In a compelling new piece published in Foreign Affairs, Lant Pritchett makes a convincing argument that the drive to utilize automation to fill labor shortages overlooks a far simpler solution — namely, filling those job openings with migrants.
Choosing devices over people is a mistake, argues Pritchett, Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships, RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Development at the University of Oxford, and a former World Bank economist.
Such a decision “leads the world to miss out on the real economic and humanitarian gains that would come from letting people move to where they are needed instead of trying to invent machines that can supplant humans. The refusal to allow people to cross national borders as economic migrants, especially to engage in jobs that require just core labor skills, massively distorts the trajectory of technological change in ways that make everybody, especially the world’s poor, worse off.”
He points out that the U.S. faces a scarcity of truck drivers. “To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce the demand for drivers,” Pritchett notes.
But there is no global scarcity of people who would like to be long-haul truck drivers in the United States, where the median wage for such work is $23 per hour, the article points out. “In the developing world, truck drivers make around $4 per hour. Yet firms cannot recruit workers from abroad even at the higher wage because of restrictions on immigration, so business leaders in the United States are impelled to choose machines over people and eradicate jobs through the use of technology.”
The fact of national borders “steers businesses toward investing in technology that does not respond to global scarcities—and that no one really needs,” he argues.
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 