Maids for your professionals or professionals for your maids?

Sir Martin Wolf is absolutely right when in “Why immigration is hard to tackle”, November 2, when he says that “this is no area for stealth” and requests more transparency. For instance he makes a good point when mentioning that the “impact on the gross domestic product of migration should be measured after subtracting the incomes earned by the migrants” although perhaps there is also a need to differentiate between temporary and final migrants. Where I am not really sure is when he mentions market-compatible systems like auctions of work permits to be better than arbitrated point systems since neither one of them seems to be covering the problem that could be caused by in relative terms favouring the highest added value workers and therefore implicitly perhaps relegating your own to the lower earning sectors. Do you want to allow a foreigner to work as a maid so as to give your own professionals a better chance or do you want to give the foreign professionals a better chance and have your own work as maids? Not an easy proposition to handle.

Personally what I most favour, everywhere, is massive temporary worker programs so as to allow for the market to cover its short term needs without necessarily forcing the society to enter into long terms commitments. To make these temporary programs more feasible I am currently investigating the use of private insurance companies to guarantee compliance (going back home) instead of putting the burden on already overly stretched migration authorities.

The main obstacle to the development of temporary worker programs lies ironically in the arrogance of developed countries believing that anyone who gets there wants to stay there forever. So instead of making good livable room for all your temporary needs what you are getting is more and more permanent fixtures.

In immigration, more than barriers new riverbeds are needed

Sir Clive Crook in “How to untie the immigration knot” June 14 gives a glimpse of what is needed by arguing that instead of working on how to solve the 12 million stock of illegal immigrants the US would be better served by first working at the flow control valves. Doing that it is important to remember that the best way to control a flow is not always by building a barrier but sometimes by finding new riverbeds where it could run more orderly. It is in this respect that I believe FT’s readers could be interested in hearing about an initiative of trying to have private insurance companies stepping up to the plate and offer to guarantee the payment of a substantial indemnity to the US government for each worker who being favored by a temporary visa program does not return home in a timely fashion.

Immigration policies should not be a Noah’s Ark.

Sir, you are absolutely right when in “Small steps needed on US immigration”, June 12, you insist on the need to build credibility, which is exactly what some of us are trying to do by for instance developing a private insurance programs destined to guarantee that workers with visas issued under temporary programs will return in a timely way, or else paying some very substantial indemnities. What is not that clear though is why you think that creating bureaucratic biases in favour of high skilled workers is a naturally good thing to do instead of allowing the market to signal its own and very dynamic relative worker shortages. One thing is a Noah’s Ark in times of flooding and quite a different thing when it remains in the same spot, on dry land.

We should be able to do a lot of good with temporary worker programs

Sir, when you comment what you find as the better flawed than nothing US immigration deal, May 21, you mention in it that “the temporary worker program offers no paths to citizenship” and that it “will merely create a huge new pool of permanently illegal aliens”. You are mistakenly looking at it from a very negative (might I dare say almost “supremacy”) perspective.

There is a real urgent need for a substantial temporary worker program that really is temporary, that has nothing to do with earning citizenship, and that if adequately executed could bring a lot of economic growth and social satisfaction for both sending and receiving countries. The program now announced might possibly be our last opportunity in a long time to have a chance of creating a good example to follow and we need everyone’s help and support for that, including yours. Many of us are already working on organizing our Central American workers so that they, while fully complying with the laws of the program, can best utilize their few legal working years in the US to earn and learn the most, so as to be able to do their best for their beloved homelands upon their return.

And, by the way, these workers, they are no aliens; they are all just earthlings like me and you.

The World Bank is needed more and more

The World Bank is less and less relevant writes Armeane M. Choksi, May 14, while the truth is that a true World Bank is more and more needed in times where there are not only billions of poor that seem more left behind than ever and everything gets, or at least is discovered to be, more and more intertwined. Of course there is a lot of intellectual capacity in the individual countries but they all need a forum where they can come together and discuss economic development from a global perspective and not only from their own local needs and the World Bank is the ideal venue for that.

Clearly the World Bank needs to undergo some deep reforms in order to face up to all the new challenges, and not only with respect to its governance. Just as example they need to reduce the research that is based only on the availability of data and scale up the research that gives us better current data, like they are managing to do with their “Doing Business” reports. I have also frequently begged the World Bank to become that really carbon-solutions neutral agency we all need so as to make sense between all the green magical solutions to global warming that are currently peddled, as well as to provide the world with some good temporary-migration-program blue prints, that make sense to all parties.

That Choksi, who presents himself as a former Vice President of Human Capital Development & Operations Policy at the World Bank can even start to think that selling their prized real estate and distributing the capital gains to their shareholders has anything to do with what the word needs, is such a shame and only comes to show that even people who have been in the Bank, never understood what it was all about. The World Bank’s current loan portfolio after 40 years stands at approximately $103 bn. The USA’s total share (16.38%) of the World Bank’s total reported net worth comes only to about $5.5bn, or less than a tenth of what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have received in endowments.

Do not tax the migrants, make them save instead.

Sir, I could not agree more with Philippe Legrain on that Europe (and the US) need urgently to develop some large scale temporary immigration programs if they want to have a fighting chance of keeping what is happening under reasonable control. If the political price to pay for such programs is along the lines that he suggests in “A migrant tax would slash illegal entry into Europe”, April 25, namely an “extra payroll tax on foreign workers” so be it, and only because something is better than nothing. Nevertheless, let us be clear that what he is suggesting is a form of bribery offering all the “true” citizens to share into the earnings produced by the migrants, the secondary citizens. It is also equivalent to a handicap system where you place a special tax on the shoulders of foreigners, so that your homeboys can easier compete, which could have of course some long term debilitating effects for your own.

Much better is a system that looks to really guarantee the temporary aspects of it all. Not only do you have to make certain that the migrants keep up their contacts with their homelands, so as to avoid the risk of any heart-drain but also, that those same homelands manage to get better homes to return to. That you take a percentage of the migrants earnings and place it into a savings account that he will get back when he returns home, sounds much more reasonable than taxing him so that he might remain poor and impeded from returning home.

Bank needs products

eSir, your “Bank seeks customers”, April 4, in which you describe the headaches of someone who is losing a valuable market niche, in this case the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as its clients have grown richer and don’t need it anymore, reminds us about a not so well known flip side to that saying that a bank only lends you the umbrella when the sun shines and asks it back when it rains. Your title might not be entirely correct since the customers are still there and so what they really have to seek are new products. No interest income? Go for fees! In questions about the environment and energy there is much need for some really independent and neutral advice, as the world might be wasting its last chances of fixing its climate change problems by falling for some well marketed but inefficient hybrid solutions. And in terms of the increasing global migration, why does not ADB develop a temporary worker program that meets everyone’s expectations and needs, then patent it, and charge for its use.