Rich countries need to improve immigration policies

The Economist says, “Migrants can make the world more prosperous, but voters need convincing…. The influx should be orderly and legal as well as humanely handled. Migrants should be encouraged to work. They should be helped to fit in. And they should be seen to pay their way.

America’s flexible labour market makes it easy for migrants to find entry-level jobs, and its meagre welfare state means they have to. The unemployment rate for immigrants is 4% compared with 16% in Sweden, where benefits are fatter and unions have negotiated industry-wide pay scales that price unskilled migrants out of jobs (see chart 2). The National Academies of Sciences found that even immigrants who drop out of high school are net contributors to the public purse if they arrive in America before the age of 25

Cultural assimilation is startlingly quick in America. Fully 60% of foreign-born Latinos speak mostly Spanish, but by the next generation this has fallen to 6%, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Some 15% of newlywed foreign-born Hispanics in 2015 were hitched to non-Hispanics; among US-born Hispanics it was a whopping 39%. For Asians the figures were 24% and 46%.

And elsewhere…..

Nearly every rich country has an ageing population and a shortage of workers to care for them. Yet surprisingly little effort has been made to train foreign workers to meet this demand. The German government, anticipating a huge shortfall of geriatric nurses, is training young Vietnamese in Hanoi in both nursing and the German language. But such examples are rare.

Raffy Fermin moved from the Philippines to the United Arab Emirates to fix cars. Locals love flashy vehicles, but would not be seen dead under one. So Porsche, a German firm, sponsors a school in Manila that teaches young Filipinos how to service its machines. When they qualify, Porsche offers them jobs in the Gulf.

The Economist August 25 2018

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