Debunking Myths On Migration

ABHIJIT V BANERJEE and ESTHER DUFLO, who jointly won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences recently, say that wage differences between countries have little to do with whether or not people migrate. In fact, evidence suggests that migration makes both migrants and local people better off

MIGRATION IS big news, big enough to drive the politics of much of Europe and the United States. Between President Donald Trump’s imaginary but enormously consequential hordes of murderous Mexican migrants and the anti-foreigner rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany, the French Rassemblement National, and the Brexit crew, not to mention the ruling parties in Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia, it may be the single most influential political issue in the world’s richest countries. Even politicians from the mainstream European parties are struggling to reconcile the liberal traditions they want to uphold with the threat they see across their shores. It is less visible in the developing world, but the fights over Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh, and the citizenship bill in Assam, India, have been equally frightening for those who are its targets.

Why the panic? The fraction of international migrants in the world population in 2017 was roughly what it was in 1960 or in 1990: 3 percent. The European Union (EU) on average gets between 1.5 million and 2.5 million non-EU migrants every year from the rest of the world. Two and a half million is less than one half of one percent of the EU population. Most of these are legal migrants, people with job offers, or those who arrive to join their families. There was an unusual influx of refugees in 2015 and 2016, but by 2018 the number of asylum seekers to the EU was back to 638,000, and only 38 percent of the requests were granted. This represents about one for every twenty-five hundred EU residents. That’s it. Hardly a deluge.