President William Ruto says change aims to boost trade and allow goods, services, people and ideas to move freely across continent
President William Ruto says change aims to boost trade and allow goods, services, people and ideas to move freely across continent
That’s not a problem of the open borders though. That’s an issue with the countries themselves.
The newly elected post-communist democratic Polish legislature could not reasonably be accused of running their country into the ground. Yet brain drain following the fall of the Iron Curtain was (and is) a real problem because it harms the country in a very real way. Eastern Europe is still paying for decades of autocratic communist rule, and looser border restrictions are certainly one contributing factor to the brain drain that continues to harm Eastern European countries (which leads to continued brain drain, which leads to a worse performing economy… you get the gist). There’s a reason the USSR forbid essentially all migration from East to West across the Iron Curtain.
From an individual perspective moving to a richer country makes sense, I’d do the same, but from a macroeconomic perspective this traps less developed nations in a vicious circle of brain drain leading to less economic development leading to brain drain (and more develpped nations in a vicious circle of de-industrialization).
I do not claim that this means that we should close down borders, as I still value individual freedoms quite highly and am generally pro-EU, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the very concrete downsides of those policies as well.
I see where you’re coming from and I don’t disagree. I just have a hard time telling people where they can and can’t go. I have no idea how we’d deal with both ends of this issue
Governments and big companies create strong incentives for the types of workers the country needs.
The problem can be solved by billionaires spending their money, just like every other problem in the world.
If that’s what we’re waiting for then we’re gonna be here for a long time…
Except that the flow from poor countries to rich ones isn’t constant.
In the USA, internal migrations have gone to relatively poor states for various reasons, including better economic opportunity. It wouldn’t be hard to see that shift occurring in a less developed EU nation.
We’d probably need a degree in economics to model this, but intuitively I’d think it’s both a matter of relative difference in wealth being much smaller between Cali & Louisiana than between Germany&Romania, as well as the absolute living conditions being much better in Louisiana than Romania.
There’s poor, and there’s poor. Nowhere in the US or Western Europe is even remotely poor like post-communist Romania was poor. That changes the game a lot when deciding where to live and work.
Let’s compare GDP per capita. These are just basic numbers I pulled from Google.
Bay Area/New Orleans = $89,978 (2017) / $52,535 (2017) = 1.71
Frankfurt/Bucharest = $55,200 (2020) / $39,200 (2020) = 1.41
So the San Francisco Bay Area has a higher income disparity compared to Greater New Orleans than Frankfurt has to Bucharest. Maybe there is an absolute number that people target, but the relative difference is much worse in the USA.
Lmao Frankfurt is not to Germany what the Bay area is to Cali. The Bay Area is so ridiculously overpriced it tops the worldwide charts.
Comparing at a country/state level, Louisiana-Cali is a 1.5x difference while Romania-Germany is a 2.7x difference in nominal GDP per capita… and it was way worse right after the fall of communism. Like, “oh shit oh fuck why are there so many orphanages and so many homeless orphans” kind of worse.