Nations without Borders: The Gifts of Folk Gone Abroad

More than ever before, migration is a global phenomenon. In search of employment, higher wages, educational opportunities for themselves and their children, and escape from persecution and violence, millions of people cross international borders each year. Countries that had few immigrants in the past now have growing immigrant populations. Nearly every major city in the world has a sizable immigrant community. Frankfurt has its Turks, Vancouver its Chinese, Marseilles and Paris their Algerians, London its West Indians, Kuwait, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi their Indians, New York its Russian Jews, Dacca its Biharis, Bangkok its Burmese, and Tokyo its Iranians. Over a hundred million people are now living outside the country of their birth, and millions more latter-generation immigrants maintain their ethnic identities. In industrialized societies, noncitizens now typically constitute more than 5 percent of the population. That figure is 8.5 percent in the United States and Germany, and as high as 15 percent in Canada, 18 percent in Switzerland, and 24 percent in Australia. In a few oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Kuwait, noncitizens outnumber natives.

These large and visible immigrant populations have given pause to governments and their citizens. Do immigrants benefit the economy, taking unwanted jobs and providing needed skills, or do they displace workers and burden public resources? Do immigrants add cultural diversity and artistic creativity, or do they erode national identities and fragment societies? Are immigrants fully incorporated into citizenship, or are they marginalized with limited rights and benefits? Are countries losing skilled workers, or do they benefit by having many of their citizens abroad sending remittances home, making investments, and transferring technologies? Do immigrants facilitate international cooperation, or do they exacerbate conflict and contribute to global terrorism and drug trafficking?

In country after country, these questions are the subject of political debate and the impetus for new policies. In the United States, California passed Proposition 187 in 1994, denying many benefits to illegal immigrants. Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has called for a halt to immigration, and congressional legislation to restrict and cut benefits to legal immigrants and their children is pending. Almost every European country has introduced further restrictions on the number of immigrants and asylum-seekers. Even developing countries, the sources of most world migration, have turned refugees away and introduced measures to prevent illegal entry.

Once principally the concern of American sociologists, historians, and demographers, migration now attracts the attention of economists, political scientists, and specialists in international relations around the world. For those who work in the field it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with the flow of articles and books. International migration and its causes, consequences, benefits, and costs have taken on the centrality and sharpness that once belonged to the study of multinational corporations.

Thomas Sowell, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of numerous books on the links between economics and culture, has added to the debate with his new book, Migrations and Cultures. Sowell's principal interest is what makes immigrants prosperous. Many immigrant communities, he points out, have done well for themselves and contributed to the economic development of the countries in which they settled. Moreover, their success is often independent of local conditions. Some migrant communities have prospered wherever they moved--to colonies or independent countries, democratic or authoritarian countries, developed or developing countries. Often they have had to overcome discrimination and hostility.

THE SUCCESSFUL IMMIGRANTS

Sowell looks at six high-achieving migrant communities. He starts with German migrants to the Baltic States, Poland, Russia, South America, and the United States and describes their contributions to brewing, optics, industrial manufacturing, and educational institutions from kindergartens to research-oriented universities. By contrast, the Japanese first settled in the United States, Brazil, Peru, and Canada as migrant laborers with few technical skills, but their culture enabled them to overcome discrimination, become independent farmers, and join the middle class. The Italian migrants to Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Australia were industrial workers, masons, winemakers, fishermen, and vegetable growers. The Chinese migrants, numbering 36 million, settled mainly in Southeast Asia, where they started out in difficult, dangerous work and eventually became financiers of rice production in Thailand, merchants and industrialists in Malaysia and Indonesia, and retailers in the Philippines. In medieval Europe, Jews were peddlers, artisans, moneylenders, and rent and tax collectors. In Eastern Europe they were craftsmen, cobblers, bakers, and tailors. In societies as different as the Soviet Union, Australia, and Argentina, they contributed their skills to universities, commerce, industry, and the professions. In the nineteenth century millions of unskilled Indians settled overseas as indentured laborers in eastern and southern Africa, Ceylon, Malaya, Fiji, Trinidad, British Guiana, and Mauritius. In the middle of the twentieth century educated Indians settled in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Today a large proportion of the overseas Indians are professionals such as electronics engineers, doctors, bankers, and merchants.