O Intermitente
(So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

terça-feira, setembro 30, 2003

Johan Norberg: Open borders for immigrants as well pt 4/8

Restrições à imigração de mão de obra não especializada

This is a paradox. On the one hand, governments are trying to recruit the skilled. On the other hand they are making it increasingly difficult for asylum seekers to enter our countries, with the result that illegal immigrants suffocate in container trucks, and corpses of refugees float ashore on Europe?s southern shores ? in increasingly desperate attempts to get here. A Swedish newspaper commented this policy with an illustration of a boat from the coast guard. They had spotted several refugees in the dark water, desperately trying to keep afloat. Instead of saving them, the official from the coast guard reach for the megaphone, and ask loudly: ?Is anyone of you a software programmer??

I think this morally disturbing attempt to recruit some and keep the others away, to take the best plums, is going to fail. It is another attempt to centrally control the economy. Governments think they can socially engineer and design the labour market. That?s not how an economy works. The government does not know what kind of workers we are going to need a few years from now, or what kind of potential people have just by looking at their formal skills. And the people with the best incentives to find out, and those who are closest to the information is actually those who are most concerned ? businesses and immigrants.


Furthermore, we actually need the unskilled workers as well, for example to take care of service jobs that our own population don?t want to do. When all of us here get old and sick, the services we need most are not going to be given by a software programmer from India. And as Nigel Harris has observed, sometimes we need those unskilled workers to be able to entice the IT specialists to come. If they get ground support from drivers, deliverers, nannies, maids and gardeners in India, why would they want to go to Europe and the US where they won?t afford services like that even though their wages are multiplied? Those services are needed here as well.

posted by Miguel Noronha 8:57 da manhã