Senior fellow Michael Clemens was mentioned in a Financial Times article on emigration.
From the article
I have been mourning the loss of a dear family friend: a doctor, trained in West Bengal, who then emigrated to Birmingham and worked all her life in Britain. She died, surrounded by her family, back in Kolkata. The choices she made would probably have been impossible today: the National Health Service now has a code of practice banning recruitment from around 150 developing countries – almost all of them. It also bans recruitment from West Bengal.
It is sad that in all the fuss about immigration, few commentators take the viewpoint of the emigrant, although every immigrant is also an emigrant. (Even in the scholarly economics literature the word “immigration” is four times as frequent as the word “emigration”.) The reason is obvious enough: we view migration by considering what we have to gain, rather than what the migrants might gain.
What the migrants might gain is, of course, a great deal. Migrants receive far higher wages than they would back home. It is possible that migrants are particularly energetic people who would have earned well anywhere – but this effect is probably not the main explanation for the gap between wages at home and abroad. Economists who have studied situations where the right to migrate is assigned by lottery have found little difference between the wages of those who lose the lottery and those who do not apply.
A recent survey by the economist Michael Clemens, of the Center for Global Development, points out that although the question is largely ignored, any reasonable estimate of the economic gains from freer migration would dwarf that of the gains from, say, freer trade – if we include the welfare of the migrants themselves. Clemens points out that allowing some migration from disaster-hit countries such as Haiti or Somalia would be a far more effective way to alleviate poverty than many conventional aid programs.