TABARROK: It’s actually very simple. You take a person from a poor country, a country like Haiti for example, and you bring them to the United States or another developed country, and their wages go up. Three times, four times, fives times. I’m told, sometimes as much as ten times. So, it’s an incredible increase in living standards simply by moving someone from where their labor has low value, moving them to where their labor has high value. It’s far more effective than any other anti-poverty program we’ve ever tried.
DUBNER: So, that sounds good on the input side. What about on the output side? Or the emigrating side? So, if I say, “You know, I think I’m going to take the 10 percent best, smartest, hardest-working, most devoted potential employees or students from country X, Haiti,” what does that do to Haiti? Is that a tide that lifts all boats? Or does it lift my boat and the boats of the 10 percent who get here?
TABARROK: So, I think there are two points to make here: First of all, the 10 percent of Haiti, Haiti doesn’t have a right to say, “We own these people. And they’re going to be chained to our country because if we let them go, the rest of us are going to be worse off.” That’s not how we treat people. Now, on the economic issue, what does happen? It actually looks like everybody is better off. First of all, the Haitians that move, they maintain ties with their older country, they send back lots of remittances, which are again, a very effective anti-poverty program. It’s much better for example, if parents send back money to their kids in Haiti or to their grandparents in Haiti. That’s a much more effective program — individual money transfers — than a transfer of money from one government to another government. So, overall this interconnecting of the world, I think, makes pretty much everyone better off.