Is migration the key to breaking the stranglehold of global poverty? I raised that possibility here in April in a piece Can Migration Change the World?. But Lant Pritchett — the former World Bank official who has just been tapped to help Google.org plan its philanthropic approach to alleviating poverty — goes a lot farther. As a NYT profile this Sunday put it: He wants a giant guest-worker program that would put millions of the world’s poorest people to work in its richest economies. … The basics are simple: The rich world has lots of well-paying jobs and an aging population that cannot fill them. The poor world has desperate workers. But while goods and capital can easily cross borders, modern labor cannot. This strikes Pritchett as bad economics and worse social justice. He likens the limits on labor mobility to “apartheid on a global scale.” Pritchett, in his book Let Their People Come (most of which is available for free download), argues that the only way to effectively deal with global poverty is to add to the standard approach (of trade, aid and debt relief) work mobility for at least a portion of the world’s unskilled laborers. The rich… (more)
(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 3:52 PM)