The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram G. Rajan

the benefits of immigration are highest when a country can allow entry selectively to the kind of immigrants it needs. Countries like Canada, protected by oceans and distance from poorer countries, have the ability to be selective, and typically welcome immigrants. A country has no ability to be selective if a large fraction of immigration is undocumented or when it faces a huge wave of refugees. Following years of drought in Sub-Saharan Africa, farm workers and their families in recent years have braved stormy seas in rickety overcrowded boats as they look for refuge in Europe. Many have died on this perilous journey. Such immigration raises legal, moral, and humanitarian issues, not just economic ones, for pushing the starving, the fearful, or the persecuted back at the borders is simply inhumane. It may also create a wider security problem if stateless youth, with little to lose, take up arms and vent their anger against the unsympathetic world. And in these volatile times, today’s reluctant host could be tomorrow’s refugee. One of the most hospitable countries currently to Venezuelan refugees fleeing a venal incompetent regime is Colombia, which remembers how Venezuela took in Colombians when they were fleeing violence.

Today's host can be tomorrow's migrants