Making Social Spending Work, by Peter H. Lindert
Do Immigration Tensions Fray Safety Nets? Depends how immigration is managed. Australia, Ireland, Canada (so far) have socially-economically balanced policy ..
Peter H. Lindert wrote:
Chapter 11
Do Immigration Tensions Fray the Safety Nets?
Two future threats are likely to jeopardize the progress of social spending and its favorable economic and social effects. One has been developing for decades, and will continue to build slowly. The other will appear more dramatic in the short run. Both threats are demographic and political. The knowable trends in life expectancy, fertility, and migration may threaten the expansion and productivity of social spending through two politicized channels.
The longer-run channel, the one harder to block or modify, works through human aging. As we saw [earlier], population aging has already shown signs of diverting social spending into less productive forms.
Fortunately, the longer-run threat from aging is more predictable than most future developments. We can more reliably forecast its implications for social spending and the welfare state in, say, the year 2050 than we can predict that year’s technology, or its weather, or its World Cup winner. What makes the mid-century forecast clearer for the main threats to the welfare state is that it is driven by vital rates, that is by human survival, fertility, and migration. Demographers have been able to forecast survival, fertility, and migration well enough for generations ahead. Luckily for the purposes of this book, it just so happens that the future of social spending is one of those things depending more heavily on those predictable demographic vital rates than it will depend on the fuzzier future of standard economic variables. The population will continue to age, and [later chapters] will concentrate on this slowly advancing threat.This chapter addresses the other very real demographic threat – the shorter-run threat posed by the combination of rising immigration and the political backlash against it.
Waves of Immigrants – and of Backlash
Migration has come in waves. The wave-like feature is easily demonstrated by the history of the country that has absorbed the most immigrants. For the first century and a third of its independence, the United States was a country in which one out of every seven residents was born abroad. Yet anti-immigrant sentiments were evident as early as the 1880s. At the same time that the statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” was being built as a French gift on Ellis Island, facing out to the Atlantic, the United States also banned immigrants from China with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Similarly, in 1907, in response to anti-Japanese nativism in California, the United States and Japan came to informal agreements that Japanese would be denied passports to the United States. Both restrictions were replaced in the early 1920s by the even tougher Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924. These banned all immigration of Asians, while benefiting those from Northern and Western Europe (whose migrations declined anyway), and shutting out many from Southern and Eastern Europe.
The anti-immigrant flames of the early 1920s were fanned by three historical forces. First, population growth had closed the open-land frontier, which had previously allowed separate ethnic groups based in Europe enough space to spread out and live separately. Second, the new immigrants of the 1900–1914 era were from Southern and Eastern Europe, perceived to be culturally distant from those that had arrived earlier. Finally, the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution of November 1917 sent a Red Scare across America. This new fear became associated with nationalities to the south and east, reinforcing the fear of immigrants.
For example, the New York Times of February 9, 1921 warned that immigration restrictions must be imposed because “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens whom we are importing as ‘hands’ for our industries … With the diseases of Bolshevism we are importing also the most loathsome diseases of the flesh.” In the same year Vice-President Calvin Coolidge warned in an article in Good Housekeeping that “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend … The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” Such was the mood that passed the tough immigration bills of 1921 and 1924.
The effect on the foreign-born share was deep and lasting. By the 1960s, the share of all Americans born abroad had dropped from about 14 percent to about 5 percent. Yet after World War II, a more prosperous and self-confident America opened the doors again. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 abolished direct racial barriers. In 1965, the Immigration and Naturalization Act, also known as the Hart–Celler Act, officially welcomed foreign-born refugees and relatives of Americans. Then in 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act granted amnesties to those who had entered the country without sufficient documentation, while threatening employers of undocumented workers with new fines. These liberalizations, plus postwar peace and prosperity, allowed the share of foreign-born Americans to return to its earlier heights by the early twenty-first century. Immigration has continued to rise, despite attempts to close the door again.
The recent rise of immigration has in fact been shared by all the richest democracies of Western Europe and North America. Over these years, the inflow of migrants has grown most clearly for Germany, which accepted a particularly large number of refugees in the 2015–2016 wave from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. While this latest wave has been impeded by the migration barriers in response to the 2020 virus pandemic, Europe should expect further rises in the supply of migrants, both ordinary economic migrants and desperate refugees. The rich receiving countries all have poorer neighbors with dysfunctional governments. Economic breakdowns and humanitarian crises are likely. A horrific descent into civil war like that in Syria after 2012 could easily happen again in any of several large countries – say, in one of the large countries of Mediterranean North Africa and the Middle East. Such a civil war would send another wave of refugees to Europe. While some of the African and Middle Eastern refugees will also head to Australasia and North America, there will be an offsetting decline in migration from Latin America. That region has entered an era of low population growth, so there will be less demographic pressure to cross the Rio Grande, with or without a border wall.
The wave of refugees that crested in 2015–2016, like earlier high waves, raised nativist backlash against the arriving foreigners. Almost all European countries and the United States have seen anti-immigrant political parties capture a rising share of votes. Much of the accompanying rhetoric has been raw. Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, has repeated the phrase “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.” In Denmark in 2005, Pia Kjaersgaard, then head of the nativist Danish People’s Party, demonized Sweden’s liberal welcoming of refugees thus: “If they [Swedes] want to turn Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmoe into a Scandinavian Beirut, with clan wars, honour killings and gang rapes, let them do it. We can always put a barrier on the Oeresund Bridge [between Sweden and Denmark].” In the American presidential election campaign of 2015–2016, candidate Donald Trump similarly demonized migrants, in this case from Mexico: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Such raw xenophobia seems to be accompanied by many natives’ genuine misperceptions about immigrants and their fiscal effects. To back up this point with objective measures of people’s perceptions, Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University (2018) surveyed people in six countries (USA, UK, France, Italy, Germany, and Sweden) in the winter of 2017–2018. People were asked about some magnitudes they perceived regarding immigration – how big is it, where do the immigrants come from, and what happens to them after they arrive? A virtue of this team’s interview design is that people’s answers can be compared directly with the actual numbers. Table 11.1 shows some of the results.
[MGH: Table 11.1 is difficult to reproduce from Lindert’s book so instead I exhibit the original in the NBER article by the late and brilliant Alberto Alesina (et al. 2018). The source for Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Immigration and Redistribution”, NBER Working Paper 24733 (2018) is here — https://www.nber.org/papers/w24733]
First, as shown in the top row, people in all six countries greatly overestimate the share of immigrants in their midst, imagining that about 30 percent of residents are foreign-born, when the true shares are only 10–18 percent. In five of the six countries, people also over-imagine the shares of immigrants that are Muslim or that come from North Africa and the Middle East. Strikingly, the only country that did not overestimate the Muslim share, or the share from North Africa and the Middle East, was France, the country where Muslims and trans-Mediterranean migrants was the greatest. People in all six countries made the further mistake of underestimating the education of the immigrants; as shown in Table 11.1, they consistently overestimated the low-education share, the share of immigrants that had not yet finished high school.
Regarding what happens to the immigrants after arrival, we often hear conflicting perceptions. Some nationals think that the immigrants are a fiscal burden because they work very little and get handouts, while others think they work too much, taking jobs away from the native-born. The team of Alesina, Miano, and Stantcheva came up with a clear result regarding work by immigrants of working age. In all six countries of Table 11.1, immigrants’ unemployment rate has in fact been much lower than people tend to think, even in that winter of 2017–2018, when so many refugees still had not mastered the new native language or found jobs. Finally, people were asked whether the average adult immigrant received more transfer payments from government than the average native-born. The truth is that immigrants do receive more on average, because of their initial economic hardships. On this matter, the interview responses of the native-born were close to the truth, even though they had overestimated immigrants’ unemployment and had underestimated their education.
How Immigration Has Affected Government Budgets
So have immigrants been a net burden or a net benefit to the native-born population? Economists have tried to add realism to popular perceptions, by studying the real-world effects of extra immigrants, or of measures to shut them out. Let us next survey how these effects have played out under the immigration policies practiced thus far, to sharpen our guesses about how different political outcomes and different policies might affect the tax burdens and social-spending behavior of the native-born populations in immigrant-receiving countries.
The results will depend, of course, on the type of immigration being restricted – which skill groups would be cut, which age groups, and what emphasis on refugees versus economic migrants, for example. To mobilize the existing empirical literature, let us begin with its tendency to summarize the effects of the observed recent mix of immigrants, without any detailed focus on a particular proposal for immigration restriction.
Immigrants’ Effects on GDP and Government Revenue per Capita:
The effects on government revenue, via effects on GDP, can conveniently draw on the literature estimating the effects of immigration on labor markets and productivity. That literature, while freely admitting the limitations of its evidence and its econometric estimation, generally concludes that the observed mix of immigration has probably raised GDP per capita a bit, especially in studies that try to guesstimate externalities. The slight extra GDP in turn translates into a slight addition to government revenue, slightly improving the affordability of social programs. This bland and tentative positive result seems to enjoy a consensus, despite the heated controversy over whether natives’ wage rates are lowered, or raised, or unaffected.
Net Budget Effects Implied by Existing Tax Rates and Entitlements: Even if immigrants contribute slightly to GDP and government revenue, such slight positives could be swamped by the extra demands that immigrants place on social-expenditure programs. There is widespread fear that immigrants are a net fiscal burden, for which the already-arrived native population must pay. Opinion surveys have shown that people’s fears of immigrants’ negative fiscal effects loom even larger than their fears of effects on the labor market, such as their taking jobs away or lowering wages.
The fiscal burden of an individual immigrant depends very much on the immigrant’s age, since all countries tend to support children and the elderly, while taxing those of prime working age. The first-generation immigrants receive net benefits when they are still children of school age, and receive net benefits again in old age. In between, however, they are net taxpayers. The population of arriving immigrants is unevenly distributed, however. The first-generation immigrant population includes more adults per year of working age than children or elderly, so that the taxpaying of the middle age ranges is actually magnified relative to the expenditures on young and old.
How does it all net out fiscally, given the age distribution of arriving immigrants? The net fiscal effects of extra immigrants depend critically on one’s time horizon. Instead of just asking “are immigrants a net fiscal benefit or burden?” we must ask “over what time span are they a net benefit or burden?” Table 11.2 summarizes this dependence conceptually, drawing on “plausible longer-run simulations.
Suppose we take the usual short-run view, in the top row of Table 11.2, asking the pay-as-you-go question “Do today’s extra immigrants cause a net drain on government budgets right now, in this same year?” They often do so, since extra immigrants’ families typically are a net drain through the host country’s child-related social programs such as education. If this drain is greater than the tax revenues collected from adult immigrants, helping to pay for pensions and other public programs, then immigrants do cause a net fiscal drain this year. Fiscal-demographic simulations suggest that the net short-run fiscal effect is indeed negative. A typical mix of immigrant age groups is so tilted toward the young that the costs of child-centered social programs yield a negative net result for the first twelve to fifteen years after an immigrant arrival. This short-run negative effect would also show up in immigrants’ use of non-contributory aid to those of working age. As OECD economists have rightly emphasized, the short-run fiscal impact depends above all on the host country’s success or failure in helping the foreign-born find jobs.
Next, suppose one takes a somewhat longer view, asking Table 11.2’s second question about the net fiscal effects over the whole lifetimes of the first generation of new immigrants. Now the net effect is probably positive. True, the immigrants in old age probably get a net transfer from others, because public pension systems are typically designed to be progressive, giving a high rate of return to lower-income earners, such as first-generation immigrants. Yet while that first generation is aging, its children have already become productive adults, paying positive taxes instead of needing school money. These tax contributions should outweigh any intra-cohort redistributions toward foreign-born pensioners.
Finally, when we consider the whole lifetimes of not only the extra immigrants but also their children and grandchildren, the net fiscal effects become clearly positive, as again suggested in Table 11.2. We know that the eventual fiscal results are clearly positive, because in the long run the immigrants and their descendants pay more in taxes than they get in targeted transfers, just like the rest of society. So the answer to the net-burden question is clearly “no,” not a net burden for any year beyond about the sixteenth year after arrival. The long-run fiscal effect of extra immigration is clearly positive. That makes perfect sense: In the long run, we are all descendants of immigrants, and over our lifetimes we pay more in taxes than anybody receives in social spending – our remaining taxes cover such shared public goods as national defense and public transit.
Will Immigration Backlash Undermine Social Spending? Four Options
So under existing policies, extra immigrants will tend, on the average, to have slightly positive effects on GDP, and effects on the government budget balance will eventually be positive as well. These generally positive results suggest that immigration has not endangered social spending or the welfare state – at least not economically, and not with existing policies toward taxes and social spending. Yet recent political backlash against immigration threatens to cut immigration, one way or another. If it did, would the political reaction against immigrants also bring a reaction against social programs in general, even as they applied to those who are needy and native-born? The positive fiscal effects of immigrants and their descendants may be politically trumped by negative perceptions like those surveyed earlier in this chapter, especially in the wake of a large influx of refugees. Prevailing opinions can still be negative about the same fiscal effects, and about the negative effects on some native workers’ earning power, not to mention cultural phobias and fears of terrorism.
There are four options, or four political scenarios, that could be followed in the near future. The first of the four is a baseline case in which the government resists all calls to restrict immigration – in other words, keeps the country’s doors as wide open as before. Recent experience and recent surveys of public opinion tell us much about this baseline option.
Option 1: Welcoming Immigrants without Discrimination
As German Chancellor Angela bravely said in 2015, “wir schaffen das” (We can manage this).
A country can welcome immigrants and, after paying extra for their initial training and language learning, give them the same kinds of need-based entitlements as are given to the native-born. Germany and Sweden led the world in choosing this option in 2014–2016. Germany accepted 890,000 permanent-type refugees from the Middle East in 2015 alone. Sweden accepted 163,000 that year, an even larger share of the national population than for Germany. A sustained use of this open-door policy would promote global growth and equality at the expense of domestic growth, equality – and harmony.
However, both countries soon hurried to close the gate, both at their own borders and at the Mediterranean borders of the European Union. By 2018, Germany had accepted only 185,000 refugee applications, a 79 percent drop from that 2015 peak of 890,000.
What kinds of countries would follow this first option, which implies a significant rise in social-spending obligations until the immigrants have learned the language and found jobs? The most likely candidates are indeed countries like Germany and Sweden, who welcomed so many refugees in the wave that peaked in 2015–2016. Initially at least, both countries have refused to discriminate against immigrants from distant cultures in their welfare-state system of entitlements, and have accepted the extra initial burdens that come with such arrivals.
Is Option 1 sustainable, either as an acceptance of more immigrants or as a commitment to universal social entitlements for all residents? As noted, both Germany and Sweden moved within a couple of years to restrict the acceptance of refugees for the foreseeable future. Will the other shoe drop – that is, will these countries cut social spending even for those that are native-born? This key question deserves careful reflection. No immediate answer has been given by the rising anti-immigration parties themselves. Germany’s rising right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), while outspoken on many issues, has not come out against the welfare state. Nor have their counterparts in Sweden. Since 2011 or earlier, Sweden’s right-wing “Sweden Democrats” Party (not to be confused with the Social Democratic Party, which has governed Sweden most of the time since 1932) has repeatedly denied that they seek to cut back the welfare state, knowing that the welfare state remains popular. Their leader, Jimmie Åkesson, was explicit about this – “We believe in the welfare state” – while also voicing suspicions about Sweden’s mosques and Islamic community groups.
The political climate can change, of course. For example, people can update their opinions about welfare programs, and change their votes, in response to new exposures to immigrants. We can gather two kinds of clues to upcoming trends: public opinions about the welfare state, and actual policy changes.
Public opinion surveys sometimes ask people whether they think that “social benefits” should be higher, and in a subset of those surveys one can exploit exogenous-looking variation in exposure to immigration to see if that exposure seems to reduce support for social spending. An early opportunity to conduct such a test occurred in Sweden in 1985–1994. At that time, the government’s Refugee Placement Program assigned refugees to cities, with preference for secondary cities. That is, the refugees were not allowed to decide where they first lived. That suggests that which native-born Swedes came in contact with foreigners was initially exogenous, even though the refugees were soon able to change cities. Exploiting this geographic variation within Sweden, the research team of Matz Dahlberg, Karin Edmark, and Heléne Lundqvist (2012, 2013) estimated the effect of locals’ exposure to immigrants on the locals’ answer to the question “Are you in favor of decreasing the social benefits?” The authors found that there was indeed a tendency for Swedes more exposed to immigrants to favor cutting social benefits. And since the question about social benefits seemed to refer to universal benefits, the implication was that support for the welfare state was undercut by contact with newly arrived immigrants. If true, this would suggest something like the negative effect of ethnic fractionalization on the growth of social spending, as we described back in Chapter 6.
A more recent survey is that 2017–2018 survey conducted by Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva, cited earlier in connection with Table 11.1. The authors found that people’s support for generous redistribution is undermined by the perception that immigrants are more represented among the beneficiaries of redistribution. At first glance, this seems to reveal direct links between their fears of immigrants and their willingness to retreat from offering universal social benefits. However, the link is actually not so direct here. The fears about immigrants only take the indirect form of their being asked first about immigrants before being asked the payoff questions about social benefits. Given this ordering of the questions, there is a strong chance that they interpreted the questions about social benefits as referring to immigrants as such, not to the more universal benefits of the welfare state.
A deeper test of the link between exogenous exposure to immigrants and support for income redistribution has now been carried out by the research team of Alberto Alesina, Elie Murard, and Hillel Rapoport (2019). Like the Dahlberg–Edmark–Lundqvist team, they exploited variation in actual exposure to immigrants among regions, in this case among 140 regions within sixteen Western European countries between 2002 and 2016. Controlling for many other things, they explored how regional exposure to immigrants made the interviewed individuals agree or disagree with the statement “The government should take measures to reduce differences in income levels.”
The effects were strongly negative, that is against progressive redistribution. Going beyond asking just about progressive redistribution, the authors also asked questions about social spending itself, such as whether one agrees that “social benefits place too great strain on economy,” “social benefits cost businesses too much in taxes and charges,” and “social benefits make people lazy.” While social spending is indeed correlated with progressive redistribution, as shown in [an earlier chapter], the authors concentrated on the demand for redistribution, not on social spending itself. Still, their overall conclusion also strongly suggests a negative effect of exposure to immigrants on support for social spending. Importantly, and not surprisingly, they also found that cultural distance and low skills on the part of immigrants made the negative effect stronger. Implication: Welcoming low-skilled immigrants from very different cultures will weaken the universalist welfare state.
So far, all the studies are based on opinion surveys, and all suggest that an erosion of expressed support for social spending will result either from anti-immigrant prejudice or from actual contact with immigrants from distant cultures.
The second kind of relevant clue comes not from expressed opinions but from directly observed policy changes themselves. Have immigration shocks negatively affected actual safety-net policies? One econometric study has looked at the pool of twenty-five developed OECD countries for the period 1980–2008, testing for effects of changes in immigration on changes in aggregate social expenditures, controlling for time and country effects. The authors (Gaston and Rajaguru 2013) find no negative effects on social spending, either from aggregate immigrants, or from lower-educated immigrants, or from migrants from poorer countries. A similarly muted result comes from a study of the shifting generosity of social assistance payments among provinces in Canada between 1986 and 2001 (Green and Riddell 2019). Having a greater proportion of immigrants did not significantly reduce the generosity of social assistance to four kinds of household groups, with the slight exception of assistance to couples with children after a certain federal reform of 1996. Such studies have the virtue of testing for actual policy outcomes instead of accepting answers to opinion surveys. Their null results lose some value from the fact that they test only policy behaviors from before the slump of 2008–2009 and before the refugee shock of 2015–2016. Perhaps the real policy backlash is yet to come?
There remains the threat of a policy backlash against the welfare states choosing the generous and even-handed Option 1, even though no reduction of universal benefits has yet occurred – neither in these statistical studies nor in the social-spending policies of Germany and Sweden since 2015.
Option 2: The Door Stays Locked
At the other extreme, consider the possibility of a country with a large social-spending share that simply blocks immigration. The main candidates are five Eastern European members of the European Union: the three Baltic republics, Slovakia, and Hungary. To think of a country that has clearly tried to shut the door recently, one can choose Hungary, the most outspoken in its opposition to immigrants.
In such a case, immigrants would cease to be a short-run budgetary burden, aside from the cost of enforcing the barriers at the border. Social spending for the native population could continue as before. Equality could also be promoted within the country, if the migrants being kept out would have competed mainly for lower-skilled jobs.
In the longer run, however, the restrictiveness of Option 2 would take a toll on the economy. As we have seen, after maybe twelve to fifteen years, the effects of a typical mix of immigrants on government revenues and net fiscal surplus would have turned positive, if the migrants had been allowed into the country. That is, the effect on government revenues and surplus of keeping them out would grow increasingly negative. So eventually, Option 2 comes with a growth cost relative to Option 1.
Option 3: “Welfare Chauvinism”
A third possibility is that immigrants are still allowed to enter, but the government discriminates against them in its provision of social services. Practicing such discrimination, also known as “welfare chauvinism,” should in principle make it easier to avoid dilution of benefits for natives. This strategy harkens back to the seventeenth century, when the European towns denied poor relief and other local services to immigrants, as noted in [an earlier chapter].
To what extent have immigrant-receiving countries practiced such discrimination recently? Thus far, countries accepting immigrants have been unwilling to saddle themselves with immigrants who are not entitled to basic social services. To date, the main case of discriminating against migrants in social program entitlements has been China’s hukou system of internal passports, which blocked rural–to–urban domestic migrants from the better health, education, and other entitlements of the major eastern cities between the communal era of the Great Leap Forward and the partial relaxation of hukou in 1996. Again, there is a clear parallel to the settlements policies of seventeenth-century Europe.
In a federal system, discrimination in social services can gain advocates because a state or local population resists having to pay for immigrants’ social services, yet is unable to block immigration, a policy reserved for the central government. Another near approach to welfare chauvinism, receiving immigrants while denying them basic services, threatened to arise when conservative Californians passed Proposition 187 in 1994. The proposition called for denying public K-12 education and other public services to the families of those non-US citizens who had entered the state without legal documentation. However, Proposition 187 was struck down by the state’s Supreme Court, and has never been implemented. The political perils of welfare chauvinism were underlined in California’s case: Republicans’ support for Proposition 187 is believed to have doomed their party to long-run minority status in California.
The real test will be the policy reactions to Europe’s heavy refugee inflow of 2015–2016. That test is currently in progress. Among the rising anti-immigrant political parties on the right, the support for welfare chauvinism has shown an interesting, but logical, pattern. Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik (2018) has studied the policy pronouncements of right-wing anti-immigrant parties in the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. These pronouncements have voiced strong opposition to social assistance, but not to social insurance. That is, they reject giving outright grants to the foreign-born on the basis of unemployment or poverty, but do not oppose contributory plans in which the foreign-born would pay into plans entitling them to later health care and pensions. Thus, even the right-wing call for discrimination in social services has been only partial. Welfare chauvinism seems unlikely to be embodied in sustained policies.
Option 4: Cherry-Picking the Best Earners
A final option reacts to the anti-immigrant spirit with a combination of blocking boat people and over-border refugees, while admitting, or even actively recruiting, the highly educated and highly skilled. The usual formal name for cherry-picking of immigrants is a points-based immigration system that determines a non-citizen’s eligibility to immigrate (partly or wholly) on the basis of that non-citizen’s points in a scoring system including such factors as education, wealth, language fluency, or an existing job offer.
Here again, there is little threat to social programs for established citizens, since the skilled immigrants passing through the filter need little help and will quickly become net taxpayers.
This fourth option is now practiced widely among rich countries, with Canada in a leading position [In the UK the example usually cited is Australia which is a close 2nd in the table]. Figure 11.2 shows some striking international patterns in the destinations reached by highly educated migrants. For one thing, they end up in countries where the native-born population is also highly educated. One reason for this is unrelated to immigration policy: Those with high skills tend to agglomerate in places where others have high skills, which in practice means major urban areas in the richest countries. Figure 11.2 shows this correlation of educated migrants with educated natives in the international snapshot taken in 2015.
Australia debate today’s news: Let market control skilled migrants, say experts
UK debate today’s news: Britain needs controlled migration
The Source:
Peter H. Lindert, Making Social Spending Work, Cambridge University Press 2021
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.