[lbo-talk] Re: Kerala and Cuba

kjkhoo at softhome.net kjkhoo at softhome.net
Mon Apr 28 19:26:10 PDT 2003


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>One of the necessary ingredients of development of Europe was the
>ability to dump its surplus population on the rest of the world:
>
>***** ...One of the most stupendous achievements of 19th-century
>classical liberalism was the right of freedom of movement. As one
>indication, between 1840 and the early decades of the 20th century
>almost 60 million people emigrated from Europe to other parts of the
>world. Eighteen million came from Great Britain and Ireland; 10
>million from Italy; 9.2 million from European Russia; 5.2 million
>from Austria-Hungary; 4.9 million from Germany; 4.7 million from
>Spain; 1.8 million from Portugal; 1.2 million from Sweden; 850,000
>from Norway; 640,000 from Poland; 520,000 from France; and 390,000
>from Denmark....
>
><http://www.fff.org/freedom/0500h.asp> *****
>
>Today, poor nations, trying to catch up in the age of tight
>immigration control, can't do the same -- one of the reasons why
>development is difficult today.

A necessary ingredient? In this bald form, this is a very dubious argument -- a neo-Malthusian theory of development: getting rid of 'surplus' population is a necessary ingredient of development? Plus the sources of origin cited presents a bit of a problem -- that 9.2 m from Eur Russia didn't do Russia much good, nor the 4.7 m from Spain and the 1.8 m from Portugal.

Anyway, even if it were true in the 19th century, it does not necessarily make it true for the latter half of the 20th century -- the operative period for "poor nations" trying to develop. The global and national conditions in the 19th and the later 20th centuries are very different.

In any case, factually, has there been such a reduction of the movement of people? Inflow into the OECD averaged 3.1 m annually in the 1990s -- which would translate to 210 m over a comparable 70 year period. But I've no idea what the composition of that inflow is -- largely internal movement within OECD or from outside OECD

Still, if one takes the US alone, I recall reading somewhere that the latest statistics show that the proportion of foreign-born in the US is, today, little different from what it was a century ago. One could argue that, if anything, in-migration into the US underpins US development -- especially if one takes the biophysical sciences and engineering as one of its central needs. And this draws out resources from the poor countries -- the Philippines might be such an example. The usual brain-drain argument -- although the draining may result in people working in manual occupations: Malaysia is an example where there are Bangladeshi computer science graduates working as petrol pump attendants!



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