BK helps make the case for open borders in poor countries:
Interesting point by Jones: if high-IQ people produce positive externalities well above their market wages in poor countries, then citizenists in poor countries should be willing to offer larges subsidies for high-IQ immigration:
“If IQ has the sizeable positive externalities posited here, then there may be room for a Coasian bargain between countries with low current LV IQ and higher IQ individuals in other countries. One purely suggestive possibility: If the ratio of private to public benefits of higher IQ are even half as large as the 6:1 ratio suggested by Jones and Schneider (2010), a low LV IQ country could rationally offer a 100% subsidy for any wages a high IQ immigrant earns in excess of that nation’s median wage. In practical terms, a 10 year income tax holiday for permanent immigrants with engineering degrees could accomplish the same goal of encouraging high IQ immigration. “
Favoring engineers seems too much like “picking winners,” and I don’t think the research is really there to support anything so specific (don’t forget that the most obvious externality of engineers, that they invent things, is global in nature) but a simpler policy recommendation to derive from this argument would probably imply that poor countries should simply open their borders to immigrants from rich countries. Rich countries generally have higher average IQ, certainly higher levels of education, and probably other traits– work ethic, perhaps, or trustworthiness– that make their home countries productive. I don’t have great data on this– go, IMPALA!— but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be very easy for an immigrant from the US or Western Europe, with or without an engineering degree, to migrate to India or Malawi or China or Russia and just get a job, never mind a tax holiday. Why don’t poor countries offer free immigration to holders of US, EU, Japanese or South Korean passports? I suspect that it’s some combination of (a) elite protectionism– a corrupt business elite makes the rules and doesn’t want the competition from capable Westerners or East Asians– and (b) global norms– rich countries have migration restrictions and they’re either blindly imitating or else retaliating out of pride against countries that exclude them. But it would be interesting to investigate further.
Related thoughts: (1) Would it be easy for rich countries to negotiate away restrictions against their nationals working in poor countries, in return for a bit more openness to migrants from those countries, or perhaps other concessions, e.g., aid or trade? (2) Would a high-profile open-borders movement in the US and/or Western Europe, even while unsuccessful domestically, change the climate of ideas and persuade poor countries to open their borders to migration, to gain the “moral high ground?”
One of the problems with trying to use source country-based open borders for poor countries is that there isn’t any reason to believe that the people who will make use of those open borders will be the high-IQ (or otherwise “desirable”) people that the policy would like to attract. If India completely opened its borders to the US, would the subset of the US population that takes up the offer be more “desirable” in terms of IQ/skill/human capital from India’s perspective? If not, then this particular argument wouldn’t work, though, of course, there are moral and practical reasons to have considerably more open borders.
What types of people from the rich world might want to migrate to a relatively poor and corrupt country such as India? I can think of a few categories:
(1) Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs): These are people who are not Indian citizens but whose parents, grandparents, or other relatives are from India (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_Person_of_Indian_Origin for more on the terminology). India basically has open borders for PIOs — they can come and acquire long-term residency in India with ease (see http://www.globalvisas.com/india_visas/persons_of_indian_origin__pio_.html for more). This list of people would probably include people high in skills/human capital/IQ relative to the Indian population at large, and perhaps even relative to the developed world population.
(2) Do-gooders, philanthropists, and missionaries of various stripes: They are attracted by the opportunity to alleviate poverty and help Indians, and also by the evangelical scope offered. These were more common in the era of colonial rule by the British, and are relatively infrequent now. Some of them visit India temporarily, then fall in love with it and settle permanently. Examples include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Besant and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa among others. I don’t know how easy it is for such people to migrate to India temporarily or permanently.
(3) People who are middle-skilled by developed-world standards, but would be high-skilled by Indian standards, and prefer a lifestyle of hustle and bustle with access to cheap labor (nannies, housemaids, drivers) to a relatively quiet lifestyle with better gadgets but more expensive labor. I don’t really know how big this category is, and whether this would fit in with your ideas.
Also, I’m not really sure how well high IQ immigration to a poor country with bad institutions would work. One reason I think low IQ immigration to rich countries is not all that harmful is that the institutions of the rich countries are stable due to status quo bias and founder effects. But the institutions of poor countries are also stable for similar reasons, albeit probably less so (given that I think status quo bias is stronger for systems that appear to work than for systems that are clearly not working, as I discussed here). But it would still be a big problem. My guess would be that high skilled people (whether high IQ or otherwise) would do best being next to each other in a productive hub that exploits their talents (such as Silicon Valley for programmers and web/computer innovators), and most of the positive effects of such a hub would be global, with the premium captured locally being quite minimal. That said, if a poor country could facilitate the creation of a productive hub where skilled people from across the world could come across to pool their talents, then the country and its local citizenry would be able to capture some of the benefits. But setting up such a hub is quite tricky and cannot simply be done by declaring an intention to do so. Middle-income countries like Chile might have a better shot at facilitating the creation of such hubs.
A more general argument that one could make is that poor countries could benefit from the migration of people who are high-IQ and/or high-skilled by the poor country standards, but not ultra-high-IQ or ultra-high-skilled — they might be talented shopkeepers, business managers, restaurateurs, etc.