Migration is clearly related to development, advantageous to both the migrants’ countries of origin through the cash remittances they send back home and to their host countries through their labor and skills. Today, there are approximately 200 million people working abroad. The impact is huge.

‘Obviously, migrants help their homelands by remitting cash on a vast scale. Armies of itinerant nannies, dishwashers, meatpackers and plumbers shift more capital to poorer countries than do Western aid efforts. (This may long have been true, but without the data who knew?) The World Bank says foreign workers sent $328 billion from richer to poorer countries last year, more than double the $120 billion in official aid flows from OECD members. India got $52 billion from its diaspora, more than it took in foreign direct investment.’ Migrant workers are the real aid workers.

According to the United Nations Human Development Report, migrant workers boost human welfare and development even beyond the cash remittances they send to make material life and economic condition better. Migration, it seems, is not really a problem to be solved. ‘By crossing a border, most migrants find a richer, longer, healthier and better-educated life than they would otherwise have had: over three-quarters go to a country with a higher rank on the human development index.’

The report also asserts that ‘migrants send home useful values as well as cash.’ According to Demetrios Papademetriou, head of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC, ‘such “knowledge transfers, the social and political remittances” are very important.’ Beyond the flow of money is the flow of ideas.

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Via The Economist