Capitolo 1
Beyond Borders: Why Immigration is Essential for Our Future
In a world where borders are increasingly contested, Philippe Legrain's "Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them" stands as a compelling counterpoint to the doom-laden narratives that dominate immigration discourse. Published in 2007, this book quickly became a favorite among policy experts and progressive thinkers, including former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who praised its "refreshing perspective." What makes Legrain's work particularly powerful is its comprehensive approach-combining economic analysis, personal stories, and ethical arguments to demonstrate why wealthy nations should welcome rather than repel immigrants from poor countries.
As anti-immigration sentiment continues to shape politics from America to Europe, Legrain's book remains startlingly relevant. Its core message-that immigration benefits both sending and receiving countries-challenges the conventional wisdom that has driven policy for decades. Drawing on his unique background as a London-born writer with Estonian-American heritage and extensive international experience, Legrain offers insights that transcend the typical left-right divide on this contentious issue. The book's influence can be seen in how it's frequently cited in academic research on migration economics and has shaped the thinking of policy reformers across the political spectrum.
Capitolo 2
The Human Cost of Border Control
Our current immigration system causes unnecessary suffering and death. In the Mediterranean Sea alone, approximately two thousand people drown annually attempting to reach Europe from Africa. The United States Border Patrol recorded 464 migrant deaths along the Mexican border in a single year-more than ten times the number killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall during its entire 28-year existence. These numbers likely underestimate the true toll, as many bodies are never recovered.
What makes these deaths particularly tragic is that border enforcement policies deliberately channel migrants into more dangerous routes. Operation Hold the Line in El Paso and Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego intentionally force migrants away from urban crossing points into treacherous mountain and desert terrain. Border Patrol agent Michelle LeBoeuf candidly acknowledges this strategy while showing me the extensive resources deployed: surveillance vans positioned every quarter-mile, aircraft, sensors, night-vision equipment, cameras, floodlights, dogs, and weapons.
Despite this massive investment in enforcement, the borders remain porous. Approximately 500,000 migrants enter America illegally each year, with another 800,000 penetrating "fortress Europe." Some cross through unguarded sections, others use forged documents, while many simply overstay visas or work illegally on tourist permits. The United States may harbor 12 million undocumented immigrants, while Europe likely contains 7-8 million.
These border controls actually foster illegality rather than preventing it. They raise migration costs and risks, divert people from legal to illegal channels, create lucrative markets for criminal smugglers, leave migrants vulnerable to exploitation, and encourage black market economies where taxes go unpaid and labor laws are violated. People smuggling generates an estimated $20 billion annually in the Americas and 4 billion in the EU.
What would happen if we truly tried to seal the borders? It would require extreme measures: denying visas to all poor-country nationals, thoroughly searching every vehicle and container, building massive walls with lethal electric fences, and authorizing border agents to shoot migrants. Such measures would be prohibitively expensive, damage international relations, halt tourism and trade, and still likely fail. We must question whether a system that causes death while fostering criminality and undermining the rule of law is truly protecting society.
Capitolo 3
Migration Through History: Patterns and Transformations
Mass international migration began in the early nineteenth century, enabled by revolutionary transportation advances. In the century after 1820, approximately 60 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to build new lives in America, Canada and Latin America. They came first from the British Isles and northwestern Europe, later from southern and eastern Europe. By 1910, one in seven people in the US was foreign-born. However, the First World War and subsequent Great Depression halted this mass migration.
Since the Second World War, migration patterns have reversed, flowing primarily from the Third World to the First. Europe transformed from a continent of emigration to one of immigration. From the 1950s until the 1973 oil crisis, European countries imported workers from poorer peripheral nations and former colonies. After 1973, European countries tightened immigration rules, though family reunification continued. Since the 1980s, previously poor European periphery countries like Ireland, Italy, Spain and Greece have themselves become immigration destinations.
Unlike Europe's two-burst pattern, American immigration has grown steadily since the 1970s. The watershed 1965 reforms abolished national quotas designed to exclude Latin Americans and Asians, giving preference instead to family reunification. This led to surging immigration from Asia and Latin America. Legal immigration rose from 2.5 million in the 1950s to 9.1 million in the 1990s. Canada and Australia have actively encouraged immigration throughout the postwar period, both eventually abandoning race-based policies for points systems that select immigrants based on skills and education.
Despite these waves of migration, the UN estimated only 175 million people worldwide were living outside their birth country in 2000-just one in thirty-five of the world's population. Though this number more than doubled from 1970, the migrant share of global population only increased from 2.2% to 2.9%. The controversy arises because migrants are concentrated in a handful of rich countries with low birth rates. In developed nations, the immigrant share nearly doubled from 4.3% to 8.3% between 1970-2000, with migration accounting for nearly two-thirds of population growth by the late 1990s.
Most migrants move in search of a better life, but immigration systems artificially divide them into three categories: political refugees fleeing violence, family members reuniting with relatives, and economic migrants seeking work. In reality, these distinctions blur-refugees may choose asylum destinations for economic reasons, while family visas provide work opportunities. Despite public perception, refugees comprise only a small portion of immigrants.
Capitolo 4
Why We Need the Huddled Masses
The primary reason rich countries need immigrants is the growing shortage of workers for jobs that natives no longer want or aspire to do. As education levels rise dramatically-with fewer Americans and Europeans leaving school without qualifications and more attending university-people's aspirations have also increased. Jobs once accepted by working-class youth are now shunned as menial or demeaning.
Yet modern economies still require many low-skilled workers: hotels need chambermaids and cleaners; hospitals need support staff; and an aging, wealthier population demands more personal services like eldercare, childcare, and food preparation. While technology and trade have reduced some low-skilled work, many services cannot be mechanized or imported.
Immigrants enable rich-country citizens to specialize in higher-skilled, higher-paid jobs while immigrants perform necessary lower-skilled work. Without immigrants, many services would become prohibitively expensive or unavailable. The streets might be cleaned less frequently, restaurants would have fewer waiters, and childcare would be limited. Society would be worse off with higher costs for labor-intensive services.
Economic fears about immigration rest on three misconceptions: that there are only so many jobs to go round, that immigrants compete directly with locals, and that immigrants come to live off welfare. In reality, people don't just take jobs but create them too-when immigrants spend wages, they increase demand for goods and services. Far from competing with locals, immigrants typically have different skills and backgrounds. A semi-literate Mexican peasant with poor English isn't competing with American high school graduates.
Immigrants' drive to get ahead explains why many start businesses. Sir Gulam Noon exemplifies this entrepreneurial spirit-arriving from India with hardly any money, he founded Noon Products, revolutionizing British supermarket Indian food. Now worth 50 million, his company employs around 900 people and has helped make chicken tikka masala Britain's national dish. His success demonstrates how immigrant enterprise creates wealth not just for themselves but for their adopted country.
Despite our high-tech world, many basic tasks still require human labor. Rather than denying willing immigrants these opportunities, we should welcome them. Most migrants from poor countries actually prefer temporary work-they want to earn money abroad to improve their lives back home. But immigration controls make border crossing so difficult that once migrants arrive, they're reluctant to leave, inadvertently creating permanent settlers instead of temporary workers.
Capitolo 5
The Global Talent Contest
Countries are increasingly competing to attract skilled migrants. Canada actively recruits highly educated workers with flexible skills, admitting nearly 60,000 skilled workers and businesspeople in 2004. Australia uses a complex points system favoring youth, English proficiency, and specific skills, with over 66,000 skilled migrants admitted in 2003. European countries are slowly opening their doors: Britain is implementing an Australian-style points system, while France, the Netherlands and Germany have created limited pathways for highly skilled workers.
Skilled migration offers three key advantages: First, foreigners bring different or superior skills and qualities, along with knowledge of their home countries that aids exports. Their "burning desire to succeed" boosts productivity and competitiveness. Second, talented immigrants significantly enhance innovation-studies show a 10% increase in foreign graduate students increases US patent applications by 4.8%. Third, in industries where clustering occurs (like London's financial sector or Silicon Valley), drawing from a global talent pool becomes essential for maintaining competitive advantage.
Silicon Valley's success hinges on immigrant entrepreneurship. By the late 1990s, Chinese and Indian engineers ran 29% of Valley technology businesses, generating $19.5 billion in sales and 73,000 jobs. Organizations like The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) help immigrants mobilize resources and connections. These immigrant networks foster cross-Pacific business relationships, with engineers serving as middlemen between American companies and Asian partners. The Valley's immigrant entrepreneurs succeed by drawing on ethnic resources while integrating into mainstream business networks.
While Silicon Valley demonstrates immigration's economic benefits, many countries remain hesitant to embrace similar policies. Australia offers a contrasting approach with its selective skills-focused immigration policy. Abul Rizvi, who oversees Australia's immigration system and himself immigrated from India in 1966, explains their policy aims to offset population decline while addressing skills shortages. Australia targets young, English-speaking, highly skilled immigrants to boost economic growth and develop international trade links.
However, Australia's skills-based immigration policy is fundamentally flawed because governments lack sufficient information to accurately predict which workers an economy needs. Labor markets constantly evolve, making government assessments quickly obsolete. Canada's approach of admitting highly educated people with flexible skills makes more sense than Australia's attempt to match specific migrants to specific vacancies.
Capitolo 6
Cosmopolitan and Rich: How Diversity Drives Innovation
While skeptics like George Borjas dismiss the economic benefits of cultural diversity as unmeasurable, economists Ottaviano and Peri have quantified its value by studying wages and rents in US cities. They found that US-born workers earn higher wages and pay higher rents in culturally diverse cities, suggesting both increased productivity and willingness to pay for multicultural amenities. Their research confirms that New York's diversity isn't just a consequence of higher wages but actually helps drive those higher earnings.
While economists struggle to fully explain what drives economic growth, technological innovation clearly plays a crucial role. Immigrants contribute to innovation both as individual geniuses (who as outsiders may be less constrained by conventional thinking) and by bringing diverse perspectives to problem-solving groups. Research from Los Alamos National Laboratory challenges the old view that diversity hinders performance, instead showing that diverse groups solve complex problems more efficiently.
Norman Johnson's maze experiment demonstrates that combining different individuals' experiences creates solutions superior to what any single person could achieve alone, suggesting diversity actually boosts group performance in complex situations. Johnson found that diversity of each person's contribution was key to higher performance, with diverse groups finding shortcuts that individuals couldn't discover. This synergy emerges not from formal cooperation but from people bouncing ideas off each other, especially when they share common goals or identity.
An increasing portion of modern economies consists of companies that solve problems rather than manufacture widgets. In these firms, employees aren't interchangeable parts but creative thinkers whose ingenuity drives performance. Research by Hong and Page shows that diverse groups with limited individual abilities can outperform homogeneous groups of high-ability problem-solvers because different perspectives matter more than individual brilliance. As former Bell Atlantic CEO Ivan Seidenberg noted: "If everybody in the room is the same, you'll have a lot fewer arguments and a lot worse answers."
While ethnic diversity can hamper economic growth in poor countries, it becomes beneficial at higher development levels. Advanced economies can better harness workers with complementary skills and different insights while having institutions robust enough to manage potential conflicts. Diversity proves especially valuable during periods of rapid technological change, when creativity and adaptation matter most. Creative people often question accepted views and consider contradictory perspectives-traits common among those with multicultural backgrounds.
Capitolo 7
The Economic Impact: Jobs, Wages, and Welfare
Flexible economies can absorb large numbers of immigrants without harming native workers. Study after study confirms immigrants do little or no harm to wages or employment prospects of locals. Even Israel absorbed a huge influx of immigrants with only temporary wage effects. Immigrants typically don't compete directly with natives-they take jobs locals shun, and often complement native workers' efforts. An immigrant nanny allows a hotel manager to return to work; foreign chambermaids boost productivity; immigrant scientists contribute fresh ideas. Recent studies show immigrants actually raise natives' wages by 0.6% overall.
The fear that immigrants come to "feed at our trough" is almost as old as fears they steal jobs. Critics claim foreigners migrate to exploit welfare systems. But this argument lacks empirical support. It simply doesn't pay to move to rich countries for relatively low benefits, especially when migration is costly and risky. Most immigrants have restricted access to benefits anyway, with many countries imposing waiting periods or complete bans. Illegal migrants have virtually no access to social benefits, and even legal migrants face increasing restrictions.
Calculating immigrants' fiscal impact is complex, depending on who immigrates, their age, skills, and which benefits they can access. However, several patterns emerge: temporary workers without families are clear net contributors; those who become permanent residents after working temporarily are likely lifetime contributors since governments didn't fund their education; and contrary to popular belief, illegal immigrants rarely burden taxpayers-they often pay taxes without receiving benefits.
Immigration alone cannot solve rich countries' aging population problems. While migrants can help maintain population levels and working-age populations, they cannot preserve dependency ratios at previous levels without unrealistically massive immigration. A realistic approach requires multiple solutions: some immigration, raising retirement ages, ensuring more working-age people actually work, encouraging higher savings rates, and potentially higher taxes.
Capitolo 8
How Migration Benefits Developing Countries
Most developing countries have ambivalent attitudes toward emigration, seeing it as a sign of failure while acknowledging its benefits. Mexico now calls its US workers "heroes" in recognition of their economic contribution. Emigration boosts wages for those who remain while remittances reduce poverty. When migrants return, they bring valuable knowledge and capital-half of returning Turkish migrants from Germany start businesses within four years.
With migrants in Europe earning thirty-five times the average sub-Saharan African wage and typically sending back one-sixth of their earnings, remittances make a substantial difference. Official flows totaled $167 billion in 2005, though the true figure may be 50-200% higher. This exceeds the $79 billion in government aid and rivals foreign direct investment. In twenty developing countries, remittances account for over 10% of the economy, with Tonga receiving nearly a third of its GDP from migrants.
Unlike foreign aid, remittances go directly to those who need help, bypassing corrupt governments and bureaucracy. They provide crucial insurance against unexpected shocks in poor countries where incomes are volatile and social safety nets nonexistent. Studies show remittances cushion economic blows-in Jamaica, migrants send an extra $25 for every $100 in hurricane damage, while in the Philippines, they replace 60% of income lost to bad weather.
Migrants remain deeply connected to their homelands through "hometown associations" that fund development projects in their communities of origin. From the Miraflores Development Committee in Boston funding water systems and schools in the Dominican Republic to Colombian expatriates supporting charities through websites like conexioncolombia.com, these grassroots organizations make profound differences in their home communities. They often provide more funding than municipal budgets for public works, bringing paved roads, electricity, and improved facilities to rural areas.
Migrants create transnational businesses that connect countries in a form of "globalization from below." Ecuador's Otavalan indigenous community travels internationally to market their woollens while maintaining workshops in their homeland. Dominican immigrants returning from the US have pioneered new businesses based on skills acquired abroad-from fast-food delivery to mobile phone services. Salvadoran entrepreneurs see their expatriate communities as lucrative markets, with companies like Constancia Bottling establishing plants in Los Angeles to serve "hermanos lejanos" (distant brothers).
Capitolo 9
Brain Drain or Brain Gain?
While globally it makes sense for talented people to work where their skills are most productive, developing countries worry about losing their best minds. Albania's Media Institute director laments that their AIDS experts have gone to Canada and only 5% of Albanians studying abroad will return. Brain drain deprives countries of entrepreneurship, mentorship, and economic clusters.
Yet costs aren't always severe-India produces surplus engineers, Philippine medical schools train specifically for US employment, and small countries simply can't sustain large professional classes. Importantly, emigration can increase wages for remaining skilled workers, generate substantial remittances, create valuable diaspora networks, and incentivize more education domestically-potentially transforming brain drain into brain gain.
High-skilled emigration from developing countries has soared since 1970, increasing by two-thirds between 1990-2000. Rich countries actively recruit talent with tax breaks and incentives, with the US hosting over half of the twenty million educated immigrants in wealthy nations. While countries like India, China and the Philippines send the most skilled emigrants in raw numbers, the highest brain-drain rates affect small nations in the Caribbean, Central America, South Pacific and Africa-with up to 90% of skilled workers leaving countries like Guyana and Jamaica.
Ghana's health service is near collapse with hospitals lacking doctors. African physicians earn between $50-1,242 monthly while salaries in Canada and Australia are four times higher, plus offering better facilities and opportunities. Rich countries face growing healthcare shortages themselves-the US projects a 275,000 nurse shortfall by 2010 and produces only 17,000 medical graduates annually for 22,000 vacancies. One in four US doctors and 28% of British doctors were trained overseas, mostly from poor countries.
Poor countries can transform brain drain into brain gain by viewing their diaspora as a valuable resource rather than trying to restrict emigration. Expatriates like Kenyan entrepreneur Cecilia Ruto create new export markets, as she did by introducing Kenyan tea to New Zealand. Diaspora networks facilitate trade-Chinese communities boost trade between countries by over 150%, while 19 of India's top 20 software businesses were founded or managed by diaspora professionals.
Capitolo 10
Cultural Integration in a Diverse World
The notion that nations are extended families linked by blood is nonsense. Britain combines at least four ethnic groups, France embraces diverse regional identities, and America's supposed ethnic unity is a delusion. Nations are largely civic constructs forged by states through standardized language, common laws, education systems, and sometimes official religions. Even supposedly ancient ethnic nations like Germany include diverse regional identities.
People increasingly have multiple identities that aren't limited by national borders. Someone might identify as British Muslim, Pakistani origin, European, middle-class, university-educated, and more. These overlapping identities force us to consider what truly defines national character. Immigration adds complexity, but expelling immigrants wouldn't return society to some mythical homogeneous past.
Rather than viewing immigration as threatening national identity, we should see it as an opportunity for redefinition. Nations can be recreated to better reflect reality and become more robust in a changing world. British identity need not center on Christianity but could emphasize shared present circumstances and future aspirations rather than a past that some don't share or resent.
Canada offers a powerful counterexample to fears about immigration destroying national identity. With one-fifth of Canadians foreign-born and nearly 1% annual population growth through immigration (mostly from Asia), Canada embraces its diversity as a "multicultural mosaic." Canadians define core values simply: respect neighbors, obey laws, embrace equality, and participate in community life. While Canadians debate their national identity, most agree they have a distinct character marked by non-violence and tolerance.
Integration requires mutual accommodation-immigrants willing to assimilate and natives willing to treat them as locals. If society is racist or indifferent, immigrants cannot integrate regardless of their efforts. Conversely, if immigrants isolate themselves, even liberal societies cannot integrate them. The process creates feedback loops: welcoming societies that accommodate difference create virtuous circles where diversity becomes strength, as in London where British-born minorities can comfortably combine multiple identities. But initial rejection creates vicious circles of resentment and hostility, even if society later becomes more welcoming.
Capitolo 11
Toward a More Open World
Technology and individualism have undermined geography's tyranny, loosening nationalism's shackles. Yet we maintain boundaries-mental and physical-creating a global apartheid where the rich move freely while the poor are confined. Our efforts to keep poor people out while welcoming the wealthy are increasingly unsustainable, with over a million immigrants entering Europe and North America illegally each year.
The story of Hanna, a Polish woman in London, illustrates the benefits of legal immigration. Initially working illegally as a cleaner, her status changed when Poland joined the EU in 2004. Unlike most EU countries that imposed restrictions, Britain, Ireland, and Sweden opened their borders to Eastern Europeans. Hanna proudly registered, obtained a national insurance number, started her own company, and began paying taxes-something she wanted to do all along but couldn't without legal status.
While "Make Poverty History" campaigns focus on fair trade, debt relief, and aid, freer international migration could make a bigger dent in global poverty than all those combined. Economist Dani Rodrik calculates that allowing just 3% more workers from poor countries to work temporarily in rich nations would yield $200 billion annually for citizens of poor countries-two and a half times more than current overseas aid. The benefits would accrue directly to workers, with the biggest gains going to the poorest countries.
There are multiple paths to more open borders: immediate opening like Britain did for Eastern Europeans, bilateral agreements like the Philippines has established, creating international organizations to negotiate broader agreements, or opening markets to foreign service providers through the WTO. While completely open borders would be ideal, incremental opening would be an improvement over current "piecemeal, incoherent and non-transparent" policies.
While open borders will inevitably lead to some permanent settlement, fears of being "swamped" are unjustified. Most people don't want to leave their homes permanently-many migrants only settled in Europe in the 1970s because border closures forced them to stay if they wanted to keep working. Despite all 75 million Eastern Europeans having the right to live in Britain, fewer than one in 175 have come, and most have already returned home.
Our Open World divides those free to move from those tied to one place-this is morally wrong, economically stupid, and politically unsustainable. The rallying cry must be "Let Them In."
