Paul Collier (Wikipedia) is a development economist at Oxford University, most famous for his development economics book The Bottom Billion. In October 2013, Collier’s book Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (Amazon Kindle, Wikipedia) was released.
The book included a model of diaspora dynamics to predict migration flows: the claim was that migration flows from a region would initially be small, but they would pick up as the size of the diaspora increased.
Collier’s book discussed many issues such as social capital decline, nativist backlash, and brain drain.
A detailed list of responses to Collier’s book is available on the Wikipedia page. Here, we list the main responses from the open borders angle:
- Nathan Smith’s multi-part response to Paul Collier: Chapter 1, Chapter 2.
- Paul Crider’s two blog posts responding to Collier: Paul Collier’s Exodus and the risk of migrant diasporas and ghost nations and the end of emigration.
- Bryan Caplan’s blog post Diasporas, Swamping, and Open Borders Abolitionism, EconLog, February 5, 2014, where he argues that Collier’s diaspora dynamics allows for significant migration under open borders while alleviating concerns about swamping.