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In times of fear, men and women of reason have a responsibility to speak about facts.
I understand fear. I narrowly escaped a terrorist bomb in Colombia as a young man. Fear can make you do things you regret when you learn the facts. And in the United States now, fact-checking has been replaced by fear-mongering, hard evidence by hysteria.
On Thursday, the leaders of 30 African countries signed a European Commission action plan tasking them–in exchange for a $2 billion “emergency trust fund”–to take back economic migrants looking to settle in Europe. If this sum is meant as a bribe, it is a bad deal. With remittances dwarfing foreign aid worldwide ($580 billion versus $135 billion in 2014), migration is a better deal for Africa than aid.
Recent research overturns the standard narrative about refugee crises: that addressing them mainly means curtailing the conflict and poverty that “push” migrants away from home and slashing the excessive generosity that “pull” them into other countries. Instead, pragmatic and self-interested policymakers should consider that they often waste resources when trying to reduce push factors, and they can spark an inhumane and inefficient race to the bottom by acting individually to reduce pull factors. Through broad international cooperation to get people out of camps and into the labor force, though, they can transform refugees from a burden into an investment.
Journalists have warned you that there are now 60 million refugees worldwide, and that Europe faces “the worst refugee crisis since World War II.” They’ve told you this again and again and again.
Fact check: It’s not true. Not even close.
Around 1900, many claimed that Italian immigrants were harming the US by sending money abroad. All the way back to 1728, Jonathan Swift believed that outflows of money hurt Ireland. The idea keeps coming back because, if you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. Money buys stuff, and if it buys Mexican stuff, it’s not buying American stuff. But if you think about it for one more minute, it falls apart. Here is a basic course in the economics of remittances for populist politicians.
Spoiler alert: this is not a blog post about #DumpTrump. However, the 2016 U.S. presidential election – and last week’s Republican debate – demonstrates an increasing focus on U.S. immigration policy and reform. While many candidates are sticking to the oft-repeated refrain of ‘border security first,’ some have taken unexpected stands.
It was a big deal when various media outlets declared last week that the evidence to support mass deworming had been “debunked.” The debate now is not about whether children sick with worms should get treated (everyone says yes), but whether the mass treatment of all kids — including those not known to be infected — is a cost-effective way to raise school attendance. The healthiest parts of the debate have been about the need for transparency, data sharing, and more replication in science. Here, we’re going to focus here on the narrower question of the evidence for mass deworming specifically, which is where some journalists have gotten things quite wrong.
Here’s good news about the economics profession — for the development community and for us at CGD. The American Economic Association has just started a “research highlight” series that will promote for non-economists the most policy-relevant research published in AEA journals.
Skilled people from developing countries are increasingly migrating to other countries. How should policy respond?
International migration has giant effects on global development. Social scientists are just starting to understand those effects, and the latest research is moving far beyond traditional subjects like remittances.
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