One of the weird side-effects of my desultory attempts to spell out in intellectual terms the moderate, common sense concept of citizenism and its implications for immigration policy is that it seems to inspire more respectable (i.e more extremist) intellectuals to spell out their reactive nuttiness in ever more explicit, self-parodic detail. For example, here is a pro-Open Borders reductio ad absurdum in the center-left New Republic that sounds like a Sailer parody.
Last month, in a speech in Boston, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen provoked some grumbling from conservatives when she said, “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me…. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.” But she is hardly alone in her concerns. Since at least Occupy Wall Street, income inequality has been one of the most intensely debated issues in American politics. Commentators fret that rising inequality hurts the poor, gives the rich the upper hand in politics, and will create a caste system in the United States. Proposed solutions range from the practical but weak, like raising the minimum wage, to the fanciful, like Thomas Piketty’s global wealth tax.
But the most powerful force to reduce inequality worldwide has gone largely unrecognized by the West, even though their value has been proven in the Gulf nations: open migration laws that are coupled, paradoxically, with caste systems.
The first thing to understand is that inequality is a much more severe problem across borders than within countries. In the United States, the median household makes around $50,000 per year and those in the top one percent make on average $300,000-$400,000. But even the poor in the United States are well-off compared to the poor in most other countries. The poorest five percent of Americans make about $3,000-$4,000 per year. This amount exceeds the per-person earnings of 60 percent of the global population. Around the world, more than a billion people live on a dollar a day.
So if you care about inequality, you should care about global inequality. Is there anything that can be done about it?
Well, there used to be starving children in China and now there aren’t. Why not? Because the Chinese did things about it.
Maybe other countries could takes steps to solve their own problems, too. For example, the people of Mexico could overthrow the parasitical chokehold of Carlos Slim on their economy so that he is no longer a contender for World’s Richest Man.
But Mexico successfully taking down Slim’s empire might give Americans the idea that maybe the vast riches that go to Silicon Valley billionaires from their monopolies, such as Facebook, aren’t a complete necessity. And The New Republic is owned by a Facebook zillionaire, Chris Hughes, so … let’s turn America into Qatar instead!
One view is that we in the rich countries should make donations to poor people in other countries. Researchers, including the two of us, have different views about whether such aid would be effective or desirable. Some argue that we’d lose much of the aid to waste and corruption. Yet even if foreign aid would be useful, it seems unlikely that rich countries will ever voluntarily contribute enough to dent global inequality.
So, involuntary …
The major approach of the West to international justice has been through its commitment to human rights. Western countries have ratified human rights treaties and created international institutions like the U.N. Human Rights Council with the purpose of creating a legal framework that compels the governments of all countries to respect the rights of their citizens. While the treaty regime does not explicitly address inequality, it does require countries to guarantee health care, fair wages, pensions, and education.
But this system, which has been in place for decades, has failed to stop widening inequality within countries, and has done little to improve the rights of people, as one of us argues in a new book. The largest contribution to human well-being in the last few decades has come not from the U.S. or Europe but from China, whose authoritarian government has engineered massive economic growth for its poor populace, and from authoritarian countries in the Persian Gulf.
Sheikh Hamad, Emir of Qatar and World’s Greatest Guy
The countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — are not known for their humanitarianism. They are authoritarian Islamic states that sit on huge pools of oil, and they’re also among the most unequal in the world. About 85 percent of the population of the UAE, for example, consists of migrant workers living on roughly $5,000 per year. Fifteen percent of the population are Emirati nationals, who live on roughly three hundred thousand dollars a year, implying greater economic inequality than existed even in Apartheid South Africa or the antebellum South.
But these foreign migrant workers earn vastly more in the GCC nations than they would at home in Bangladesh or India, where they would make around $1,000 per year. By welcoming migrant workers, the UAE and its neighbor Qatar do more than any other rich country to reduce global inequality. …
This is not to say that migrant workers in GCC have it easy — not by any stretch. Those in monarchical Qatar, for instance, do not enjoy even the limited rights of Qatari nationals. But reducing inequality will require uncomfortable tradeoffs. Qatar would not welcome so many migrant workers if it had to give them generous political and civil rights; in fact, Gulf states explicitly seek non-Arab, dark-skinned migrants so as to minimize the risk that nationals will sympathize, fraternize, or intermarry with migrants (who would then demand permanent residence, if not citizenship). Indeed, almost all of the massive historical migrations from poor to rich countries have occurred on such economically and politically unequal terms.
… If the OECD countries copied the migration policies of the GCC countries, they would reduce global inequality by much more than their welfare systems do within their borders. For example, if OECD countries welcomed migrants in proportion to their GDP at the same rate and from the same poor nations as Qatar does, this would reduce global inequality by about twice the amount that eliminating all internal inequality in the OECD countries would — and by twice the rate that taxes and transfers in these countries reduce global inequality. If they adopted the same per-citizen rate at which the UAE takes migrants, they could accomplish much more. By taking in the 60 percent of the global population who make less than the bottom five percent in the United States and paying them $5,000 per year, the U.S. and Europe would reduce global inequality by roughly a third.
We citizens of OECD countries take pride in our political and civil rights, and our generous welfare systems. Yet we maintain our high standard of living by giving no rights and trivial money to people who live outside our arbitrary borders.
But the many unappealing aspects of the [Gulf Arab] system — the migrants’ limited economic, political, and social rights, their segregation from the citizenry, and an authoritarian enforcement regime — seem necessary to maintain political support for the migration policies that help to reduce global inequality. (There are, of course, many other unsavory aspects to these regimes, like the oppression of women and LGBT people, that no nation should imitate. But those issues bear no relationship to the open immigration policies we’re proposing.)
Massive indentured servitude with no civil rights — Great Idea!
Intellectuals and leaders in OECD countries need to think carefully, and in a politically realistic way, about how to reconcile their commitments to rights and the agenda of reducing inequality. The GCC model of accepting migrants on economically and politically subordinate terms, though not humanitarian on its face, has proven so in practice. If this model were adopted in rich countries, then inequality — both political and economic — would dramatically increase within our own societies. This could undermine some of the liberal character we all prize, and it would certainly make all of us even more uncomfortable about inequality than we already are. But the benefits for the world’s poorest people would be vast.
Defectors claim Pyongyang regime pockets 90% or more of earnings made by migrants working on construction sites in Qatar, where preparations are under way for 2022 World Cup
Thousands of migrant labourers from North Korea are toiling for years on construction sites in Qatar for virtually no pay — including on the vast new metropolis that is the centrepiece of the World Cup — in what may amount to “state-sponsored slavery”.
According to testimonies from workers and defectors, labourers from the reclusive state said they receive almost no salaries in person while in the Gulf emirate during the three years they typically spend there.
They work in the expectation they will collect their earnings when they return to North Korea, but according to a series of testimonies from defectors and experts, workers receive as little as 10% of their salaries when they go home, and some may receive nothing. One North Korean worker at a construction site in central Doha told the Guardian: “We are here to earn foreign currency for our nation.”
