Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The biggest immigration debate of this year in the US has been what to do about the rise in migration pressure at the Southwest border. That pressure comes mostly from the “Northern Triangle” of Central America: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
As the debate on family separation and US immigration policy continues, Michael Clemens and Kate Gough pose a key question: why are so many children and families migrating?
Richer countries are under pressure to respond to and suppress high levels of irregular migration reaching their borders. One prominent recommendation is for richer countries to expand opportunities for lawful or regular migration. Suppose they do. Will more regular migration simply raise migration overall, or will it substitute for and reduce irregular migration?
CGD studies the ways that the richest countries affect the rest of the world, far beyond foreign aid. And the US massively shapes economic development in its neighbors to the south. The 2,000 mile border between the United States and Mexico is an economic cliff, the largest GDP per capita differential found at any land border on earth. Across this fault line, the two nations continue a deep and centuries-old exchange of goods, services, investment, labor, culture, and ideas.
This is a joint post with Milan Vaishnav.
One of the biggest experiments in development economics is about to begin on Honduras's Northern Coast. Honduras has altered its constitution to open the way to ceding a large tract of land to build a new "Special Economic Zone", modeled on NYU economist Paul Romer's idea of charter cities -- new cities, built up from scratch, where first-world institutions and third-world immigrants can meet and do business.
This weekend, leaders of the entire Western Hemisphere will gather in Colombia to discuss cooperation for development, including legal cooperation. Something new and remarkable this year is how far apart the leaders have grown—openly this time—on drug decriminalization. It’s an issue with potentially huge implications for development.
Update: On March 29, the U.S. Senate confirmed Pamela White to be Ambassador of the United States of America to the Republic of Haiti.
Assuming she is confirmed by the Senate, Pamela White is set to become the next U.S. ambassador to Haiti. In her March 14 confirmation hearing, White and the senators agreed on one message: Haiti’s unstable government is impeding post-earthquake recovery, including U.S. aid efforts. But White could consider alternative approaches—from migration policy to mobile money—that might do more to help Haitians right now.
As the international response to Haiti’s earthquake shifts from emergency rescue to longer term reconstruction, things are inevitably going to get harder.
How long should presidents rule? On Tuesday, Colombia’s senate approved a national referendum to amend the constitution—again—to allow the popular president Alvaro Uribe to stand for election next year to yet another term in office.
You should care because this is representative of a big phenomenon that spans the whole developing world. For good reasons, many developing countries built presidential term limits into their constitutions—the contracts that govern how people agree to be ruled by each other.
Nearly every time there is a news story about the billions of dollars flowing to poor countries as remittances, someone worries that not “enough” of that money is being saved and invested. A case in point is today’s piece in the Washington Post. Latin American workers in the US will send home $45 billion this year, but “only a small portion … has gone to economic development.”
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