Senior fellow Michael Clemens' blog on the importance of emigration to the world economy was featured in The Huffington Post.
From the Article
Economists who study globalization pay lots of attention to trade and capital flows. They have spent generations researching how much better off the world could be if there were fewer international obstacles to voluntary, mutually beneficial trade and investment. If there's a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk--economists' old catch-phrase meaning an opportunity for big gain at small cost--why not pick it up?
But according to the latest research, one of the biggest growth opportunities in the world economy lies not in the mobility of goods or capital, but in the mobility of labor. If we somehow wiped away all remaining policy barriers to international goods trade, and eliminated every last barrier to the international flow of capital, world income would rise by somewhere in the range of $3 trillion a year. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the economic gains from even small reductions in the barriers to the international movement of the workers who make those goods and use that capital.
In a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, I discuss the latest research literature on this question. The bottom line: A modest increase in emigration out of low-income countries--just 5% of the people now living there--would expand the world economy by several trillion dollars every year. That's a stunner, so I'll say it again: Minor reductions in the barriers to labor mobility would add more value than the total, global elimination of all remaining policy barriers to goods trade and all barriers to capital flows, combined.