Friday, September 14, 2007

The Virtues of Immigration

It helps people escape poverty...
If we insist on thinking of development as a matter of national growth, we may well consign most of the bottom billion, and their children and their grandchildren, to unrelenting poverty trapped within their UN-recognised national prisons. Our real moral concern should not be the Central African Republic, but its unfortunate denizens. The best thing for their prospects may simply be to get out--to leave for a place where growth has already commenced. The West's many attempts to jumpstart growth where the world's poorest already reside has yet to work. So why does the international community insist on betting the poor's lives on the gamble that it will, finally, some day?
... and it promotes freedom...
Does globalization create races to the bottom or the top? David Law suspects that in at least one area, the cycle is a virtuous one. In his view, countries now “compete for financial capital and human talent is by offering bundles of rights and freedoms that are attractive to investors and elite workers.” Moreover, he suggests that “states bid for elite workers by offering both pecuniary and non-pecuniary inducements that include more or less generous bundles of rights and freedoms. Countries that do not boast an attractive bundle of this kind must compensate by offering what this article calls a freedom premium, which amounts to a competitive disadvantage in the global market for human talent.”
... but Lou Dobbs will have none of it!

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