Book Review: Paul Collier (2013), Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century

While denouncing the ‘toxic context of high emotion and little knowledge’ surrounding the area of migration policy, Paul Collier urges his audience, including policy-makers, migration scholars and experts, to learn the real effects about migration as a social fact, rather than being led by value-based judgements. The long list of his publications culminates with his most recent book in a new research field, marking for the first time the territory of migration scholars and policy-makers. Exodus. Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century is an extension of his previous work, The Bottom Billion, the title of which refers to the number of people ‘trapped’ in extremely poor countries, the poorest in those countries and in the world. The bottom billion of the world’s poorest people are not the migrants we see among us in Western societies, because the poverty afflicting these poorest people is so extreme as to decouple their hopes of better lives ‘abroad’ from realistic opportunities to actually flee elsewhere. Collier, however, emphasises that the emigration of those poor who do make it to better societies, usually referring to Europe and the USA, has a number of effects on the poorest left behind; it is indeed of primary moral as well as social and economic concern whether these effects are good or bad. It is this empirical observation which triggers Collier’s engagement in his latest book, which presents a wider analysis of the social phenomenon of international migration from poor, underdeveloped and developing countries to Western affluent democracies. The question of whether migration is good or bad is not the right question to ask, he argues. We need to ask to what extent migration is ideal and how fast the international movement of people should be taking place. When it comes to the issue of international migration, he argues, immigration policies set by host states ought to weigh the interests, in terms of the social and economic costs and benefits to the indigenous population primarily, against the interests of migrants and those left behind as well.