Must-read: Branko Milanovic: “There is a trade-off between citizenship and migration”
Must-Read: A surprisingly-large (to me) number of people have been trashing the very sharp Branko Milanovic for what seems to any normal economist to be an obvious point: At one pole is (1) restricting immigration far below the economically-rational level for any economic welfare analysis because the political system rejects providing full national-community citizenship rights and powers to every migrant. At the other pole is (2) completely decoupling political voice from geographic location and affective ties to the local community. The best policy has to be somewhere in the middle. Yet many more so-called “leftists” than really ought to or than I expected to see say that (1) is obviously correct, and that Branko is guilty of ThoughtCrime for thinking about where in the middle the proper balance might lie…
: There is a trade-off between citizenship and migration: “The rich world believes it has reached the limits of acceptable migration….
…We know that migration does more to reduce global poverty and inequality than any other factor. Calculations done by Alan Winters of the University of Sussex show that even a small increase in migration would be far more beneficial to the world’s poor than any other policy…. So is there a way to make greater migration acceptable to the native populations of the rich countries?… Most of a person’s lifetime income is determined by where he or she lives…. Citizens of rich countries receive a citizenship premium, while citizens of poor countries suffer a citizenship penalty. Migration is the attempt by the global poor to enjoy that premium, or at least a part of it, for themselves….
We [need to find a way to] redefine “citizenship” in such a way that migrants are not allowed to lay claim to the entire premium falling to citizens straight away, if at all… [to] assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries…. Migrants could be allowed to work for a limited number of years, or to work only for a given employer, or else be obliged to return to their country of origin… pay higher taxes since they are the largest net beneficiaries of migration…. This would require significant adjustments to traditional ways of thinking about migration and citizenship….
It is not clear that the old conception of nation-state citizenship as a binary category that in principle confers all the benefits of citizenship to anyone who happens to be physically present within a country’s borders is adequate in a globalised world. In effect, there is a trade-off between such a view of citizenship and the flow of migration…. If graduated categories of citizenship were created… we would be able to reconcile the objective of reducing world poverty with reducing migration to acceptable levels. If we do not do something, we will be stuck in a position in which everyone who makes it to the rich world is given full rights of citizenship, but we do everything in our power to make sure that nobody gets here.