Philippe Legrain

About Phillippe Legrain

Tue, 2008-05-27 19:24 by admin

Philippe Legrain, in his book, Immigrants - Your country needs them (see, also, review by Mark O’Connor), argues for unlimited international immigration. His web page is www.philippelegrain.com. To Legrain's credit, last time I looked, he has allowed critical comments to remain on his web-site. The comment reproduced below, appears to utterly demolish all of Legrain's case in the article The bogus population argument. He has not, since 5 April, that is, over 5 weeks ago, attempted to refute the points made in this post. Should anyone notice a subsequent post from Legrain which addresses these arguments, please let us know.

See also below, response to Phillippe Legrain's Open Britain

Phil said: “One of immigration critics' favourite arguments is that Britain is full up. Even if immigrants might have something to contribute to this country, they argue, we simply can't house a larger population.”

Well it’s a vision thing Phil, innit? It probably sounds irredeemably old-dufferish, but those of us who don’t earn our living by jetting around the world lecturing other people about who they should be letting into their country would, given our druthers, actually prefer to live in, say, a nice quiet English market town or cathedral city, rather than in a Blade Runner-esque dystopia resembling Mumbai or Shanghai. Actually judging by the numbers of Mumbaians and Shanghaiers who are clamouring to join us in the west it seems as though most of them aren’t too keen on living there either.

Phil said: “The argument is superficially attractive to anyone who is often stuck in traffic or on a crowded train. Yet it is flawed in all sorts of ways.

“For a start, there are more Britons living abroad than foreigners living in Britain, so the UK population is now lower, not higher, because of net migration.”

But, erm, so what? It would be lower still if immigration had never occurred.

Phil said: “The strains on public infrastructure have more to do with decades of underinvestment than excess population. The Netherlands is more densely populated than the UK yet its trains are not over-crowded; Paris is more densely populated than London yet its Metro is less cramped than our Tube.”

There doesn’t seem to be any data to hand about the relative levels of cramping on Dutch Railways or the Paris Metro, but as far as population density is concerned, the Netherlands and England are almost identical at around 390/km². England seems to provide a more appropriate comparator for the Netherlands than the UK, since it is England where an overwhelming majority of migrants end up. As for Paris, it seems that the 9.6 million people in the Paris urban agglomeration are significantly less cramped overall than the 7.5 million of Greater London, at 3,500/km² compared to 4,800/km², respectively (all stats courtesy of Wikipedia).

Phil said: “While the Office of National Statistics recently projected, by extrapolating recent trends decades forward, a 10 million increase in the UK population by 2031, there is no reason why this should turn out to be true. The ONS projection is simply a possible scenario, not a forecast, let alone a certainty.”

It is silly to state there is no reason why it should turn out to be true. If the ONS has used the correct assumptions, it will be sure to occur, if they haven’t, it won’t.

Phil said: “There is good reason to think that the recent rate of population growth will not be sustained. The increase in the population in recent years is largely due to the one-off opening of our borders to Poland and the other new EU member states - and it appears to be mostly temporary. Many Poles are, in effect, international commuters who split their lives between Britain and Poland - and with the Polish economy looking perkier while Britain’s slows and the falling pound devalues wages here, many Poles are returning home.”

As is well-known, the number of arrivals is bounded on the lower end by the number of worker registrations recorded, and the number of NI numbers issued (not sure how non-working dependents figure into this), while so far at least only anecdotal reports exist concerning the number of returnees. The true state of play may not be known until the 2011 Census.

Phil said: “Seemingly inexorable trends often reverse unpredictably. Lest we forget, as recently as the 1990s, many were worried about the prospect of a falling population. In 2001, as the oil price plunged below $10 a barrel, analysts did not envisage that it would soon soar to over $100 a barrel. So yes, the UK population may rise a lot over the next 25 years. Or it may rise a little. Or it may not rise at all.”

It’s correct, any of those three population scenarios *might* occur but the prudent and responsible planning assumption going forward would surely be to hope for the best but plan for the worst, rather than blithely meander on keeping our fingers crossed that the wheels don't come off in the meantime.

Phil said: “Even if the population does rise, since when are other people such a bad thing? While population growth can cause strains on infrastructure and public services unless it is matched by correspondingly increased investment, it is not inherently undesirable. Many British people do not appear to think that living at close quarters is terrible: they opt to live in Glasgow rather than the Grampians, and flock from Lincolnshire to London.”

Most people in Britain, as in other western societies, live in urban settings for primarily economic reasons. Given a choice, many prefer not to, as demonstrated by that the fact that the ‘indigenous’ populations of the ten major cities in Britain are all smaller now than it was in 1950. In the case of London, the ‘native’ population is dramatically smaller now than it was it in 1950. So rather than people flocking from the Shires to London, the reverse seems to be happening these days.

Phil said: “Far from being a problem, more people can be a boon. Other people are what make our lives special; and the more people there are, the greater the chances of coming up with the new ideas that transform our lives for the better. Nobel laureate Douglass North, for instance, argues that the reason why innovation (and thus living standards) have soared over the past few hundred years is because there are more people able to contribute valuable new ideas.”

If sheer numbers were the key determinant in whether or not a society is innovative and able to support high living standards, we should expect to be seeing great numbers of Chinese, Indian and other Asian Nobel Laureates in the ‘hard’ sciences, as well as GDP per capita levels approaching western norms. The fact that we don’t see such things occurring indicates that something other than simply more people is the key ingredient for societal and economic success. To pursue the ‘more is better’ argument to its logical conclusion, the optimum immigration strategy for the EU to follow would be to invite the entire population of China and India to come over and join us as soon as it is convenient for them to do so.

Phil said: “If you are worried about the environmental impact of population growth, migration is not necessarily a problem. From a global perspective, migratory flows merely alter where people are located, not the total number. And it is difficult to argue, if you care about the planet, that Britain is less able to cope with extra people than, say, Bangladesh. Moreover, there is no reason why a rising population cannot go hand-in-hand with more eco-friendly living. For instance, while London’s population has risen considerably in recent years, traffic congestion has fallen thanks to the congestion charge.”

The plain, unvarnished truth is that anyone who cares about the planet should shudder at the thought that the 8-plus billion people who will form the Third World by 2050 will be aspiring to western-style levels of material consumption as they are currently being encouraged to do by the Nattering Nabobs of Globalisation.

Phil said: “It is a myth that Britain is full up. The Daily Mail used to argue likewise in the 1930s as a pretext for keeping out German Jews, yet somehow Britain has accommodated over 10 million extra people since. While parts of the country are more densely populated than others, there is still plenty of space: nearly three-quarters of Britain is agricultural land.”

“Somehow” is the key word here. There is little doubt that many, many millions more people could be physically accommodated within these islands. We might even contemplate accommodating a billion or more within a single Mega-city state on the Singapore or Hong Kong model, both of which have population densities 25 times that of the UK. But such a scenario would entail that 95% of the population lives in high-rise tower blocks rather like the ones that local authorities are currently pulling down all over the UK. It would also necessitate the almost complete cessation of all agriculture and elimination of most of the countryside, as well as stringent restrictions on private car ownership. Can’t see many folk opting for such a package somehow.

Phil said: “At the government’s target density, the 3 million new homes that it is planning to build - mostly to accommodate pent-up demand due to more people living apart rather than recent immigration - would take up a measly 0.31% of Britain’s total surface area – and even less if they are built on brownfield sites.”

But houses are not built on Britain’s ‘total surface area’; they are built primarily in areas in which usable land is already scarce, and on land that might better be used for other purposes, such as agriculture or horticulture, or simply for recreational amenities which could provide a little extra elbow-room or breathing space for the existing population.

Phil said: “While some people are no doubt genuinely worried about the prospect of a rising population – and I am not imputing their motives for being so – others are using it as a convenient cover for their dislike of allowing in foreigners. After all, we don't hear the Conservatives proposing a one-child policy to keep the population down, do we?”

No, we don’t, but given the prevailing fertility rate of the indigenous population, that is hardly necessary anyway. Without immigration, the British population would likely gently trend downwards over the long term, which is not necessarily such a terrible thing to have happen, is it?

Stan Ogden 5 Apr 2008 00:39:11

Comment in Response to Open Britain

The following comment was posted to the forum associated with Phillipe Legrain's article Open Britain which was linked to a longer article of the same name on www.opendemocracy.net.

John Bull, I agree that Phillipe Legrain would be torn to shreds on any anti-immigration site, but at least he should be given credit for allowing his critics to post comments which utterly demolish his case on his own site. Each time I visit the site, I am pleasantly surprised to find that all the posts that shoot him down in flames are still here. However Phillipe Legrain should now acknowledge the arguments against his case and either show us where he is wrong, or else, acknowledge that he is wrong and stop peddling this nonsense.

I commend an recent article How mass migration has devastated the social fabric of Britain by a current resident of the UK on how, contrary to the strident assertions made by Phillipe Legrain, the UK has been turned into a crowded slum by mass immigration.

It's long past time that we put the claims of immigration advocates to be motivated by compassion for fellow human beings were placed under the microscope. What they do makes every person in the countries receiving immigrants poorer and the poorest in those countries are hurt the hardest. Only a small selfish minority benefit at the cost of the quality of life of everyone else, the environment and future. I heard striking confirmation of this when I listened to an Australian talkback show, Australia Talks in 2004 (then called Australia Talks Back). That program was bizarrely devoted to the supposed problem that the already hyper-inflated housing prices were not rising fast enough to suit Australia's property speculators. An economist working for the Real Estate Institute Australia, as I recall, stated repeatedly that this will be fixed as soon as immigration was raised again, which the right wing Howard Government duly did. Consequently Australians now face impossibly unaffordable housing prices. Only those on massive incomes or those who have inherited their homes can hope to live in a free standing house, that every Australian who was prepared to work hard for a few years and save could previously aspire to owning.

How Australia got into this mess is explained in Sociologist Sheila Newman's Master thesis of 2002 "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France" which is downloadable as a 2.5MB pdf file.

I also commend Mark O'Connor's review of Book Review: Immigrants: your country needs them.

Philippe Legrain

Move over Mr Legrain, the floodgates are open

Sun, 2008-03-30 17:55 by tim

Philippe Legrain's puerile veneration of globalization and free market economics is, for its outrageous simplicity, alluring to some in the same way that Ayn Rand's uncompromising fantasies drew a cult following. His call for open borders is so boldly brazen that it disarms many of his incredulous audience in the manner that Milton Friedman or Julian Simon did theirs. But a glance at any best sellers' list will reveal that is typically those who stake out extreme and provocative positions without solid empirical foundation who attract readers and the favour of publishers. While those authors and commentators who are better informed of a broader and deeper knowledge, on the other hand, often lose their market edge because a more balanced account is inherently less exciting.

In fact, in his book review of Immigrants:Your Country Needs Them, Australian critic Mark O'Connor characterized Philippe Legrain as essentially "ill-read", "a rhetorician, not a thinker", who in his euphoric assessment of a world where mobility was unimpeded "ignores inconvenient issues of resources, spaces, greenhouse emissions and environmental degradation."

Like a tireless door-to-door salesman of a quack remedy that subsequent lab analysis would show to be lethal and fraudulent in its claims, the infamous open-borders advocate, economist and journalist Philippe Legrain knocked on French Canada's door recently to speak to the biweekly magazine L'actualitie. The message was practically the same one he has given to the Economist, the Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times, Prospect Magazine, to the BBC and many foreign publications.

The pitch is: “Hey Canada (or America, or Australia etc.). Not enough water? Here's the medicine. Open your borders to limitless millions! Housing costs too high? Open your borders to limitless millions! Almost out of agricultural land? Open your borders to limitless millions! Educational institutions and medical system over-burdened? You guessed it. Open your borders to limitless millions! It's good for them and good for you too.”

The pitch is: "Hey Canada (or America, or Australia etc.). Not enough water? Here's the medicine. Open your borders to limitless millions! Housing costs too high? Open your borders to limitless millions! Almost out of agricultural land? Open your borders to limitless millions! Educational institutions and medical system over-burdened? You guessed it. Open your borders to limitless millions! It's good for them and good for you too."

Actually Legrain did not say that verbatim, but in so many words. For one thing he has no evident concern or awareness of any ecological consequences from his miracle cure. It is enough for him that bringing down national borders would allegedly double the size of the world economy. The effect of this on greenhouse emissions or biodiversity is simply not on his radar screen. But it is on the radar screen of the Royal Academy of Sciences who according to Monbiot has virtually stated that economic growth will have to be halted if we are to escape that critical two degree rise in global temperatures. Clearly Legrain's economic utopia would be an environmental dystopia.

When asked by L'Actualitie why we should abolish all borders and open all countries to freedom of movement, Legrain responded with the same line that he had given the New York Times six months before in October. "It is first of all a moral question. We should end this global apartheid by which we set the door wide open for rich and well-educated foreigners but close them for poor ones thereby forcing them to stay in their poverty. It is also a humanitarian question", in that according to the IMF immigrants send $300 billion in remittances to their home countries, "which go straight to the pockets of local people." But unfortunately he doesn't appreciate that from the pockets of local people it goes straight back into the pockets of corrupt policemen and officials as bribes. Remittances take the edge off the worst of third world poverty and emigration allows incompetent regimes to export their poor, providing a safety valve so that corruption and overpopulation never gets solved. How many potential Nelson Mandelas and Lech Walesas would be lost to emigration under a global free movement protocol?

I must confess that I find it somewhat galling when an economist of any stripe should protest like Legrain that "it is abhorrent that the rich and the educated are allowed to circulate around the world more or less freely, while the poor are not." Mr. Legrain should know that there are lots of things that the rich can do with their money that the poor can't in the marvelous free-market economy that he champions. They all can drive hummers if they want to, for example. Does that mean that, as a matter of equity, every one in Bangladesh should be afforded a hummer? Migration has vast ecological consequence too. If Mr. Legrain wants to vent his closet socialist conscience, why doesn't express abhorrence over the low wages that his unskilled immigrants are making everywhere in the developed world?

"A conservative position that encourages free trade and restricted immigration is not contradictory. Simply put, importing tomatoes is not the same thing as importing people.

Harvard economist George J. Borjas

Legrain would argue that it should be a matter of consistency that governments devoted to the free movement of money and goods should also be committed to the unfettered movement of people. But Harvard economist George J. Borjas would reply that "a conservative position that encourages free trade and restricted immigration is not contradictory. Simply put, importing tomatoes is not the same thing as importing people."

Thomas Sowell also stated that people are not commodities, as commodities are consumed, while people generate more people, and immigrants impose a cost on the country. In his Canadian interview, Legrain argued that immigrants consume goods and services and generate economic activity, making the U.S. an economic powerhouse. What he did not mention, however, was the 2004 report by the Centre for Immigration Studies that showed that illegal immigrants consumed $10.6 billion more in services than they paid in taxes. Nor did he comment on the 1997 metastudy by the National Research Council that concluded that while immigration raises over-all output, the aggregrate additional net benefit to the U.S. native-born is nugatory--wiped out by taxpayer funded transfer payments to immigrants.

As for Britain, a House of Lords committee reported on April 1st of 2008 that ten years of record immigration has produced virtually no benefits to the country. The report argues that the 6 billion pounds that foreign workers supposedly add to the nation's wealth each year must be balanced against their use of services like health and education and the growth of the population. The error of conventional government assessments of migrant benefits to economic growth (15-20%), according to Professor David Coleman of Oxford University, is that it has excluded costs from crime, security, race relations and imported ailments like TB. And, according to visiting Professor Richard Pearson of the University of Sussex Centre for Migration Research, "these migrants are likely to be displacing, and reducing the incentive on employers to recruit and train low-skilled, indigenous workers."

If these are the results of a Labour government that critics say has lost control of the nation's borders, issued too many work permits and should not have exposed the labour market to Eastern Europe, what would have been the result if they had followed Philippe Legrain's formula for success and thrown open the borders entirely? One pill makes you sick so you take three or four more?

Legrain of course, can no doubt conjure up a study to show wage improvement in the wake of mass immigration, but other studies by more eminent economists like Borjas can counter them. But can't Philippe Legrain be honest here? Does he really believe that big employers lobby governments for more immigration so that they can raise wage levels? Is that why Bill Gates went to Congress to ask to loosen H-1B visa regulations and raise caps, as a philanthropic measure to improve the wages of IT workers in America? Give us a break, Mr. Legrain. It is as Garrett Hardin said, "immigrant labour pauperizes local labour." What is most sickening about Legrain's argument is that he presents it mostly as a cause of social justice for the global poor while it is in fact, really a cause to bring cheap labour to the developed world and improverish its indigenous working class. As socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont observed, five million middle income workers in America have been caught in a vice between out-sourcing and cheap immigrant labour and have dropped into the ranks of poverty during the Bush era. Even more sickening than Legrain's hypocrisy though has been the collusion of leftists and liberals in it. Imagine if Charles Dickens had teamed up with the Manchester school. Contemporary leftists are not internationalists. They are globalists, unwitting collaborators in the pyramid scam of runaway population growth that cloaks the naked profit motive under the attractive guise of cultural diversity and human rights.

Now for the old chestnut. The one Legrain repeats ad nauseum in countless interviews and essays in reference to several countries. The famous "they do work that locals won't do" routine. For example, he recently stated in his blog that "with France's growth slowing, its sclerotic labour market could do with an infusion of foreign blood—of hard-working , enterprising people who are willing to do the jobs that French people can't or won't." There is always an inference that native workers aren't hard-working, or "enterprising", and as far as a "sclerotic" labour market in a slow growing France is concerning, there is an alternative translation for that. The workers of France are benefiting from a "tight" labour market in a "stable" economy. As one should know, but many including Legrain apparently don't, there is no such thing as jobs that Frenchmen, Americans, Canadians or Australians "won't do". Merely jobs they are unwillingly to do at the wages offered. The phrase "they do work that locals won't do" evidences equivalent ignorance to other phrases that have consigned to the lexicographical museum like "I drive better when I'm drunk" or "my wife had it coming."

Legrain's open borders recipe, aside from presenting monstrous adjustment problems for recipient countries, would also pose problems for poor countries, one would think. When asked by L'Actualitie if they would not be crippled by an exodus of doctors and engineers, Legrain was cavalier and dismissive. Émigré doctors would only meet 12% of current needs if they were forced to return now, so therefore it was better just to assist developing countries in training more doctors. And then what? So they in turn could leave for the First World? Is that Legrain's vision? India and Africa as a big medical school for the West?

Philippe Legrain is not very re-assuring about terrorism either. Since "99.99% of immigrants aren't terrorists" then border controls don't make sense as a deterrent to terrorists. OK, Mr. Legrain, since 99.99% of all air-line passengers aren't bombers, on any plane that you are boarding, we won't bother to do any security screening or luggage checks.

It would seem reasonable, would it not, that when toying with the fate of 6.7 billion people and 194 plus countries that before unleashing a sweeping change of Philippe Legrain's prescription we first test the waters by leaving one or two nations defenceless against incoming hordes. Actually the experiment has already been conducted. Does anybody know how things have working out for Tibet the last little while? How have the ethnic Serbians made out in Kosovo? How did the Poles like their open borders in September of 1939? Must admit, those hard-working enterprising Germans did work that the Poles would not do.

Legrain doesn't favour a kind of incremental, phased relaxation of borders, but rather the shock therapy of an immediate global village.

But Legrain doesn't favour a kind of incremental, phased relaxation of borders, but rather the shock therapy of an immediate global village. His only assurance is, not to worry, when the floodgates are opened, not many folks will actually move. "Since the EU opened its borders to certain East European countries, there has been little emigration." But surely Mr. Legrain can't compare the economic disparity between Poland and England with the disparity that exists between England and Bangladesh or Africa. The Mariel flotilla from Cuba presents a more plausible portrait of third world eagerness to seek greener pastures. And if even 5% of the world's population could move to the United States, it would double their population and bring about an ecological holocaust.

I think it prudent then, despite Legrain's assurances, to first test the market as it were by granting an unlimited number of visas to all third word economists who wish live and work alongside Mr. Legrain in the UK. With an economist coming out of every manhole cover to bid for jobs as columnists with the Guardian and the Times and so forth, and as commentators on the BBC, Philippe Legrain could test his hypothesis that immigrants raise the wages of local labour.

If this pilot project was pronounced a success and British sovereignty subsequently dissolved, then I could look forward to moving into Legrain's London flat, with a host of my relatives, who have always fancied living in the great city. Even if it contained only the 76 square metres of space that the average British dwelling does, I am sure Mr. Legrain, as a matter of logical consistency, could have no objection to moving over and making room for us. After all, a man who favours open borders can hardly oppose open houses.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
28 March 2008

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Book Review: Immigrants: your country needs them by Philippe Legrain

Thu, 2007-10-04 12:59 by James Sinnamon

The following review first appeared in the October 2007 newsletter (PDF 516K) of Sustainable Population Australia

Book Review: Immigrants: your country needs them by Philippe Legrain (Little Brown Book Group, UK, 2006) A$35.00 review by Mark O'Connor.

Some angst was caused in February 2007 when Philippe Legrain (with this book in tow) was featured at Perth Writers Week. The problem was not that a debate on migration was irrelevant to a literary festival but that there was no debate--and that the supposed expert (Legrain) seemed ignorant of Australian conditions.

I am struck by how little and how selectively Philippe Legrain has read in the area on which he claims to be an expert. Despite his Australian publicists' claim that he offers a lucid and enlightened account of "Australian policies, facts and statistics" the facts he states are frequently incorrect or slanted. His index is barren of references to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which perhaps explains his bizarre claims that Australia's population is 19 million, that its net migration is some 90,000 a year (see p. 9), that births are not keeping pace with deaths (p. 108, in fact they are twice deaths), that immigration was slashed from 1996 by the Howard government (see p. 53) and so on. In fact we have never had such a high-immigration government as Howard's. Only in the immediate post WWII period, when most of our migrants were war refugees, has immigration been so high.

Australia, along with Canada and the USA is one of Philippe Legrain's three best examples of countries which have sought and accepted what is by world standards a bizarrely high level of immigration. For Australia, he seems to have relied on interviews with a couple of high immigration advocates (Stepan Kerkyasharian and Abdul Rizvi). The rest of his figures on Australia could have been gained from half-an-hour's googling---some time ago. Of critics of high immigration in Australia he seems ignorant. There are no references in his index to CSIRO's Ecumene project, to People and Place, to Sustainable Population Australia or even to the numerous publications of the Bureau of Immigration Research, which at least attempted a certain objectivity.

On the UK and the USA (his main market target) he seems only a little less ill-read. When referring to critics of high immigration he concentrates on Peter Brimelow and Samuel Huntingdon, but seems unaware of such important players as Britain's Migration Watch Committee or America's Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Centre for Immigration Studies. All of these have websites that could have provided him with an encyclopedia's worth of articles and information on relevant issues of which he seems ignorant. But I get the impression that Philippe Legrain is a gentleman who likes to make up his mind and then not disturb it by looking at inconvenient facts or contrary opinions.

A crucial document is the 1994 plenary resolution of the Australian Academy of Science on Australia's population options. This specified that our population should probably have been capped at 19 million, but must in any case be capped at no more than 23 million, and that net migration must therefore be kept below 50,000 a year.

1994 was also the year of the Cairo Conference on Population, in which the nations of the world pledged (with only a few selfish exceptions) to hold their populations in check, and not to use emigration as a way of unloading their population problems upon others. Needless to say, Cairo also is missing from Legrain's index. Nor does he mention the way in which the USA's immigration-fed increase has prevented its population stabilizing and made it dependent for its life-style upon a risky pursuit of foreign oil.

Nor does he mention the issue of the vast increases in greenhouse effect caused by migration from the low GHG to the high GHG producing countries. Most telling of all, against Legrain's irresponsible vision of open borders, is the fact that the two large-population countries that have had spectacular success in reducing their population growth (Iran and China) did so precisely because they had quarreled with the West and could not lean on it to take their emigrants. By contrast, those countries like Mexico and the Philippines, where families could hope that an extra child might be the lucky or talented one that would get to the US and bring in the rest of the family, have neither solved their own problems nor ceased to drive up population in the wealthier countries. Legrain complacently notes that the Philippines relies on remittances from its emigrants for something like 40% of its economy. (And still the babies keep coming.) By contrast, Legrain asserts (p. 20) that "freer migration is one of the best ways to help poor countries." For a capitalist economist Legrain is oddly naïve about the problems of population socialism. A visit to www.garretthardinsociety.org might trouble--yet expand--his mind considerably.

Legrain seems to share the common economist's delusion that growth can go on for ever, that there are no other species or environments to be considered, and that almost the only thing we lack (to fuel an eternal bonfire of growth) is more people.

Overall, this book, despite its parade of academic references, is not a serious attempt to examine the issues. It should be read as a piece of rhetoric: a first speech for the government in a student debate "That this house believes the world should have open borders". Legrain's 'lucidity', which some foolish reviewers have praised, is largely a reluctance to explain his economic modeling. He simply asserts. He claims at one point (p. 64, cf. p 19) that studies show freer immigration could 'potentially' make us all far richer--which is code for saying he won't explain the assumptions behind the calculation. [ revised: He offers no refutation--only an ad hominem put--down but no adequate refutation --of the detailed calculations of the Harvard economics professor George Borjas, a much more eminent economist, who draws the opposite conclusions. Legrain's calculations of the economic effect of immigration in the USA seem based on the assumption that one need only make sure that the supply of capital increases in proportion with the workforce. Then more immigrant workers simply make everyone better off. The inconvenient issues of resources, space, greenhouse emissions, and environmental degradation are ignored by Legrain (and one suspects by those economic studies he cites on his side). Perhaps Legrain knows he is writing for people who want a feel-good sense of moral superiority, and don't want to be bothered with inconvenient details. ]

Yet if Legrain can get us used to using cheap immigrant servants and cooks and nurses, he will then try to make us feel guilty about "the anonymous people whose existence you barely acknowledge . . . We just never bother to ask" (pp. 26-27). It doesn't make much sense. But as I say, Legrain is a rhetorician, not a thinker.

Perhaps most irritating is Legrain's glib sense of moral superiority--backed by his publisher's predictable assertion that he is offering an original "challenging and powerful" version of the open borders case. Not so. If the facts were as Legrain claims, and if the only issues to be considered were the ones he propounds, then everyone would come to his conclusions. Intelligence and moral superiority don't enter into it. Naivety and ignorance do.#

Philippe Legrain

About Phillippe Legrain

Comment in Response to Open Britain

Move over Mr Legrain, the floodgates are open

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Book Review: Immigrants: your country needs them by Philippe Legrain

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