Hi, I’m Mat Johnson – and I’m here to open your mind about human migration. A couple of years ago, I took a job in Denmark, and, as an American citizen, nothing more wonderful could have been easier. My boss told me that Denmark had a temporary work program, where I could just come over on a tourist visa, start working and then in 3 months we could just convert to a longer term work visa if we wanted to. And I was struck by how much educated people from developing countries would just kill for the same type of set up. Even my international friends from college here in the US would kill for this kind of program. But I am one of the lucky ones, if you are from a developing country, it’s just not that easy. How many of you are immigrants yourselves? Ok, so that’s a decent amount. How many of your parents immigrated? How about your Grandparents?
So that’s really a lot of you who have a personal, blood connection, in-your-lifetime to immigration. It turns out that over 50% of Americans are first, second or third generation immigrants. That’s enough Americans to win an election
In fact, we are a world of immigrants. Right now there are about 250 million immigrants in the world – that’s almost as many people as in the entire United States.Now think about just how important the immigration event is in your family history. Probably, it was incredibly important – maybe the single most important event in your life or your family’s history.
Maybe you and your family made it out of an Afghan refugee camp in the 1980’s after your father was killed, got to the United States and now you’re a young lawyer in California at a top-drawer law firm.
Maybe your family had to leave Pakistan in 1947 with literally nothing, but managed to build up your own import/export business in Singapore, send your children to ivy league schools and pay extortionate Singapore prices for cars – where even a Subaru Forester costs $90,000. That’s an enormous change and enormous upward mobility.
Maybe your grandparents came to Israel from Europe in the 1930’s.
In fact – if you had to choose one, just one, image to describe all of human history, it’s hard to think of a better one than this: A world map of the migration of humans. This is as relevant to pre-history as it is today. The only difference is that instead of . . .
A caveman,
. . . Wearing furs, Trudging across an icy land bridge from Asia,
Today, for people like you and I, it’s much more convenient to migrate by airplane. But the core concept remains the same, the history of humans is, as much as anything else, the history of migration.
Every year over 600,000 people immigrate to the top 5 English-speaking countries, USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. That’s like the whole population of San Francisco taking the most important step in their family’s history, putting everything on the line to create a better life for themselves and their children each year.
Immigrants who are well off will pay a lawyer $15,000 to, say, help them buy the right condo in Vancouver to get permanent residency in Canada.
Poorer people will borrow heavily to pay a consultant $5,000 to help them immigrate, sometimes for good advice, sometimes for outright fraud.That’s billions of dollars in fees alone each year, for just immigrants to a handful of countries, to say nothing of all the other costs of getting started in a new country. And I’ve purposefully left out the most dramatic stories of even more desperate people who pay equivalent money to smugglers to lock them in shipping containers headed for the United States, or find them a place on one of the leaky boats crossing from Morocco to Spain, that often sink at sea killing everyone on board. The point is, migration is incredibly expensive, and it’s totally worth it.
Why do people pay so much? Because not only is immigration incredibly important - it is also a really big hassle, and if you get anything wrong, you can be blocked from immigrating for life.I mentioned some pretty dramatic but not uncommon immigrant stories. But why else to people migrate?Lets talk about economics for a minute. This will make you think.
The equation for economic output is pretty simple. Economic output equals capital times labor.
It’s hard to argue that the free-flow of capital around the globe, to new people, new places, and new ideas has been the greatest driver of economic growth in last 100 years.
But it’s still really hard to migrate. The immigration process has enormous friction in it – in fact, almost anyone with personal immigration experience would likely say immigration was broken – so it’s not a stretch to assert that:Reducing friction to immigration is the single biggest economic opportunity in the world.
Economists have calculated that the average person from a developing country who immigrates to a developed country multiplies their income by 4x, and the more educated you are, the greater the multiple.
Just for example, that means that immigration from Mexico to the US increases world income by about $140 billion a year!
So immigration is clearly and quantifiably good for the total size of the economic pie, and there’s no question that is a good thing for immigrants themselves. But what if you are really really selfish? Well, here in America, and in all of the other rich, developed countries, our population is aging. People here are both living longer and retiring earlier – so a greater percentage of the population is moving out of the workforce. And we’re not having enough children to replace all these retiring workers. So, where can we get more smart, motivated, educated workers? Well, they are all over the rest of the world, and would love to migrate and help out.
And what’s more, a ton of really smart, accomplished foreign students are already here studying in universities throughout the developed world – and a lot of them would love to stay after they graduate and build on the careers and social networks that they’ve begun at university. But it can be really difficult to stay after graduating. And if it’s too difficult, people will take their skills and energy home to the detriment of our developed countries.
Let me pause for just a minute and recap. Migration is biggest factor in allowing people to make better lives. Migration has enormous economic benefits on both a personal level and a world societal level. Tons of people want to migrate and are already paying exorbitant amounts of money to do so. So if we want to change the world for the better – lets think about how we can make migration easier.
So how can we reduce friction to immigration? What might be a disruptive force in immigration? I mean, of course: Where is the Internet in all of this?
Well, there are definitely a number of ancillary Internet services that have really helped immigrants out, like Skype or Paypal or Facebook.
But for pure-play immigration, “the Internet” hasn’t really happened to immigration yet. For immigration, the Internet looks little bit more like this. It looks like “the Internet” is about to happen, the disruption is about to happen to immigration. Today looks like 1996 on the Internet as a whole.
Where is the LinkedIn of immigration, where consultants and lawyers can find new profiles of energetic and accomplished immigrants who need expert advice?Where is the Yelp of immigration that helps immigrants avoid scams, bad advice and predatory behavior?Where is the Turbotax of immigration that helps immigrants complete all of the complicated forms and applications without making any costly errors?
I want to leave you with this call to action:Lets all get together and disrupt immigration and unlock the greatest economic and social justice opportunity in the world.I’m @matjohnson – and thank you!
