'Migration’s Economic Positives and Negatives'

Branko Milanovic:

Migration’s economic positives and negatives: I was always a strong believer that geography determines one’s worldview. (I think it is de Gaulle who is credited for saying that “history is applied geography”.) When you spend one month in Europe traveling to various places, you just cannot avoid the biggest issue in Europe today:  migration. So let me go briefly over some key issues (again). ...

To an economist, it is clear that most (not all; I will come to that later) economic arguments are strongly in favor of migration.  ...

It must be a force for the good and if there are problems or objections to it, they must stem from extra-economic reasons like social cohesion, preference for a given cultural homogeneity, xenophobia and the like.

However, I think that this is not so simple. There may be also some negative economic effects to consider. I see three of them.

First, the effect of cultural or religion heterogeneity on economic policy formulation. ...

Second, cultural differences may lead to the erosion of the welfare state. ...

Third,  migration might have important negative effects on the emitting countries. ...

We have, I think, to take into account also the negative economic effects of migration. I do not think that the three effects I listed here (and perhaps there could be others) are sufficiently strong to negate the positive economic effects. But they cannot be entirely disregarded or ignored either.