1. Absent labor mobility, there’s a tendency towards divergence or at best slow convergence in the world economy, and foreign aid can’t do much about that.

2. Labor mobility (immigration) can raise incomes quickly and dramatically, and has other beneficial side effects such as remittances and the spread of good ideas and institutions.

3. But labor mobility tends to cause slight inconveniences to the poorer native-born strata in rich countries, such as slight erosion of wages, and perhaps, more subtly, an undermining of their moral claim to predation-by-ballot at the expense of more productive strata at home. Immigrants tend to start out a lot poorer, but rise through enterprise and hard work, and in any case to regard their lot as rather a fortunate one, relative to their fellows who were unable to come. This makes it harder for native-born voters to pose as victims and ask for handouts.

When you hear calls for labor mobility to be allowed as a form of development aid, it is as if an appeal is being made to the conscience of the median voter in (say) the US. But if the median voter in the US obeyed the dictates of conscience we wouldn’t have immigration restrictions in the first place. Is there another way? Perhaps a World Migration Organization (WMO) which would try to influence the evolution of global property rights in such a way that firms headquartered in migration-restrictionist countries would be subject to confiscation of their assets abroad? Make Border Patrol agents subject to arrest if they set foot outside the United States?

I used to work on Haiti and have been there many times. I wrote up some thoughts, focusing on the question of what would happen if the U.S. allowed a temporary influx of Haitians. My one original point: the 1980 Mariel boatlift is a reasonably analogue. See my post here:
http://whirledcitizen.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/hello-world/

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100114/national/haiti_earthquake_cda_immigration