Drivers of migration

World
Europe

The Eleventh International Conference on Migration and Development brought together some of the world's foremost experts on immigration at Stanford University.

One of the key sponsors was the World Bank, which just came out with a new report entitled, "Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets."

The report begins with a simple yet through provoking statement: The rich have many assets; the poor have only one – their labor…. Migration is, therefore, the most effective way to reduce poverty and share prosperity.

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I spoke with Çağlar Özden, who is the lead economist on the World Bank report.

When I asked him about whether there has been a rise in xenophobia, his gut feeling was that xenophobia exists all across the world among all peoples. But he went on to say that the concentrated impact of the immigration of low-skilled workers in the West was creating the economic basis for political opposition to immigration.

He called that understandable.

But he cautioned that one of the real dangers is failing to recognize that immigration has two important effects – both expanding and redistributing the economic pie.

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I also met Sandra Rozo, a business professor at the University of Southern California.

She's been studying the impact of the Syrian Migration, after the conflict, on businesses located in Turkey.

Rozo says her research finds that in the areas that received a greater refugee influx, businesses there are showing a higher rate of growth.

(Top image: Young migrants searching for objects and food in a garbage dump, look toward the sea and in Fnideq, northern Morocco, July 5, 2018. /VCG Photo)