The refugee crisis of 2015 in Europe has brought out the best and the worst in human behaviour and public policy on the immigration of refugees, asylum seekers and ‘economic’ migrants. While Germany has welcomed refugees, Hungary has fenced them out. Denmark has followed Switzerland in compelling asylum seekers to hand over their jewellery in exchange for the costs of looking after them, with all its echoes of Nazi practices towards the Jews during the Holocaust. The outpouring of popular support for refugees in the wake of the Mediterranean drownings has restored some faith in human generosity in the face of racist attacks on migrants and the rise of right-wing nationalism across the continent. Against this background, the debate about immigration in general, and its benefits and limits, has intensified.
Exodus predates the current refugee crisis and is centrally concerned with migration from poor to rich countries. It is firmly situated in the context of the immigration debate in the UK and other parts of Europe, though there is occasional reference to migration in other parts of the world. Yet migration is global and complex. Current data tell us that most migrants originate from middle-income countries and go to high-income countries, while most migrants from low-income countries go to middle-income countries. With the exception of the Caribbean and Latin America, most migration is between countries in the same area of the world. More than half of African migration is within Africa and only a quarter to Europe, while two-thirds of migration into European countries is from other parts of Europe (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2016). In the current Syrian refugee crisis it is Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon who have taken almost all of the approximately five million refugees. Yet attention in Europe has been predominantly on the tens of thousands of Syrian and African refugees who have sought asylum there. Similarly, the migration debate in Europe has in the past centred on migrants from Africa and Asia and this is predominantly the case in Exodus. Yet in Europe, and especially in the UK, there is much more concern about the principle and consequences of the freedom of movement of labour within the EU, but not in this book.
Exodus (a word of Greek origin, literally meaning ‘going out’) is strongly associated with the biblical story of the migration of the Israelites, the ‘chosen people’ led by Moses, from slavery in Egypt to the promised land of Canaan, and to freedom and peace. The peopling of the modern world is the consequence of human migrations across the centuries, often to escape religious persecution but often also to seek a better life. Migration has been especially important in the development of capitalism especially in its imperialist stage. The people that have dominated the headlines over the last year and reignited the debate about migration are mainly refugees from the horrors of war and repression, most notably Syria, Eritrea and Libya, seeking asylum in Europe. These refugees add to the regular migration of those in search of more prosperous lives in richer countries. As Collier observes, ‘[M]any of us are the descendants of immigrants’ (p. 3). His own grandfather was German and his father anglicised his name as Britain went to war with Nazi Germany, just as this reviewer’s Polish Jewish refugee father changed his German-sounding name when he decided to settle in the UK; in both cases the name change was made in order to protect their families from the inevitable anti-German sentiment of the period.
There are many personal histories like these. They do not necessarily mean that people with these histories are in favour of freedom of movement. There are those who would pull up the drawbridge after they have managed to get in to the host country, there are others who are thankful they were taken in and do not want to refuse this chance to others. And then there are those, like Collier, who believe that there has to be ‘rational’ discussion about how many migrants can be admitted. Yet even this simple question is confused. In the UK, for example, as previously noted, the immigration issue is now more about the European Union’s principle of free labour mobility between its members. This means in practice that farmers in the richer EU countries satisfy their demand for agricultural labour by attracting workers from agricultural Eastern Europe. Similarly, companies in the richer countries can resolve labour shortages of mainly unskilled labour and at the same time depress wage growth rates, especially in the context of the weakening of the trades unions and the privatisation of the state. The inextricable link between migrant labour and capitalism is of course central to an understanding of migration, but not so in Exodus.
Collier’s modus operandi, as is standard to the practice of modern economic inquiry, is to construct a model of how a set of measurable variables relates to the subject which requires explanation, find or construct a dataset with these measures and analyse the data using an econometric programme to produce the answers. These variables are not exclusively economic: indices of corruption and governance provide quantitative measures of political variables which can be fed into the testable models. It is contended that only through rigorous statistical analysis of all available relevant data, preferably in large datasets, can theories be tested and policy be properly informed.
In the case of migration, the (rational choice) theory underlying the models assumes a utility-maximising individual migrating to gain or increase income. This micro-level decision is treated as an investment not only by the migrant but by those who have financed or helped to finance the costs of migration. In return, the migrant remits a portion of his (usually his) earnings to support the family he has left behind. Questions such as who benefits and who loses in both the labour-supplying and host countries, or the optimal number of migrants which the host country can accommodate, can then be addressed. In Collier’s earlier work The bottom billion and War, guns and votes, it is the rational utility-maximising man, or boy, who decides to go to war – a consequence of the poverty which makes the opportunity cost of doing that close to zero. Such rational discourse can also be applied to macro-level questions such as why some countries develop faster than others. The questions raised at both micro and macro levels can then be answered by the systematic analysis of all available large datasets using a wide array of statistical tools to explain why migration should be limited to the optimum or why the ‘bottom billion’, mainly in Africa, have been left behind rapidly developing Asia (Collier 2007, 2009; Lawrence 2010).
Collier’s first major foray into this way of showing ‘how modern research is done, and [getting] the thrill that comes from cracking intractable questions’ (Collier 2007, xiii) was a book on Ujamaa and inequality in Tanzania (Collier et al. 1986). On the basis of large surveys across most of the country, he and his fellow authors found that inequality within villages was greater than inequality between them, thus arguing that Ujamaa had resulted in the opposite of what it was designed to achieve. This only confirmed earlier research that had been conducted a decade or more earlier which demonstrated the inequalities within villages derived from the inequalities among farmers before they were grouped into villages. This was completely ignored, even though it demonstrated that the objectives of Ujamaa were not being met and illuminated why this was the case. However, for Collier and his colleagues, a large dataset subjected to ‘rigorous’ analysis was the only way we could really be sure that Ujamaa did not work, so that previous work demonstrating the same outcome in different ways could be ignored.
First, Collier structures Exodus around three ‘clusters of questions’ (p. 6): why people decide to migrate, how migration affects those who remain and how it affects the ‘indigenous’ population in the host country. The answers to these questions provide the evidence required to answer the key question: not whether migration is good or bad (for him, on balance, good), but rather ‘how much is best’ (p. 26). He argues that there are three major factors that drive international migration. First, the gap in income between the country of origin and the host country: this, as a consequence of 30 years of growth after the Second World War in the developed countries, has become ‘horrendous’ (p. 39); second, the economic, legal and social barriers to migration which generate an investment cost to the migrant; and third, the existence of a ‘diaspora’ in the host country. The ‘diaspora’ is defined as ‘the stock of unabsorbed migrants and their descendants already in the country’ (p. 44) so that the larger the ‘diaspora’, the higher the rate of migration to the country that hosts it.
Then we have the model. Collier constructs a simple one in which, with a constant gap in income and constant investment cost, migration creates a ‘diaspora’ and the ‘diaspora’ creates more migration. So with diasporas accumulating populations, we have ‘the beginnings of disequilibrium of epic proportions’. The gap will continue to widen, migration will not reduce it because the feedback mechanisms are weak – the migrant population is too small to depress incomes in the host country and raise them through remittances and other transfers from rich to poor. For Collier, ‘[M]odern migration is not a quest for land, it is a quest for efficiency’ (p. 50).
The conceptualisation of ‘diaspora’ and ‘indigenous’ to divide the population of the host country is hugely problematic. Who are the ‘indigenous’ in any case? Even conceding that ‘diaspora’ is the right term to describe well-established communities of immigrant origin of more than one generation in developed countries, there is no proper discussion in the book about what it takes to become integrated: how much of an immigrant’s cultural background has to be discarded, and how much of the ‘indigenous’ background has to be assimilated such that the immigrant is absorbed? Does absorption require abandoning various forms of dress, as in France, or is there any toleration of difference, as has long been the case for Orthodox Jews – or is playing for a national sports team, or at least supporting it against your family’s country of origin, the ultimate test of absorption?
The model would cease to be simple if it disaggregated the two categories of population to something nearer reality. The ‘indigenous’ population is of course divided by ethnicity and class, as well as by income groups within classes, while the ‘diaspora’ is also composed of different ‘foreign’ groups, some with more community cohesion than others. Some have short-term migration objectives, others may have decided to make their migration permanent. They are not a sack of potatoes. A simple model, however, gives clear answers to complex questions. In Collier’s model, it is possible to find the size of ‘diaspora’ at which the rate of in-migration will equal the rate of absorption into the ‘indigenous’ community and culture – the point of equilibrium. Should the rate of absorption be lower than the rate of immigration, then the ‘diaspora’ expands and so does the rate of migration, leading to a larger and larger diaspora. The assumption is that such diasporas have less of an incentive to integrate with ‘indigenous’ populations the bigger they become. The ensuing rate of migration is unsustainable and immigration controls are needed because the sending societies are ‘dysfunctional’, lacking the trust and cooperation that is to be found in the well-functioning ‘social models’ of developed countries. These models are of twentieth-century vintage; before then, ‘a high living standard was the privilege of extractive elites rather than the normal reward for productive work’ (p. 34), a remark carrying some irony given the privileges of our new financial elites.
In Collier’s view, poor countries have yet to achieve a functional social model. Poor countries are presented as a given as though they fell from the skies. There is no place for explanations of poverty, let alone dysfunction, which relate to slavery and empire, and which turned large parts of colonies into migrant labour reserves for colonial capitalist enterprise. As we well know, migrations were largely forced on colonised populations by the need for mine and plantation labour. The Witwatersrand Native Labour Association for example recruited labour to the South African mines from as far away as Tanganyika and the then Belgian Congo. The colonial authorities levied head and hut taxes on local populations to force male labour in rural areas to work for the companies that ran the mines and plantations. This had debilitating effects on the communities left behind, dependent on male labour to clear new land to enable previously cultivated land to regain fertility, and so later suffering fertility decline on over-cultivated land. Even if migrants did sometimes remit some of their earnings or return with savings to invest in agriculture, the balance was overwhelmingly negative for the supply areas.
Migration, then, is, more often than not, the result, not of an individual decision to migrate, but of a system that needs migrants to satisfy the demand for labour when ‘indigenous’ labour cannot be found, and forces migration. But nowhere in his book do we find any reference to the companies and corporations that seek to satisfy their demand for different types of labour through free movement. Under financial capitalism, labour is employed at wages that enable the corporates to make the returns to their shareholders that match the returns speculative capital can obtain in financial markets. Instead our vision is limited to a world in which a migrant decides, rather than is forced, to migrate in order to gain a higher wage in a richer economy, and the richer economy now has a problem of absorbing the migrant to keep its ‘indigenous’ population happy.
Collier’s arguments around the social consequences of migration for the host societies further exemplify the book’s distance from reality. He argues that different societies are characterised by different levels of mutual regard, trust and therefore cooperation. Inward migration brings an increased diversity to a society. This can be beneficial to general well-being, but there are diminishing returns. On the other hand, the immigration of groups of people who come from societies that lack mutual regard and trust can reduce well-being in the host country, so that the ideal rate of migration is where the marginal benefit of diversity is equal to the marginal loss of benefit from lack of trust. Collier brings in examples of research from Africa which suggests that lack of trust and mutual regard among African populations has a long history, characterised by violent conflict. There is one exception: ‘ … in poor societies, where overall trust levels are low, families function as islands of high trust’ (p. 156). This presumably explains the degree of trust put in migrants regularly to remit some of their earnings, but ignores the much wider concept of family in African societies that goes beyond the nuclear. That lack of trust and violent conflict have ravaged parts or all of Europe throughout its history up to the present, is forgotten.
Lack of trust is apparently infectious: immigration may have diminished the social capital of mutual regard, trust and cooperation among the ‘indigenous’ population, reducing its happiness, the more localities are peopled by immigrants. To reinforce this hypothesis, there is anecdotal evidence from the UK which suggests that some immigrants have imported the gun culture of the societies from which they come and that ‘indigenous’ criminals have copied this behaviour. This could lead to arming the police and an effective breakdown of the previous ‘benevolent social equilibrium’ (p. 81) where the police do not routinely carry guns. However, as he quickly points out, this might have happened anyway without migration. So why quote such anecdotes? More importantly, how is trust likely to be built if immigrants are blamed for the ills of a society, when their causes plainly lie elsewhere? (Incidentally, Collier’s account of the police shooting of the British Afro-Caribbean Mark Duggan, in 2011, cited to support this line of argument, entirely repeats the police account, strongly contested at the time by witnesses, and later partially contradicted by the still contested findings of the official inquest.) There is no possibility in this account that the social capital to which Collier refers may have been diminished by neoliberal ideology and its associated policies. These policies, after all, place lack of trust at the core of ‘human nature’: for example, workers are shirkers aided and abetted by trades unions, and public sector workers need the discipline of privatisation and bureaucratic performance evaluation procedures for maximum efficiency as a substitute for the discipline of the private sector market.
While more perceptive analysts might find the source of neoliberalism in corporate power and its capture of the state, Collier, in a remarkable leap of logic, suggests that free market policies and their associated inequities may have been caused by immigration itself. Not for him that inequality is driven by the financialisation of everything, and the increasing concentration of global corporate power in fewer hands. Rather, the root of increased inequality is information technology which has ‘probably [sic] increased the returns to exceptional mental abilities’ (p. 83). Collier partially recognises inequality has also something to do with governments reducing taxation and weakening redistributive benefits but then leaps to connecting this to cultural diversity. Immigrants tend to be disproportionately represented among those that claim benefits. So those on higher incomes are less likely to want to see some of their taxes go to the poorer end of the distribution comprising people unlike them. Hence immigration may have been a cause of the policies of low taxation and the promotion of the market! He goes on to quote evidence that ‘the recent phase of the open door in Britain has coincided with a collapse in the willingness to fund re-distribution’ (p. 85). This hypothesis is based of course on rigorous research in the US by ‘two distinguished Harvard professors’ which showed that ‘the greater the level of cultural diversity, the worse the provision of redistributive public goods’ (p. 85). Never mind that the policies of lower tax and stricter controls on benefits date from well before the increase in migration rates, not to mention well before the existence of the ‘open door’. It can hardly be argued that immigration is the cause of the richest 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population and of 1% of the world’s population owning more wealth than the other 99% combined (Oxfam 2016, p. 11). It is also difficult to argue that the developed world is not returning to the dysfunctional social model Collier seems to think has been discarded.
Turning to the economic consequences of immigration, Collier presents three main ones, but in doing so, again fails to provide the broader context in which more fundamental factors are at play, First, migration tends to increase the wages of the migrants while depressing those at the bottom end of the ‘indigenous’ wage structure, according to cited research. At the higher end the level of skills drives up productivity and therefore wages, while at the lower end an influx of unskilled workers into low-productivity jobs keeps wages low. ‘For the neediest sections of the “indigenous” population, the net effects of migration are probably negative’ (p. 24). Collier argues that migration also has negative consequences for those who have already migrated, as they compete with the existing immigrant population for jobs and so keep wages low. No mention that these effects are taking place against the backdrop of weakened unions, with lower paid public services subcontracted to non-unionised private enterprises paying the minimum wage. Consequently, low-paid workers receive benefits to raise their income to what would be a living wage. These effects are independent of immigration, which simply increases the numbers on these low wages.
The second economic effect is on housing. Research is cited showing that immigration causes a 10% rise in house prices, affecting negatively both the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘diaspora’. Collier also mentions the phenomenon of rich immigrants buying elite property but does not connect this to the rise in house prices, or unoccupied houses bought as investment assets. Again, why refer only to the immigration effect on house prices, when the only immigrants who can have affected these in any significant way are the rich ones?
A third effect of migration is due to ‘immigrant exceptionalism’ (p. 118), the idea that well-educated immigrants bring something special to the host economies. That of course is more likely to be the case where migration takes place between developed countries. Poor migrants apparently bring a different kind of exceptionalism in the form of over-representation in the prison population or in welfare programmes. This reinforces the hostility of the ‘indigenous’ towards migrants, while policies fail to tackle the poverty that lies at the root of these social problems.
Another possible effect of immigration is emigration. The theory is that immigration potentially drives down ‘indigenous’ wages thus inducing emigration to higher wage areas. Socio-economic conditions deteriorate as increased immigration leads to housing shortages and pressure on public services. There is no reference here to immigrants themselves returning home. While there is certainly significant emigration by retired people to warmer climates, and of highly skilled professionals to countries where salaries are higher and conditions of work are better, how far this can be put down to immigration is debatable and anyway, as Collier points out, unproven, which begs the question of why it is discussed by an author for whom the statistical evidence base is so important.
Although this book is not supposed to be about the pros and cons of immigration, some aspects of the case for immigration have to be disputed. Those who argue that future high immigration rates will be needed to support an ageing population are given short shrift. Policies which raise the retirement age, justified by past increases in life expectancy, make much more sense to Collier. In any case, he argues that migration will not solve the dependency ratio problem: an influx of poor and unskilled migrants, with the high birth rates which are typical of the societies from which they come, could lead to higher dependency ratios – there is already research from Scandinavia which demonstrates this. This may be true in the very short run but over time higher birth rates among migrants would increase the size of the working population and reduce the dependency ratio. For some reason this possible outcome is not considered.
Collier does not agree that immigration is needed to meet skill shortages. The immigration of skilled migrants lowers the incentive for firms and public institutions to train ‘indigenous’ workers. ‘What is good for business is not necessarily good for indigenous people’ (p. 127), it seems, as though this is usually necessarily the case for workers, indigenous or otherwise. Collier thinks it is lazy to see labour migration as integral to globalisation. Capital mobility, free trade and the spread of ideas are his alternatives to reduce labour migration, but then he offers no explanation as to why capital mobility, for instance, has not countered people movement. The irony is the development of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries heavily depended on the passport-free movement of labour around the world, while movements of capital were controlled. Now there is no passport-free movement of labour, but migration continues as economic activity clusters across the globe, where before it did so across the nation. Capital mobility is a driver of migration, not an alternative to it. Here again there is a failure to place migration in the context of capitalism’s dynamics, both historic and current.
Collier then considers the political consequences of migration for the immigrants’ own countries. Poor-country governments might be happy to see minority groups leave, or they might expel them, as in the case of the Ugandan Asians. Migrants living abroad may provide a feedback mechanism to improved governance back home, not least when they are a hotbed of opposition. Once emigrants experience good governance they may pressure for this to happen back home. On the other hand, he suggests that Zimbabwean migrants to South Africa – at least a million – could have engineered a better outcome for Zimbabwe under Mugabe if they had stayed – a conjecture that is not backed up by any explanation of who the migrants were and why they left. Collier finds some research which suggests that returning migrants are politically more aware and active but the evidence is patchy because the studies are limited and, sadly, there are no large datasets. Then, there are other more negative political consequences when migrants return home. For example, Collier writes about the crisis in Libya and its consequences in neighbouring Mali, as Malian mercenaries returned from fighting for Gaddafi to fight the Malian government. Once again, we have no context so that there is no mention of the US-led removal of the Libyan dictator Gaddafi from power, which caused the destabilising return of the Malian mercenaries. Indeed, it could very reasonably be argued that the single most effective strategy to reduce rates of in-migration to Europe would be to cease regime-change interventions around the world.
Moving on to discuss the economic consequences of migration for the supply countries, he finds that the positives are that as successful migrants tend to be better educated, putative future migrants will become better educated, thus benefiting the whole society, as not everyone migrates. However, Collier sees the migration of the educated as a disincentive to governments to spend on education, although as migration generates remittances this expenditure is an investment. The evidence suggests that governments reduce education budgets, but it is not clear whether emigration of the educated is the cause; budgets would be reduced anyway as part of the public expenditure cuts demanded by neoliberalism. On the negative side, Collier cites the ‘brain drain’ and assumes that those who emigrate are the best of a particular group and leave behind the ones who are not as good. How much evidence there is for this is unclear, apart from the anecdotal, and the ‘law’ of diminishing returns so beloved of orthodox economics.
Remittances are the main benefit of migration for the people left behind. However, more migration will lead to fewer remittances. Collier argues this on the basis of recent research that suggests that as migrants bring more of their families to the host country, there are fewer possible recipients of remittances. This means that remittances to poor countries would increase with more restrictive immigration policies. It could also be argued that with very few family members left back home, immigration rates from such groups will decline anyway, and so immigration restrictions might exclude other new groups of migrants who would leave families behind and would remit.
The final part of the book concerns immigration policies which will not produce the swings from ‘open door’ to heavy restriction but try to maintain the equilibrium path of the ‘workhorse model’. Here we are presented with the extremes of pro- and anti-immigration positions. Collier argues that the logic of supporting freedom of movement is that as migration proceeds from poor to rich, poor countries will empty and rich countries will become overwhelmingly dominated by migrants from one or other country of origin. So, one policy conclusion is that countries have a right to limit immigration. Another, rather obvious, conclusion is that countries from which migrants come in large numbers ‘should develop, not empty’ (p. 247) so that people stay there.
Collier’s ‘policy package’ comprises four elements: ceilings on immigration, selectivity, integration and legalisation. Ceilings on immigration would be related to the rate of absorption of the diaspora, something that would still have to be measured. Selectivity would be based on a ‘threshold level of education’ (p. 261), and would include limiting the rights of the more culturally distant to immigrate compared to those culturally close – an unfortunate distinction with doubtless unintended racist undertones. Selectivity would apply to asylum seekers, who could only come from countries ‘in the throes of civil war, brutal dictatorship, minority persecution, or equivalent severe social disturbance’ (p. 263). Furthermore, once countries had returned to peace and democracy, those granted asylum would be required to return to their country of origin. This appears to contradict an earlier discussion of ‘guest workers’ in which repatriation at the end of a contract was rejected on the grounds that:
Immigrants to high wage democracies become not just part of the labour force, but a part of society. It is best to accept this evident fact and weigh its consequences in the overall balance of benefits and costs to the ‘indigenous’ population. (p. 134, emphasis in original)
So immigrants become a part of society but are they still part of the ‘diaspora’ or part of the absorbed indigenous, so to speak?
The above question would presumably depend on integration policies. Collier suggests that these would clamp down on racism and have a policy of dispersal of immigrants so they are forced to integrate with local communities, rather than maintain their ‘diaspora’. This would be combined with an education policy which integrates schools but puts a ceiling on the number of pupils that come from ‘diaspora’ families, requires migrants to learn the ‘indigenous’ language and ‘promotes the symbols and ceremonies of common citizenship’ (p. 264). Legalising illegal immigration, the fourth part of the policy package, is designed to reduce the amount of illegality that follows from being an illegal immigrant. Such migrants would be granted guest worker status, pay taxes, join a queue to become permanent immigrants, but not have access to social benefits. Only those who refused to register as illegal migrants would be deported. This surely conflicts with basic equity principles, creating a class of people who are allowed to work, thus paying tax, in the host country, but are not placed on an equal footing with others who pay taxes. Collier doesn’t say what happens if the ‘guest worker’ loses her job, or how she is expected to survive without social benefits available to fellow workers and unemployed.
Exodus contains some interesting and often counter-intuitive ideas about migration which provide meat and drink for narrow academic discourse. However, these ideas and the partial evidence that is cited in the course of discussing them do not aid understanding of the nature and dynamic of migration in the geopolitics of late capitalism with its both cooperating and competing imperialisms. Its Eurocentric, and especially UK-centric discussion of immigration, its pseudo-scientific search for the optimal rate of immigration, its misleading separation of ‘indigenous’ and ‘diaspora’, and the policies advocated to control immigration, play directly to the anti-immigration discourse, however much the author tries to distance himself from that. By contrast, Hannah Cross’s study (Cross 2013), for example, of West African migrants to Europe illuminates the complexity of migration and its relationship to modern capitalism in a way that Exodus cannot do.
The book contains some economies of truth. The political party Respect, formed in the UK by socialists disenchanted with the Labour government’s support of the 2003 Iraq war, is not ‘essentially a party of Islamic extremists’ (p. 4). Following this by coupling the election of a Respect MP for Bradford ‘by immigrant votes’, with a reference to the London bombing because the four perpetrators were from Bradford, is either careless or implies the two are associated, not something to be expected from a serious ‘evidence-based’ researcher. Further, to state that the four men from Bradford were immigrants is incorrect – they were born in the UK (though presumably part of the Bangladeshi ‘diaspora’ rather than ‘indigenous’). There is not ‘complete spatial segregation between the different language groups’ (p. 17) in Belgium and Canada, though there are geographical areas where the two main languages in each country are dominant, though not exclusive. Enoch Powell may not have held a major office of state but he could hardly be described as a ‘minor politician’ (p. 20), even if his inflammatory predictions almost five decades ago about the future effects of immigration turned out to be wrong.