Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor
Immigration as Mutually Beneficial Humanitarianism
May 28, 2010
Oppressive governments crush the hopes and humanity of millions. There’s a pretty simple way we can help these millions get richer and freer faster while making ourselves richer too: We can open our borders.
The gains for potential immigrants are enormous. In his excellent (and free) Let Their People Come, economist Lant Pritchett argues that the additional income people could earn from working in the U.S. for eight weeks would be the same as the additional income they could earn from a lifetime of access to microcredit programs. Immigration to rich countries beats all other forms of aid as a way to increase the incomes of the world’s poor, and it makes the world’s rich richer to boot.
