‘As a tool for spreading wealth, open borders make foreign aid
look like a child’s lemonade stand,” writes Robert Guest, business
editor of the Economist, in
Borderless Economics, a rapid-fire case for the free
movement of labor from one country to another. Central to his case
is a 2005 study by Lant Pritchett, a former economist at the World
Bank, titled “Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on
Global Labor Mobility.” Mr. Pritchett found that if developed
countries slightly liberalized their immigration laws and increased
their work forces by a mere 3%, the gains in remittances and other
benefits to developing countries would amount to more than $300
billion.

Put another way, a Salvadorean man with a high-school education
needs only to come to the U.S. to increase his annual earning power
more than eightfold, from $2,700 to $22,611—a figure, by the way,
almost identical to the earning potential for Americans with the
same level of education. Compare the $300 billion benefit with the
$70 billion spent annually on foreign aid by developed countries,
much of which ends up in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt
politicians.

Unlike graft-riddled foreign-aid programs, nearly 100% of the
dollars sent back home by emigrants who have made good find their
way to the intended destination. Mr. Guest quotes Philippe Legrain,
the author of “Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them” (2007),
explaining that “it is common for an engineer who earns $5,000 a
year in a poor country to move to a rich one, earn $30,000 a year
and send $5,000 of it back to the old country. His home economy
does not even miss him.” Recorded remittances to developing
countries were $316 billion in 2009 (and that’s just what shows up
on the books).

Read the rest in
today’s Wall Street Journal.