In Immigration from Haiti is a terrible way to help, Super-Economy tries to make the case that this is a very expensive way to help the Haitians. He (?) says that “The NAC estimate is that the total net cost of each low-skilled immigrant for the US. State is $120,000 in 2009 dollars….Even if we absurdly assume each Haitian lives forever and sends remittances home forever, discounted at a 5% interest rate $1,300 per year is worth only $26,000 compared to a cost for the U.S taxpayer of $120,000.”
This misses something critical, that allowing Haitians to move to the USA and send remittances will actually help Haitians over the long run while virtually nothing else they will do will aid will do so. I’m not making a comment about immediate needs but longer term prosperity.
If we want all Haitians to have some minimum level of income (say $10 a day suggested by Bill Easterly in Income per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places – Working Paper 143) then we can assume that nearly all Haitians who move to America will achieve it. Those that stay behind may only better from remittances, but I believe that is a floor. There are just 9,780,064 Haitians.We need (365.25 * 10) / 1 300 = 2.80961538 Haitian immigrants per one staying behind to achieve this solely from remittances. This would require letting 6 299 137.72 more Haitians in to America. That’s 755 billion under these estimates (which I suspect are too high but I’m prepared to run with) in NPV but paid out over decades. That’s a real cost of $36 billion a year.
Plus,we get several nice benefits. One, we solved the problem of having a failed state in our neighborhood. Two, we’ve adopted a high population growth rate and young group to the US, allowing us to smooth some of our demographic problems from a graying population. Three, we get a huge PR and humanitarian win from helping out some of the world’s most unfortunate people. Four, as remarked above, there is far less waste in such a program than a big aid program in Haiti. Five, it solves some of the political economy problems. Aid programs can fold at any time, but once the Haitians are here they are our problem and we almost certainly will continue to help them assimilate. So it might be expensive but still a great deal.
There are few programs costing $36 billion or more that would prevent or eliminate more suffering than allowing a few million Haitians to come here.
He also remarks that this can cause a further brain drain.
There are currently 75,000 Haitian immigrants in the U.S. with a college degrees. I would guess the proportions in Canada are similar. According to this study that analyzes the Haiti Living Conditions Survey only 1.36% of adults in Haiti have Tertiary education. This means that that there are already more Haitians with college degrees in the US and Canada than there are left in Haiti!
Do we really believe that this exodus of the educated, of whom Haiti had so few to begin with, has benefited Haiti? Should we encourage this further?
It is morally unacceptable to condemn skilled Haitians to misery and poverty so that the other Haitians that stay behind can benefit from their skills. For one, given the enormous increases in their productivity from moving to the USA and being enmeshed with other skilled people unlocks enormous economic surplus which could well allow transfers to poor Haitians. More important, treating people as as means only to national ends is demeaning and treats man as slaves. They deserve to make migrate if they so choose.
