L’Immigrazione è un beneficio economico da incentivare

Secondo l’economista britannico, nonché fondatore di Open Political Economy Network (OPEN), Philippe Legrain, l’apertura verso gli immigrati, oltre che ad essere moralmente giusta, è anche economicamente e culturalmente arricchente. Per Legrain la libertà di movimento, all’interno di un mondo sempre più interconnesso e globalizzato, è uno dei principali diritti da difendere e promuovere, perché solo attraverso questo principio fondamentale l’individuo ha la reale possibilità di definirsi nel corso della sua vita, non solamente attraverso gli standard culturali del suo luogo di nascita, ma anche per le sue reali capacità e doti personali. Nell’ottica di un mondo sempre più aperto e multiculturale, secondo Legrain, l’immigrazione permette inoltre un arricchimento sociale e culturale per tutti i cittadini di un Paese: l’arrivo di persone da altri Stati, infatti, comporta la diffusione di una più ampia dieta gastronomica, induce ad una maggiore creatività nell’arte e nella musica e consente un allargamento delle relazioni sociali che stimola l’innovazione e la conoscenza del mondo. L’immigrazione, insomma, non comporta la sostituzione della cultura nativa con quella degli “stranieri”, bensì l’integrazione e l’arricchimento di entrambe.

Leggi l’articolo di Daniele Cornia.

L’Express on Them and Us

“L’immigration est aujourd’hui, sans doute, le sujet le plus controversé dans les pays occidentaux. Nos sociétés (relativement) ouvertes et libérales sont menacées par des personnes qui rendent responsables les étrangers en général, et les immigrés en particulier, pour tout ce qui selon eux ne va pas dans nos vies et sociétés” écrit Philippe Legrain dans Them and us. Alors que le rejet de l’immigration a été le moteur du populisme comme du vote pour le Brexit, cet essayiste britannique, ancien journaliste à The Economist et conseiller de José Manuel Barroso à la Commission européenne, livre un plaidoyer assumé. 

Merci, Thomas Mahler. Lisez son article sur le site de l’Express.

Award for Them and Us

“Them and Us: How immigrants and locals can thrive together” won the Diversity, Inclusion and Equality award at the Business Book Awards last night.

Thank you so much!

Great review of Them and Us in The Economist

“Them and Us” by Philippe Legrain, a former Economist journalist, sets out the benefits of migration and asks how newcomers and locals can get along better. “Wretched Refuse?” by Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell, a think-tanker and an academic, asks a crucial question: might immigration from poor, corrupt countries undermine the institutions of rich, well-governed ones?

Mr Legrain’s book is the more accessible: though underpinned by scholarship it is chatty, entertaining and full of anecdotes, such as the one with which this review begins. He breezily rebuts popular arguments for closed borders, and turns populist slogans upside down.

Thank you, Robert Guest.

Read the full review. Find out more about Them and Us.

Great review of Them and Us in today’s FT

“A full-throated defence of open borders and freedom of movement could easily feel too late at a time when Home Office officials looked at shipping asylum seekers to distant islands. Legrain’s work is anything but: it makes a solid rebuttal against the polemics of anti-immigrant talking heads with an unabashedly positive case for immigration grounded in facts, and ends with practical advice for resistance.”

Thank you, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan.

Read the review in full.

Read more about Them and Us.

Quoted in Richochet

In Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, economist and financial journalist Philippe Legrain does a thorough job of debunking the myth that “government workers are ever really in a position to adequately assess which workers the economy needs at any given time.” First, because the market’s needs fluctuate so widely and so quickly, and second, the human variable is so unpredictable, with an individual’s academic skills or degree offering only a small clue of what their future employment or societal contributions will be.

Read Toula Drimonis’s piece for Ricochet.

Has migration gone too far?

Photo by Joy Ekpeti

I debated this with Ian Goldin at The Economist’s Open Future conference in London.

Having just flown in from Sydney I was extremely jetlagged, but apart from saying the word “fundamentally” a few too many times, I hope my positive, reasoned message came across well.

Watch the full day on YouTube; our panel starts around 7 hours 11 minutes in

Britain’s immigration system isn’t fit for purpose

Britain’s immigration system isn’t fit for purpose. Its political targets are perverse. Its guiding philosophy is reminiscent of Soviet-style central planning. The resulting rules are unworkably complex. Their administration by the Home Office mixes incompetence with malice.

The upshot is heavy-handed controls that still leave voters feeling that things are out of control. That’s bad economics and bad politics. Even international students – fee-paying, politically uncontroversial, future ambassadors for Global Britain – are now turfed out once they’ve obtained a UK degree. Madness.

It could soon get even worse. The only bit of the system that works well – EU free movement – is set to be scrapped. Such is the perceived imperative to keep out industrious, enterprising young Europeans that the government seems prepared to sacrifice the UK’s unrestricted access to lucrative EU services markets to do so.

The danger that Britain will pull up the drawbridge is real. But if – a huge if – further knee-jerk populism can be resisted, there is also a political opportunity to craft a more sensible immigration system.

My latest for CapX

Trump’s refugee and Muslim ban isn’t just morally wrong, it’s also bad for the economy

Refugees are a tiny proportion of the U.S. population — some 3.3 million have been admitted since 1975 — but they have had an outsized impact. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was a child refugee from the Soviet Union; Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is now America’s second-most valuable firm, with a market capitalization of $553 billion. WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin were refugees from Ukraine. The late Andy Grove, who helped start and was later CEO of Intel, fled from communist Hungary. So, too, did hedge-fund manager and philanthropist George Soros; Thomas Peterffy, the founder of Interactive Brokers Group; and Steven Udvar-Hazy, the founder of Air Lease Corp.

People originating from the seven countries on Trump’s blacklist already have contributed a lot to America. eBay was founded by an Iranian-American, Pierre Omidyar. Its market capitalization of $36.1 billion dwarfs the value of Trump’s unlisted business holdings, while Omidyar’s self-made $8.2 billion fortune is more than twice as big as Trump’s partly inherited one. Oracle Corp., a software giant worth $162.2 billion, was co-founded by the late Bob Miner, who was also Iranian-American. While the communities from the other countries are much smaller and generally more recent, one notable Somali-American is author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of both Islamic extremism and Trump’s anti-Muslim policies.

Read my piece for Foreign Policy