Kenya to scrap visas for all African nationals
President William Ruto says change aims to boost trade and allow goods, services, people and ideas to move freely across continent
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/kenya-to-scrap-visas-for-all-african-nationals
It’s not been all great for Eastern Europe. Freedom of movement contributed to the massive brain drain plaguing former communist countries. But IIRC Kenya has a strong regional economy so they’re positioning themselves to be on the “good” end of increased workforce mobility.
Personally I think more freedom is a good thing despite those drawbacks, but also it’s easy for me to say as a Western European.
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).
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.
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.
But what equivalent Germany have to the Bay Area?
And I went with the metro area comparison instead of country/nation due to three reasons. First, if someone in Romania is going to move for a higher paying job, they are likely going to live in a city instead of the countryside. It doesn’t make sense to move from farm to farm unless you are getting the new farmland for free. Second, California has a far larger agricultural sector than the other states/nations, depressing its average. Third, part of Germany was also a communist country, and I don’t have a good way to remove that affect from national data.
So there may be other factors beyond the economy in general driving migrations.
Île-de-France would be a better point of comparison then as the leading sector for service industries. $65,458 (2021), so 1.67x more. However the story this really tells is that Bucharest has an even starker difference in GDP per capita vs the rest of Romania than Paris vs the rest of France (unsurprisingly, the problem of highly underdeveloped rural areas is the same for most former communist countries).
More to the point, in 1990 the GDP/capita was $21866 for France vs $1648 (constant) for Romania. A 13x difference. Which, going back to my point of the brain drain, explains a whole lot better why in the '90s and even ‘00s countries like Romania got fucked hard by emigration of their skilled workforce, or at the very least why you can’t use the United States as proof that brain drain due to economic disparity is not a problem (though OTOH participation in the common market is a partial explanation for these countries’ economies “catching-up” in the post-communist era… it’s a complex topic, I was just trying to highlight a potential drawback).
And I’m highlighting that while a drawback might have existed, it may not be as relevant today. I can see why a Romanian would move to Paris after Romania entered the EU, but the advantage today seems fuzzier.
The areas of large population growth in the USA, mainly driven by internal migration, aren’t the rich cities. Instead, they are cities that offer cheaper quality of life, attracting people who can effectively see their material wealth increase even if they don’t earn as high a wage.
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