headed.

The second idea is means to bring migration onto the international and development agenda. My proposal is that “migration is the Millennium Development Goal plan B.” The international and development communities should being now, today, in 2003 to prepare so that when Millennium Development Goals are not achieved in 2015 the response can to go beyond the globalization formula that has been pursued in the post World War II period of “growth, trade, and aid.” While the structure of the post-war international system provided for international organizations to promote the stability of the international means of payment (IMF), freer mobility of goods (GATT/WTO), and even an organization to promote capital flows (and later, with IDA some assistance) and for, within the UN system of whole host of other issues—from dispute resolution to promoting education--migration was strictly off the agenda. The question is, when and how will it come on the agenda? Seventy years (1945-2015) should be long enough to know whether an international system with globalization of the movement of everything but people (with a little bit of “aid”) is adequate for advancing human welfare. If by 2015 there are countries which have not accomplished, and are not making progress towards, the MDGs then by that time mechanism for promoting the international mobility of persons should be in place.

Lant offers a few different arguments for open immigration. Some are familiar, e.g. that wage differentials between countries are very large, that when everything else is being globalized, why not labor, etc. They're worth reading because he makes them with particular clarity. The argument I found new, and most haunting, was about "optimal populations." In America, there are a lot of "ghost towns," towns where it used to be advantageous to live, but no longer is, so everyone moves away. Lant points out that the same thing has happened (to a lesser extent) with several large regions of the US; populations have shrunk over the past two or three generations, though natural increase would have made them grow. The world economy artificially prevents this shifting of people over space, and traps "too large" populations in places where the optimal population has fallen. It hasn't always been this way. Closed borders and nation-states are not just the eternal human condition. They are the result of a specific historical episode, in which the chief event was the post-World War II settlement, the founding of the UN and the sanctifying of borders. Lant thinks the founding of this world order was worth it, despite the wicked institution that was established along with it, just as he thinks the Constitution was worth it even though it enshrined slavery-- for a time. But the time has come to transcend the original sin of the present world order. There is no necessary link between this and the Millennium Development Goals, but for Lant to phrase it that way makes it especially poignant. The MDGs are very modest-- universal primary education, reducing infant mortality, that sort of thing. They are redundant in any rich country, and we would be horrified to find the US falling short of them, yet abroad we let it go on. We are almost sure to fail to reach the MDGs. Lant wants to turn that failure to good ends by using it as a stick to beat the rich countries on the head and force them to open their borders.

I believe that the right to migrate should be recognized as a fundamental human right, like freedom of speech. Just as freedom of speech does not mean that anyone can say anything, anytime, freedom of migration would not mean anyone could cross any border, anytime. The US could legitimately stop people at our borders to check for terrorists, just as we can legitimately prohibit people from disclosing top-secret government information, perjuring themselves in the courtroom, or yelling fire in a crowded theater. But in a regime that recognized freedom of migration, any state that wanted to restrict entry would have to give clear reasons, justify their restrictions, and, as our courts protect freedom of speech, protect the right to migrate in order to live peacefully and improve one's position in life.

To make this happen, what I think is needed is civil disobedience. Martin Luther King once said that it is our duty to obey just laws and disobey unjust ones. Immigration "laws" are unjust-- as far as I'm concerned, they lack the moral substance of laws, and those who violate them are not criminals in the moral sense. Liberal democratic systems, like ours and those of the British, often go astray, because the people are not perfect, and sometimes are misguided on a large scale. But one of their virtues is that their moderation, their habeas corpus and due process and trial by jury, give those who decide to stand up against unjust laws a chance to state their case, to make an impression. Martin Luther King did so, nonviolently defying the government in city after city in the South; and it was justice, and not the "law," which won. King and his movement did not fear arrest, they braved police dogs, they did not resort to violence or fight back, but they never stood down. So it was with Mahatma Gandhi, defying the British: his satyagraha movement braved arrest, never fought back but never stood down, they defied unjust laws but never resorted to violence, and in the end they not only secured British withdrawal but laid the basis for that unique phenomenon which India represents to the world: almost six decades of democracy in a very poor country, where democracy rarely succeeds.

My proposal was for a movement called the Underground Railroad, a nationwide network of activists, including employers and people who can provide housing, who are resolved to hire illegal immigrants, give them housing, and treat them as ordinary citizens, not secretly but quite openly, braving arrest. Picture signs on buildings. "We hire illegal immigrants. No papers needed." We would need some lawyers to instruct us on just how far we could most usefully go, making our purposes as public as possible and pushing the edges of what was legal while making it hard to arrest us...

Maybe Bush will make my proposal redundant, however. If illegal immigrants keep getting amnesties, it will become difficult to make a credible threat of punishing anyone for crossing our borders. If that happens, Bush's guest worker proposal may be seen as the beginning of the end of an evil social institution, like the Emancipation Proclamation. Long live the Party of Lincoln!