Migration isn’t just for the birds

This is most obvious in the case of skilled professionals - people like investment bankers, management consultants and computer specialists - who increasingly operate in a global labour market. In some cases, such as the City of London and Hollywood, they cluster together in one place to serve the world market. At the same time, multinational companies span the globe by deploying skilled professionals around the world to serve separate national and regional markets. Many businesspeople spend their year jetting around the globe, forever on the move.

What is true for skilled professionals is increasingly true more generally - or at least it would be if rich-country governments weren’t desperately trying to prevent it. While governments broadly accept, or are even actively encouraging, the creation of a global labour market for skilled professionals, they steadfastly refuse to allow most other people, especially those from poor countries, to cross borders in search of work.

Although the US admitted 946,000 legal immigrants in the fiscal year 2004, most of them were allowed in because they already had family in America. Only 155,000 were admitted on work visas, and only 5,000 of those were for unskilled foreigners seeking year-round work.

Likewise, it is almost impossible for people from poor countries who do not have family in Europe to migrate legally to work in the European Union. And although Canada and Australia admit large numbers of foreign workers each year, you don’t stand a chance of getting in unless you have certain skills or professional qualifications that politicians and bureaucrats deem necessary.

While governments are making it easier for goods and capital to circulate around the globe, they are seeking to erect ever higher national barriers to the free movement of people.

Although most governments wouldn’t dream of trying to ban cross-border trade in goods and services - only North Korea aspires to autarky these days - outlawing the movement across borders of people who make goods and provide services is considered perfectly normal and reasonable.

Yet the global economic forces driving poor people to cross the world in search of work are pretty similar - and seemingly just as beneficial - as those that lure foreign bankers to Tokyo, scatter Coca-Cola executives around the world or, indeed, cause us to import computers from China and beef from Brazil.

Would-be migrants have a huge incentive to relocate: even allowing for the higher cost of living in rich countries, wages for equivalent jobs are typically five times higher than in poor ones. The disparity in wages between rich and poor countries is so huge that university graduates from poor countries are often better off financially driving cabs in rich countries than doing graduate work in their country of origin.

So, They need Us. But, as my book argues, We also need Them.

Some migrants come to do the jobs that people in rich countries no longer want to do, like cleaning, waiting tables and picking fruit. Others come to do the jobs that not enough people in rich countries can do: filling a shortage of nurses in Britain’s National Health Service, for instance. And increasingly, as our societies age, they are caring for our old people.

In effect, most of these migrants are service-providers who ply their trade in foreign countries.

Over the next 20 years, the supply of potential migrants in poor countries is likely to continue rising. While rich countries’ baby-boom generation are nearing retirement age, poor countries’ much younger baby-boomers are just starting to enter the labour market.