Johann Norberg poste une exceptionnelle contribution en faveur de l'immigration libre, qui serait un facteur de développement non seulement pour les pays les plus déshérités mais également pour les pays d'accueil. Contrairement aux craintes exprimées par les populations et récupérées par toutes sortes de populistes et extrêmistes, l'immigration libre serait un excellent moyen de réduire le chômage des pays riches. Comment donc ? Place à l'auteur (discours prononcé aux pays bas):
(...) Many would agree that immigration is great for the consumers, who get cheaper gods and services, but what about the workers? Won’t immigrants take our jobs, and the result will be unemployment? This is a common concern and a myth. Think again about the creative destruction that free trade brings about, that I mentioned earlier. When the goods get cheaper because of more efficiency or of immigrant workers, the consumers save money, so that they can use this purchasing power to buy other things, more expensive goods, education, health care, etc. And then people will get jobs in those sectors.
Furthermore, immigrants are not merely producers, they are also consumers, who spend their incomes. Immigrants do not merely supply, they also demand. Who are going to build their houses, grow and sell their food, produce their telephones and TV sets, supply them with health care and their children with education? To see more people as a problem, a burden, a cause of unemployment, is like thinking of more births and more babies as a problem. As long as wages follow how much people can produce, our productivity, there is no reason why it would lead to unemployment.
But so far I have only said that immigration does not affect the unemployment rate in the country they move to. That is not the whole story, there are convincing evidence that more immigrants actually reduce unemployment. That might sounds strange, but it is actually common sense. Many jobs are dependent on the existence of other jobs. You cannot work in an office if there is no janitor, you can’t work as a software engineer if noone produces the hardware, women cannot join the workforce if there is no day care, and I cannot write books if there are no publishers.
In his insightful and provocative book on immigration, Thinking the Unthinkable, Nigel Harris mentions the garment industry in Los Angeles in the 80’s. The industry expanded dramatically and Los Angeles become a magnet for US designers, specialist producers of buttons, zips and threads, and it created jobs for managers, foremen, in packaging, trucking and so on. But none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for the access to people on the ground doing the hard labour intense work in textile manufacturing. And that was done by illegal immigrants from Mexico. Their jobs created other jobs. Their immigration increased the demand for US-born workers in the industry by 50 per cent. One reason for the big unemployment in Europe is that we don’t have the jobs that can create other jobs. That is why business organisations are now lobbying governments to open up the labour markets, so that immigrants can create those jobs. According to the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, about 25 000 positions in Sweden were not filled in just one year, because of our lack of workers. (...)
L'immigration sélective, que la plupart des nations riches tentent de promouvoir, et qui tente de ne recruter que les "bons" étrangers diplômés au détriment des autres, est non seulement moralement inacceptable, elle est aussi économiquement beaucoup moins efficace que l'immigration libre.
This is a paradox. On the one hand, governments are trying to recruit the skilled. On the other hand they are making it increasingly difficult for asylum seekers to enter our countries, with the result that illegal immigrants suffocate in container trucks, and corpses of refugees float ashore on Europe’s southern shores in increasingly desperate attempts to get here. A Swedish newspaper commented this policy with an illustration of a boat from the coast guard. They had spotted several refugees in the dark water, desperately trying to keep afloat. Instead of saving them, the official from the coast guard reach for the megaphone, and ask loudly: “Is anyone of you a software programmer?”
I think this morally disturbing attempt to recruit some and keep the others away, to take the best plums, is going to fail. It is another attempt to centrally control the economy. Governments think they can socially engineer and design the labour market. That’s not how an economy works. The government does not know what kind of workers we are going to need a few years from now, or what kind of potential people have just by looking at their formal skills. And the people with the best incentives to find out, and those who are closest to the information is actually those who are most concerned businesses and immigrants.
Le principal obstacle à l'immigration libre est l'hypertrophie de nos états providence, qui peut conduire certains immigrants à vivre aux dépends des populations établies plutôt que de contribuer au développement de la société.
Quant à la peur d'une invasion d'islamistes prêts à mener une guerre sainte contre nos sociétés, elle n'est guère fondée. Elle serait aisément combattue par une réaffirmation forte de nos valeurs de respect d'autrui, de sa vie, de sa liberté, de sa propriété, et par l'obligation faite à tout immigrant de s'y conformer, ce qui suppose le rejet absolu de toute revendication communautariste contraire à ces valeurs. Et dans un tel cas, les musulmans qui arriveraient sur notre sol seraient en grande majorité des gens pacifiques, aspirant à travailler et à vivre en paix de leur travail, en harmonie avec leurs voisins, et voulant à tout prix fuir la stupidité, la privation de liberté et le sous-développement auxquels leurs régimes plus ou moins théocratiques les condamnent.
C'est un des plus beaux textes libéraux qui m'ait été donné de lire depuis bien longtemps. Merci, M. Norberg.
NB. Texte long, mais vaut vraiment le quart d'heure que vous alllez y consacrer.
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Avec beaucoup moins de talent il est vrai, j'avais en son temps (juin 2002) commis sur un site collaboratif absolument sans censure (où mon point de vue libéral était très minoritaire hélas...) un texte sur "la lamentable pensée unique répressive de nos dirigeants en matière d'immigration clandestine". Ma conversion à l'immigration libre ne date donc pas d'hier. Il est bon de voir des auteurs de la qualité de Norberg faire un tour absolument exhaustif de l'argumentation pour cette cause, sur laquelle les bons écrits ne sont hélas pas si nombreux que cela.
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