Ending global apartheid: economist Lant Pritchett defends immigration, the least-popular—and most-proven—idea for helping the world's poor

Reason, Feb, 2008 by Kerry Howley

Pritchett: It's hard to tell how much of the backlash against illegal immigration is against immigration and how much is against illegality. There is a legitimate concern that the law should be obeyed. Massive gaps between de jure and de facto are socially dangerous. So I'm pro-immigration, but I am not pro-illegality. I think you should do something about reconciling the legal situation for the people inside our country. I'm dubious about the "live in the shadows because the regulatory regime is unjust" strategy.

reason: You worry that it gives immigration a bad name.

Pritchett: Exactly. During Prohibition, alcohol sales became associated with organized crime. But there was nothing intrinsic about having a drink that linked you to organized crime. I would much rather repeal Prohibition than allow bootleggers to flourish, because Prohibition is a dumb idea.

reason: The electronic employer verification program has the potential to enforce immigration allowances that are egregiously low.

Pritchett: That doesn't worry me.

reason: It doesn't?

Pritchett: I think I have more of the opposite worry, which is the general taint of illegality around the natural process of people moving across borders for economic opportunity. If we could eliminate that, that would be a big win.

reason: What role do international institutions have to play in knocking down barriers to labor, if any?

Pritchett: I think they're going to have a very modest role, at best. In part it's embedded in the term international, if by international you mean cooperative agreements among nation-states. I don't think any country is going to enter into a binding international agreement that gives up control over its borders, and I don't think international organizations are going to play a role in free labor in the exact same way that GATT played a role in free trade.

reason: It's taken as obvious that our duties to our neighbors come before our responsibilities to far-off populations, but that raises the question of who our neighbors are. What will it take to expand that moral community beyond the nation-state?

Pritchett: That doesn't have to happen. We don't have to come up with some sort of completely cosmopolitan, completely globalist morality to move ahead on labor migration. I think it's going to happen in the other way. I think we're going to move ahead on migration; people are going to become more and more exposed to the fact that people from other places in the world are, in very deep ways, human beings exactly like us; and eventually, in an unpredictable way, the attitude toward this will shift.

The thrust of my book is, let's look for politically acceptable mechanisms with which to make incremental changes that are feasible now. If we wait for the grand shift to happen, we'll be waiting forever.

reason: You are probably often accused of thinking too much like an economist. What if the numbers don't capture the cultural damage caused by immigration: the loss of what it means to be an American, the loss of the sense of community. How do you address that?