I Want a Blue Card
The estimable Shika Dalmia, in a WSJ piece in favor of scrapping the current cap on H1-B’s, informs me:
In response, most industrialized countries, facing their own skills crunch, are liberalizing their immigration policies to make themselves more attractive. England recently scrapped its Byzantine work permit program in favor of a Canadian-style point system that will allow entry to some skilled workers even before they get a job. New Zealand has a remarkable program that gives accredited private companies fast-track access to work visas that they can hand to foreign workers along with a job offer. Australia is considering modifying its skilled visa program along similar lines.
Even more radical is the blue card program that the European Union proposed last year to bump up its skilled workforce by 20 million over 20 years. The card will admit not only skilled workers – but their entire families – and give spouses the legal right to work in all 27 EU countries within three months of applying. By contrast, the U.S. Congress recently questioned even a relatively modest suggestion by Bill Gates to raise or scrap the annual H-1B visa cap. Astoundingly, this cap was lowered to 1990 levels four years ago.
I want a blue card! The right to work in 27 other countries? Wow! That would be an immense increase in real freedom. I seriously want to look into this.
My own interest I guess is a clue to how this could work out in the long run, which is that an already stratified system of mobility rights will come to favor the wealthy and skilled even more heavily as jurisdictions compete for the most productive workers. I suspect that an increased volume of global migration among the skilled would do a good deal to acclimate incumbent residents to foreigners, thereby softening the ground for more general liberalization. But I’ll have to think about it. What do y’all think?
April 7th, 2008 23:29
I suspect that an increased volume of global migration among the skilled would do a good deal to acclimate incumbent residents to foreigners, thereby softening the ground for more general liberalization.
It could, but I think it could also lead to an easy way of making a “good immigrant-bad immigrant” divide that would allow people to continue pushing restrictionist policies toward low-skill immigrants while using support of high-skilled immigration as a shield from simple charges of racism/xenophobia (especially if the immigrants of different skill levels are coming from different countries — e.g. the US would take in a lot of high-skilled Indians, who are different enough from the Mexicans that make up most of our low-skill immigrant pool that you could see a softening ofprejudices toward Indians that doesn’t carry over to Mexicans).
April 8th, 2008 00:52
Lant Pritchett adresses this question in his book. As I recall, his conclusion is that liberalizing high-skill as opposed to low-skill labor migration is undesirable for all sorts of reasons, such as rising inequality and possible brain drain effects (though he argues that brain drain might actually benefit the sending countries rather than hurt them; the evidence is mixed), but if the choice is between liberalizing high-skill labor migration and not liberalizing any migration at all, then of course we should prefer the former. But if there are a fixed number of labor migration slots, it’s better if these are filled with low-skill workers, at least from a pure welfare-maximization perspective, if not from a political feasibility perspective.
April 14th, 2008 10:53
A non-libertarian responds:
The very fact that some countries discriminate between “high-skill” and “low-skill” workers is disturbing to me. Farm laborers may not generate as much GDP, per capita, as programmers–does this mean they should be denied the opportunities that programmers get?