Nottingham connected
Community
15
Migration: The oldest and still best tool
in the anti-poverty arsenal
- By Timothy Ogden
The case for migration as an effective tool to
combat poverty is more than 100,000 years
old – and has yet to be contradicted. Migration
is what early human hunter-gatherers did to
survive. Migration took them from Africa into the
rest of the world. Migration led them to the river
valleys of Mesopotamia and South Asia. Further
migration to these fertile valleys generated
societies. It is not overstating the case to say
that migration created civilization. And when
early civilizations collapsed under pressure from
war, disease or famine, it was migration to other
societies that kept knowledge from being lost
and allowed development to continue.
The history of humankind is a history of migration.
Being removed from that history by large spans of time
makes it easy for us to think of this history as large,
coordinated movements of people. But it is better
understood as the stories of individuals and families
making decisions to move to find a better life.
The dramatic declines in absolute poverty in the last
50 years are primarily the result of families migrating
from rural areas to cities, in China especially but
also elsewhere. Among economists, rural-to-urban
migration is known as the foundation of development:
people can be much more productive in urban
environments than in rural ones. More productive
people means more wealth and less poverty for
everyone. It is true that the conditions for the poor in
many developing world cities are abysmal. But they
were also abysmal in New York, London and Paris
when those cities absorbed hundreds of thousands of
migrants from rural areas seeking a better life. It was
the migrants’ increased productivity that created the
wealth to improve those cities. Healthy, livable cities
don’t emerge despite migrants but because of them.
The wealth generated by migrants to cities also created
the fortunes of the owners of the businesses that
employed them: Rockefeller, Ford, Wellcome, Nobel,
Bosch. In other words, the history of foundations is
a history of migrants. And the future of institutional
philanthropy is built on migrants as well: the wealth of
Ambani and Mittal (owners of factories driven by urban
workers), Ibrahim (cellular networks require dense
populations to begin), Kamprad (dense housing) and
Zuckerberg (dense population of tech talent) is all built
on migration.
Despite this, philanthropy has largely ignored – or
even worked against – people migrating to escape
poverty. It is far more common to find philanthropic
programmes aiming to prevent families from leaving
their rural farms and migrating to cities than it is to find
programmes that enable them to do so. Institutional
philanthropy has, unfortunately, not looked to the
history of humanity’s escape from poverty for lessons
on how to enable more to escape it.
Migration is the most successful anti-poverty strategy
for families in every era and every region of the world.
If we accept that, a world of possibilities for battling
poverty opens up. And yet, for some reason, the idea
of allowing people to escape from poverty by moving,
particularly if that means moving across national
borders, seems to make us afraid.
It is true that migration has sometimes destroyed
nations and cultures. But the cases where it has
happened have something in common: they are
migrations where relatively wealthy people invaded
the territory of poorer ones (see colonialism). I can
find no examples of migrants from poor countries
harming the long-term wellbeing of richer countries
since the fall of Rome – even though every wave of
global migration from poorer countries to richer ones
has been forecast to do so.
Institutional philanthropy around the world needs
to acknowledge the central role that migration plays
in reducing poverty (and creating philanthropic
wealth). Migration is the greatest tool in the anti-
poverty arsenal. It’s time for philanthropy to put that
tool to use.
Timothy Ogden is the managing director of the
Financial Access Initiative at NYU-Wagner and a
contributing editor to Alliance Magazine and can be
contacted by email on [email protected].