On the Brain Drain Refrain
Reason’s Kerry Howley (to whom I devote most of my energy for exclusive local attachment) introduced me to Lant Pritchett’s exciting and radical work on immigration, and knows way more about this stuff than I do, being a real journalist who covers this issue. So she’s got the goods on Larison’s ill-supported points about brain drain:
it’s probably not a great thing for a community to lose its most motivated members. But, this, too, is far more complicated than Larison wants to admit. We don’t know nearly as much as he pretends we do about the trade-offs, but we do know that people respond to incentives when they consider whether or not to pursue education. Thus, as the Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens has shown, claims that the U.S. is stripping Africa of health care workers probably have it backward. Health care workers who immigrate to the United States may never have acquired those skills were immigration not an option. The countries Clemens studied didn’t suffer from a lack of health care workers, generally; they suffered from the fact that they could not employ the workers they educated. There is no incentive to acquire skills you have no hope of using, and the most motivated people in a community might not be motivated at all absent the hope of exit.
And Kerry’s analysis of Daniel’s analogy to domestic ghettos is spot-on:
Applied domestically, the alternate policy would be rather like forcing people to stay in undeveloped inner city ghettos. It would mean telling the children of poor parents that they could never leave the economically backward neighborhood they happened to be born in, even if that neighborhood offered no education or employment opportunities. It would entail prohibiting suburbanites from inviting inner city residents onto their property to perform an economic service.
You didn’t know it before now, but you are anxiously awaiting Kerry’s forthcoming Reason feature story on guest worker programs.
September 27th, 2007 12:08
Interesting. I agree that the empirical question here about well-being trumps (as it always does) any proceduralist or deontological considerations.
It seems plausible that a guest-worker program would be the best of both worlds– cheaper labor for rich countries, and a stream of temporary emigrants who return to poorer countries to improve things back home.
Also, many immigrants come here to make money to send back home (I live in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood and there are tons of places to wire money). That helps things back home. It’s not a simple question of abandonment.
But, we should be wary about the brain drain question, as it too makes some intuitive sense. We should see how the empirical data plays out, and we should make our ultimate decision based on the criteria of additive utilitarianism combined with diminishing marginal utility. (help the poorest).
September 27th, 2007 13:46
How can you have as much moral responsibility for people that you do not have as much political authority over?
September 27th, 2007 14:17
A fairly off-the-cuff response:
A democratic government isn’t obligated to become undemocratic and flout the will of its people to help those in other countries. But the voters should think of the poor and not just themselves– once the voters do this, the government does the same as a byproduct. Does that address your concern?
In practice, no one is totally utilitarian or altruistic; everyone privileges themselves and those who they know. So in practice this amounts to: lean more heavily on altruism/utilitarianism, and less heavily on self-interest and local interest.
So now that means I’m backtracking on really demanding everyone be a straight-up utilitarian. Maybe the optimum is some weighted average of solipsism and utilitarianism. Darn ethical morasses.
September 27th, 2007 16:12
Chris: “How can you have as much moral responsibility for people that you do not have as much political authority over?”
Maybe you don’t. But my–and perhaps Will’s–response is that you have the RIGHT to treat aliens as well as (if not better than) your countrymen. Thus, restricting immigration to effect protectionism is wrong.