Exodus: How migration is changing our world. By Paul Collier.

Extract

Paul Collier has become known for his books that seek to clarify global policy debates for the general public, particularly by focusing on the challenge of extreme poverty. Having written on development assistance, democracy promotion and resource management, Collier has now turned his attention to the phenomenon of global migration in Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World.

Collier follows the approach of other recent books on global migration by reviewing evidence confirming that current rates of migration are on balance beneficial for sending countries, receiving countries, and migrants themselves. He contends, however, that beyond a certain threshold the marginal social and economic returns from migration cease to be positive. Therefore, migration scholarship should be less concerned with whether the phenomenon is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but about how migration policy can be used constructively to achieve optimal rates of migration.

As in his previous books, Collier casts himself as a pragmatic realist, telling hard truths in defiance of the ‘guardians of orthodoxies’, who ‘stand ready with their fatwas’ (p. 18). Relying heavily upon simplified models to make one of his key arguments, Collier contends that diasporas promote accelerating global migration and as these diasporas grow in size they make social integration in host societies more uneven. States have responsibilities here, according to Collier, both to regulate the rate of immigration and to uphold a more robust version of national culture.