This House believes nations of the world should increase protection of the economic and social right

Unless migrants receive equal social and economic rights, they will never be seen as equal in a human sense. According to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to leave or enter a country, as well as to move within it (internal migration). This freedom of movement is often not granted under current laws.

Human rights also include fair treatment under the welfare state, and increased economic protections for migrants is necessary in many states for them to receive such treatment. Without this equal treatment, common myths about migrants will continue to be widely believed. These myths claim that immigrants are criminals and that they steal jobs from natives. The organization Migrant Rights says, “All these myths rob migrant workers and refugees of their humanity, and are aimed at portraying them as less deserving of our sympathy and help.”[1]

It is a violation of migrants’ human rights to be treated this way, and they will only be seen as equals when they are granted economic protection that allows them to work alongside natives.

[1]  Migrant Rights, "Fact-checking the Israeli government’s incitement against migrants and refugees," October 1st, 2010, accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.migrant-rights.org/2010/10/01/fact-checking-the-israeli-governments-incitement-against-migrants-and-refugees/.

Migrant rights are already protected under human rights law. If a nation violates existing international human rights law against a migrant, perhaps with exploitative working conditions, wrongful imprisonment, seizure of property, discrimination, or violence, existing international law already adequately protects them. There is no need to expand human rights law to create a separate category and separate protections for migrants. Even if the international community decided it wanted to better protect the human rights of migrants, an international treaty will not necessarily advance that cause, as international law has proven to be very difficult to enforce. This will continue to be a problem into the foreseeable future.

The right to family is widely recognized as an essential human right. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that the family is the fundamental unit of society. Within the right to family is the right to family reunification for migrants who are separated from their loved ones. The Human Rights Education Associates argue, “states are obliged to facilitate contacts and deal with requests to enter or leave a state party for the purpose of reunification in a humane and expeditious manner.”[1]  This right is especially important for refugees, who have often been torn from their families by force, and although they have not been separated by force economic migrants are also separated from their families and at the very least should be able to visit their families, and it is not granted by many countries.

[1] Asmita Naik, “The Right to Family,” Human Rights Education Associates,” Accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.hrea.org/index.php?doc_id=425.

The proposed right of family reunification is too much of a burden on receiving countries, making it an obstacle to a migrant rights treaty. Indeed, states have levelled as an argument against the Migrant Workers Convention, and against other possible international migrant treaties, concerns about a robust right of family reunification to all migrant workers present in migrant-receiving countries. This could offer family members a right to migrate into the state in question, resulting in large increases in population size. And, there is no doubt that the text of the Migrant Workers Convention aims to create a "right" to family reunification. Even if it provides flexibility on how a nation attempts to facilitate reunification, it still requires that states reunite families in some way. Under this treaty, therefore, any migrant could sue the state for not allowing his family (and perhaps extended family) to immigrate as well. In overpopulated and strained migrant-receiving countries, particularly in Western Europe, such a proposition is untenable, which is why so many migrant-receiving nations oppose the treaty.

With an international regulatory body, states would be held accountable for protecting migrant rights, and migrant policies and protections would be better coordinated. The international community has created a number of regulatory bodies that have helped the global economy adapt to rising globalization, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Migration is an essential part of globalization, but there is no international body regulating the flow of workers around the world. Jason Deparle of the New York Times writes, “The most personal and perilous form of movement is the most unregulated. States make (and often ignore) their own rules, deciding who can come, how long they stay, and what rights they enjoy."[1] Because migrant rights are a growing problem and an essential part of globalization, an international regulatory body would be an effective way of improving human rights around the world.

[1] Deparle, "Global Migration.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/weekinreview/27deparle.html

The receiving countries would not accept a regulatory body. The current international regulatory bodies such as the WTO and World Bank are essentially run by the rich countries for the benefit of the rich countries and so they accept it. Any body regulating migrants’ rights would, however, be doing the opposite--  benefiting the poorest -- meaning the rich countries would try to prevent the creation of such an organisation.

In the unlikely event that the regulatory body could be created it would face a gargantuan task. How could global migration be monitored and regulated by an international body when even national bodies in rich countries are not able to keep track of all migrants in their nations? Yet the international body would also have to monitor the conditions of migrants in many much poorer countries where the infrastructure currently does not exist.

Economic protections are not only good for the migrants themselves, but they benefit all countries involved. Migrants move from countries that have a lot of workers but not a lot work available, to countries with a lot of work available, but not enough workers. Migration is a market mechanism, and it is perhaps the most important aspect of globalization.

The growth of the world’s great economies has relied throughout history on the innovation and invention of immigrants. This is particularly the case in the United States, which is famously a nation of immigrants, where the architect of the Apollo program Wernher von Braun immigrated from Germany and Alexander Graham Bell the inventor of the telephone was born in Scotland. More recently immigration has been instrumental in the success of Silicon Valley co-founder of Google Sergey Brin is Russian born while the co-founder of Yahoo Jerry Yang came from Taiwan.[1] The new perspective brought by migrants leads to new breakthroughs, which are some of the most important benefits to receiving countries from migration. The exploitation of migrant workers that exists in the status quo creates tensions and prejudices that hamper this essential creative ability of migrants in the workplace.

Source countries are equally aided by migration. Able workers who would be unemployed in their home land are able to work in a new country, and then send money—“remittances”—back to their families. Migrants sent home $317 billion in remittances in 2009, which is three times the world’s total foreign aid, and in at least seven countries this money accounted for more than a quarter of the gross domestic product.[2] One of the important goals of migrant rights is to protect these remittances, and thus to protect the economies of source countries that require them to survive.

Irene Khan shows that migrant protections are important for everybody involved:  "When business exploits irregular migrants, it distorts the economy, creates social tensions, feeds racial prejudice and impedes prospects for regular migration. Protecting the rights of migrant workers -- regular and irregular -- makes good economic and political sense for all countries -- whether source, destination or transit."[3] Both sides are likely to benefit more if migrants are welcomed and allowed to join the formal economy; they will be better able to work, they will pay taxes and national insurance to the host country and they themselves will be more secure so will be able to send more home. This benefit to the source state could be even greater if the benefits from paying national insurance were made portable and continue to be paid when they return.

[1] Marcus Wohlson, ‘Immigration chief seeks to reassure Silicon Valley’, USA Today, 22 February 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-02-22/silicon-valley-tech-immigration/53211162/1

[2] Human Rights Watch, "Saudi Arabia/GCC States: Ratify Migrant Rights Treaty," April 10th, 2003, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2003/04/10/saudi-arabiagcc-states-ratify-migrant-rights-treaty.

[3] Irene Khan, "Invisible people, irregular migrants," The Daily Star, June 7th, 2010, http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=141601.

Migration puts too heavy a burden on receiving countries, and it essentially means giving up on source countries. It is not a mechanism of the market, but rather an unfair system of taking money from taxpayers in certain countries and giving it to people other countries, this money is then sent abroad and spend abroad resulting in a net loss to the economy. Not all migration is bad, but legislation that would protect the right of immigrants to send money home would solidify this unfair system. Remittances are a short-term fix. If migrants are not allowed to send home remittances, it is possible that the most skilled workers would stay in their home country and work to rebuild the economy for the long-term.

The supposed intangible benefit to receiving countries of “innovation and invention” is much less important than the real cost that these countries feel as a result from the unemployment and increased cost of health, education, and welfare systems that migrants cause.

Migrants face a number of challenges when they reach their destination, such as finding housing and in integrating into the workforce, and the opportunities to exploit them can be dangerous. According to Dr Tasneem Siddiqui, "In 1929, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) identified the migrant workers as the most vulnerable group in the world. Seventy years have elapsed since then, but they still belong to that group."[1]

This is something that the U.N. Convention attempts to address creating specific changes in many countries that would make migrants less vulnerable. For example, in all of the Gulf States, migrants are prohibited or at least restricted from “participation in independent trade union activities.”[2] Protecting the right to unionize, as the U.N. Convention does with Article 40(1), allows migrants to fight for their own rights in the workplace, allowing migrants to fight and ensure their own rights is the best way to ensure that they will be protected in the long-term.

Migrants have the same fundamental rights as any other segment of the population as recognised by all states when they signed the universal declaration of human rights. Yet while migrants often initially migrate due to the dream of a better life they often find themselves in terrible living conditions, even in developed countries like Britain they often end up in what are essentially shanty towns, in London for example even if they manage to stay off the streets many new immigrants are housed in sheds and garages.[3] All governments should recognise their responsibility to ensure the minimum rights of migrants when it comes to shelter, education, and health are protected.

[1] Daily Star, “Ratify UN convention on migrant workers’ rights,” May 3, 2009, http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=86583.

[2] Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia/GCC States.”

[3] Rogers, Chris, ‘The illegal immigrants desperate to escape squalor of Britain’, BBC News, 28 February 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17183171

In most democratic, developed countries—which are those that receive the most immigrants—people share equal rights in the workplace, as long as they immigrated legally. People who broke the law to come to the country do not deserve these rights. Because they usually come to work, the workplace is even the ideal place to discover illegal immigrants. Not only are they not allowed to unionize, but they are not allowed to get paid. Workplace rights do not need to be strengthened for legal migrants, and they should not be for illegal migrants. Similarly it is impossible for the conditions for illegal migrants to be improved; if they are found they will be deported and so there is no need to improve their conditions, although of course they should be well treated while in the process of deportation. Moreover improving minimum conditions would be counterproductive as they would attract more migrants to immigrate illegally knowing that they will get minimum living conditions that may well be considerably better than those that they had in their home country. 

Unless migrants receive equal social and economic rights, they will never be seen as equal in a human sense. According to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to leave or enter a country, as well as to move within it (internal migration). This freedom of movement is often not granted under current laws.

Human rights also include fair treatment under the welfare state, and increased economic protections for migrants is necessary in many states for them to receive such treatment. Without this equal treatment, common myths about migrants will continue to be widely believed. These myths claim that immigrants are criminals and that they steal jobs from natives. The organization Migrant Rights says, “All these myths rob migrant workers and refugees of their humanity, and are aimed at portraying them as less deserving of our sympathy and help.”[1]

It is a violation of migrants’ human rights to be treated this way, and they will only be seen as equals when they are granted economic protection that allows them to work alongside natives.

[1]  Migrant Rights, "Fact-checking the Israeli government’s incitement against migrants and refugees," October 1st, 2010, accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.migrant-rights.org/2010/10/01/fact-checking-the-israeli-governments-incitement-against-migrants-and-refugees/.

Migrant rights are already protected under human rights law. If a nation violates existing international human rights law against a migrant, perhaps with exploitative working conditions, wrongful imprisonment, seizure of property, discrimination, or violence, existing international law already adequately protects them. There is no need to expand human rights law to create a separate category and separate protections for migrants. Even if the international community decided it wanted to better protect the human rights of migrants, an international treaty will not necessarily advance that cause, as international law has proven to be very difficult to enforce. This will continue to be a problem into the foreseeable future.

The right to family is widely recognized as an essential human right. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that the family is the fundamental unit of society. Within the right to family is the right to family reunification for migrants who are separated from their loved ones. The Human Rights Education Associates argue, “states are obliged to facilitate contacts and deal with requests to enter or leave a state party for the purpose of reunification in a humane and expeditious manner.”[1]  This right is especially important for refugees, who have often been torn from their families by force, and although they have not been separated by force economic migrants are also separated from their families and at the very least should be able to visit their families, and it is not granted by many countries.

[1] Asmita Naik, “The Right to Family,” Human Rights Education Associates,” Accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.hrea.org/index.php?doc_id=425.

The proposed right of family reunification is too much of a burden on receiving countries, making it an obstacle to a migrant rights treaty. Indeed, states have levelled as an argument against the Migrant Workers Convention, and against other possible international migrant treaties, concerns about a robust right of family reunification to all migrant workers present in migrant-receiving countries. This could offer family members a right to migrate into the state in question, resulting in large increases in population size. And, there is no doubt that the text of the Migrant Workers Convention aims to create a "right" to family reunification. Even if it provides flexibility on how a nation attempts to facilitate reunification, it still requires that states reunite families in some way. Under this treaty, therefore, any migrant could sue the state for not allowing his family (and perhaps extended family) to immigrate as well. In overpopulated and strained migrant-receiving countries, particularly in Western Europe, such a proposition is untenable, which is why so many migrant-receiving nations oppose the treaty.

With an international regulatory body, states would be held accountable for protecting migrant rights, and migrant policies and protections would be better coordinated. The international community has created a number of regulatory bodies that have helped the global economy adapt to rising globalization, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Migration is an essential part of globalization, but there is no international body regulating the flow of workers around the world. Jason Deparle of the New York Times writes, “The most personal and perilous form of movement is the most unregulated. States make (and often ignore) their own rules, deciding who can come, how long they stay, and what rights they enjoy."[1] Because migrant rights are a growing problem and an essential part of globalization, an international regulatory body would be an effective way of improving human rights around the world.

[1] Deparle, "Global Migration.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/weekinreview/27deparle.html

The receiving countries would not accept a regulatory body. The current international regulatory bodies such as the WTO and World Bank are essentially run by the rich countries for the benefit of the rich countries and so they accept it. Any body regulating migrants’ rights would, however, be doing the opposite--  benefiting the poorest -- meaning the rich countries would try to prevent the creation of such an organisation.

In the unlikely event that the regulatory body could be created it would face a gargantuan task. How could global migration be monitored and regulated by an international body when even national bodies in rich countries are not able to keep track of all migrants in their nations? Yet the international body would also have to monitor the conditions of migrants in many much poorer countries where the infrastructure currently does not exist.

Economic protections are not only good for the migrants themselves, but they benefit all countries involved. Migrants move from countries that have a lot of workers but not a lot work available, to countries with a lot of work available, but not enough workers. Migration is a market mechanism, and it is perhaps the most important aspect of globalization.

The growth of the world’s great economies has relied throughout history on the innovation and invention of immigrants. This is particularly the case in the United States, which is famously a nation of immigrants, where the architect of the Apollo program Wernher von Braun immigrated from Germany and Alexander Graham Bell the inventor of the telephone was born in Scotland. More recently immigration has been instrumental in the success of Silicon Valley co-founder of Google Sergey Brin is Russian born while the co-founder of Yahoo Jerry Yang came from Taiwan.[1] The new perspective brought by migrants leads to new breakthroughs, which are some of the most important benefits to receiving countries from migration. The exploitation of migrant workers that exists in the status quo creates tensions and prejudices that hamper this essential creative ability of migrants in the workplace.

Source countries are equally aided by migration. Able workers who would be unemployed in their home land are able to work in a new country, and then send money—“remittances”—back to their families. Migrants sent home $317 billion in remittances in 2009, which is three times the world’s total foreign aid, and in at least seven countries this money accounted for more than a quarter of the gross domestic product.[2] One of the important goals of migrant rights is to protect these remittances, and thus to protect the economies of source countries that require them to survive.

Irene Khan shows that migrant protections are important for everybody involved:  "When business exploits irregular migrants, it distorts the economy, creates social tensions, feeds racial prejudice and impedes prospects for regular migration. Protecting the rights of migrant workers -- regular and irregular -- makes good economic and political sense for all countries -- whether source, destination or transit."[3] Both sides are likely to benefit more if migrants are welcomed and allowed to join the formal economy; they will be better able to work, they will pay taxes and national insurance to the host country and they themselves will be more secure so will be able to send more home. This benefit to the source state could be even greater if the benefits from paying national insurance were made portable and continue to be paid when they return.

[1] Marcus Wohlson, ‘Immigration chief seeks to reassure Silicon Valley’, USA Today, 22 February 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-02-22/silicon-valley-tech-immigration/53211162/1

[2] Human Rights Watch, "Saudi Arabia/GCC States: Ratify Migrant Rights Treaty," April 10th, 2003, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2003/04/10/saudi-arabiagcc-states-ratify-migrant-rights-treaty.

[3] Irene Khan, "Invisible people, irregular migrants," The Daily Star, June 7th, 2010, http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=141601.

Migration puts too heavy a burden on receiving countries, and it essentially means giving up on source countries. It is not a mechanism of the market, but rather an unfair system of taking money from taxpayers in certain countries and giving it to people other countries, this money is then sent abroad and spend abroad resulting in a net loss to the economy. Not all migration is bad, but legislation that would protect the right of immigrants to send money home would solidify this unfair system. Remittances are a short-term fix. If migrants are not allowed to send home remittances, it is possible that the most skilled workers would stay in their home country and work to rebuild the economy for the long-term.

The supposed intangible benefit to receiving countries of “innovation and invention” is much less important than the real cost that these countries feel as a result from the unemployment and increased cost of health, education, and welfare systems that migrants cause.

Migrants face a number of challenges when they reach their destination, such as finding housing and in integrating into the workforce, and the opportunities to exploit them can be dangerous. According to Dr Tasneem Siddiqui, "In 1929, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) identified the migrant workers as the most vulnerable group in the world. Seventy years have elapsed since then, but they still belong to that group."[1]

This is something that the U.N. Convention attempts to address creating specific changes in many countries that would make migrants less vulnerable. For example, in all of the Gulf States, migrants are prohibited or at least restricted from “participation in independent trade union activities.”[2] Protecting the right to unionize, as the U.N. Convention does with Article 40(1), allows migrants to fight for their own rights in the workplace, allowing migrants to fight and ensure their own rights is the best way to ensure that they will be protected in the long-term.

Migrants have the same fundamental rights as any other segment of the population as recognised by all states when they signed the universal declaration of human rights. Yet while migrants often initially migrate due to the dream of a better life they often find themselves in terrible living conditions, even in developed countries like Britain they often end up in what are essentially shanty towns, in London for example even if they manage to stay off the streets many new immigrants are housed in sheds and garages.[3] All governments should recognise their responsibility to ensure the minimum rights of migrants when it comes to shelter, education, and health are protected.

[1] Daily Star, “Ratify UN convention on migrant workers’ rights,” May 3, 2009, http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=86583.

[2] Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia/GCC States.”

[3] Rogers, Chris, ‘The illegal immigrants desperate to escape squalor of Britain’, BBC News, 28 February 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17183171

In most democratic, developed countries—which are those that receive the most immigrants—people share equal rights in the workplace, as long as they immigrated legally. People who broke the law to come to the country do not deserve these rights. Because they usually come to work, the workplace is even the ideal place to discover illegal immigrants. Not only are they not allowed to unionize, but they are not allowed to get paid. Workplace rights do not need to be strengthened for legal migrants, and they should not be for illegal migrants. Similarly it is impossible for the conditions for illegal migrants to be improved; if they are found they will be deported and so there is no need to improve their conditions, although of course they should be well treated while in the process of deportation. Moreover improving minimum conditions would be counterproductive as they would attract more migrants to immigrate illegally knowing that they will get minimum living conditions that may well be considerably better than those that they had in their home country. 

International law, like the U.N. Migrant Rights Convention, and any international regulatory body that requires the nations of the world to increase protections for migrants would be a violation of state sovereignty. Not all international law is necessarily bad, but these protections go too far, because they force a huge burden on certain nations, and not others. It is fair for an international body to say that all nations should treat their citizens with equality and respect, but it is not fair to say that certain countries should have to provide for many citizens from less-well-off ones.

There is plenty of international law on the books, and it is legitimate when it protects rights that ought to be universal for the individual, no matter what country you are in. The right to have a family is not a Chilean right, or a German right, or a Malaysian right; it is a human right. As is the right to work without being harassed. The huge increase in migration over the past two decades shows that individual well-being has developed into a more important concern in the world today than state sovereignty. Migrant protections are moral because they reflect this change.

Every state has different issues and problems related to migration. There is no monolithic economic and social crisis facing migrants around the globe. It is inappropriate, therefore, to call for all nations to improve their protections in some standard manner. Instead, immigration policy and even rights need to be approached on a case-by-case, nation-by-nation basis.

This approach would allow each state to pass a law that fits its needs, particularly those of protecting its national identity, which is a concern international law cannot approach. Maintaining an original ethnic and cultural structure is important to many states, especially those that are populated by one ethnic group. Is Israel, for example, wrong to term itself a "Jewish state"? There is nothing inherently wrong with its efforts to maintain this identity, even if that effort constrains the expansion of migrant rights.

While every state may have different issues and problems, the human rights of individuals must be protected by all of them. States may choose to protect their national identity and tradition through museums and festivals and other cultural institutions; it is not necessary that they keep migrants out, or suppress those who have already immigrated. 

Because immigrants are frequently less well off financially, and they sometimes come to a new country illegally, they cost a lot for receiving countries, and so they should not be further protected. Immigrants make heavy use of social welfare, and often overload public education systems, while frequently not pulling their weight in taxes. Illegal immigrants alone have already cost the United States “billions of taxpayer-funded dollars for medical services. Dozens of hospitals in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, have been forced to close” because they are required by law to provide free emergency room services to illegal immigrants. In addition, half a billion dollars each year are spent to keep illegal immigrant criminals in American prisons.[1] The money spent to build and maintain schools for immigrant children, and to teach them, takes away from the education of current schools, existing students, and taxpayers. This is unfair. Increasing social and economic protections and rights for migrants means increasing migration and increasing benefits that migrants receive from societies. This could be a burden that a state's welfare system is not capable of handling.

[1] Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform, "Economic costs of legal and illegal immigration," accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.cairco.org/econ/econ.html.

The receiving countries to which most migrants move are the richest countries in the world so are able to afford increased protection. While migrants may sometimes cost these countries money in services like healthcare they are in countries that can afford to pay this cost. It should also not be assumed that migrants just take from the public purse. As most migrants are legal they also pay taxes. Even those who are illegal will still pay some taxes such as VAT or duties on cigarettes and alcohol. The UK government estimates that “in 1999/2000, first generation migrants in the UK contributed £31.2 billion in taxes and consumed £28.8 billion in benefits and public services – a net fiscal contribution of £2.5 billion”.[1] This will obviously vary from country to country but stories that immigrants are costing huge amounts and putting nothing into the collective pot are plain wrong.

[1] Home Office, The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration, A Cross-Departmental Submission to the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, October 2007, p.8, http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm72/7237/7237.pdf

Increasing protections of migrant rights has the general effect of increasing migration. Indeed, one policy goal of many migrant rights activists is for open borders and free and unrestricted migration across them. A right to family reunification would also increase migration. This can be problematic in many countries. It may worsen overpopulation problems, increase tensions between ethnic and/or religious groups, and raise unemployment rates. The economies of many receiving countries are barely managing to fight unemployment in the status quo. If migrants receive further protection, they will take more jobs, making it harder for citizens to find employment. Everybody should have the opportunity to work in his home country, but the economic protection of migrants overcrowds receiving countries, driving up unemployment. In America, for example, between 40 and 50 percent of wage-loss among low-skilled workers is caused by immigration, and around 1,880,000 American workers lose their jobs every year because of immigration.[1] In addition to unemployment problems, overcrowding can have a variety of negative consequences affecting air pollution, traffic, sanitation, and quality of life. So, why are migrants deserving of "protection"? It should be the other way around: the national workers of a state deserve protection from migrant workers and the jobs they are taking.

[1] Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform, “Economic Costs.” http://www.cairco.org/econ/econ.html.

The effect of migration on unemployment is actually positive: it provides cheap labor for receiving countries, and lowers the supply of labor in source countries where employers can often not afford to pay sufficient wages to their workers. The claim that immigrants take jobs away from native citizens is unfounded. In the United States, for example, visa applications for skilled foreign workers are extremely difficult to receive and are limited to a small number of people. Foreign students at U.S. universities even need special authorization to work a summer job. Immigrants cannot undercut U.S. workers wages, taking their job away for less money, because foreign workers must be paid a minimum salary, mandated by law.[1] Even illegal immigrants who do not follow these regulations tend to take very-low-paying jobs that are unwanted by U.S. citizens and that would not otherwise exist.

[1] Farhad Sethna, “Immigrants Don’t Take Away U.S. Jobs!” Immigration Law Blog, July 9, 2009, accessed June 30, 2011, http://blog.immigration-america.com/archives/131. 

The countries from which workers emigrate often struggle from failing economies, and through migration they can lose their most skilled workers, who are needed at home to turn their economy around. Strengthened protections of migrants would further incentivize migration, and so brain drain would become more of a problem. India for example has seen more than 300,000 people migrate to the United States and more than 75% of these migrants had a tertiary education[1] meaning the vast majority of these migrants were among the most educated from a country where only 7% of the population is able to goes to university.[2]

[1] Carrington, William J., and Detragiache, Enrica, ‘How Extensive is the Brain Drain?’, Finance and Development, Volume 36, No. 2, June 1999, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/1999/06/carringt.htm

[2] ‘When More Is Worse’, Newsweek, 8 August 2008, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/08/09/when-more-is-worse.html

 Those who are being ‘drained’ from the source countries are those who are more highly skilled and so in less need of protections in the first place as these people are leaving to find much more highly skilled and therefore highly paid jobs. The ‘brain drain’ may not be a drain at all, either on the source countries or the receiving country. In fact the ‘brain drain’ might be better considered as a ‘brain gain’. This is because the lure of migration means that individuals are much more likely to increase their education or learn skills with the intention of migrating. This decision to increase their human capital is a decision that would not have been made if the possibility of migration was not present. Of course in the short term much of this gain will migrate abroad as intended some will not and others will return home later. The result is therefore that both the source country and the receiving country have more highly skilled workforces.[1]

[1] Stark, Oded, ‘The New Economics of the Brain Drain’, World Economics, Vol 6, No. 2, April – June 2005, pp.137-140, p.137/8, http://ostark.uni-klu.ac.at/publications/2005/THE%20NEW%20ECONOMICS%20OF%20THE%20BRAIN%20DRAIN%20World%20Economics%20Vol.%206%20No.%202%20April-June%202005_neu.pdf