This book is mostly about how migration from the rest of the world to the West impacts on the countries that receive the migrants. The policy decisions that directly influence this migration are mainly taken in the receiving countries. Hence, they are most strongly influenced by information about the impact of migration on those, and therefore this is also what the book primarily aims to discuss. However, migration may also have important consequences for the— most often poorer— countries that migrants leave. It may offer a potential route to economic development, through the opportunities it provides for the migrants themselves, through the money these remit to their relatives, and perhaps also by helping to create networks and integrate the home countries into the global economy. On the other hand, emigration might also in some cases be an obstacle to development, because talented and educated individuals that poor countries may sorely need for their own development leave them. This chapter discusses these aspects of this migration.

The most obvious and sizeable economic effect of migration from the rest of the world to the West is the income effect it has for the migrants themselves. There exist a few studies of their magnitude. (Notably, we do not learn much about them by simply studying average incomes in sending and receiving countries, because migrants’ and others’ average incomes may be very different in both these places.) In one of these, immigrants who had obtained permanent residence permits in the United States in the summer of 1996 were asked a few months later about their current income and about their income at the last employment they had before migrating. The purchasingpower adjusted annual incomes of these migrants (whereof 70 percent were from Latin America and Asia) were on average around US$10,000 (or 68 percent) higher after comparing with before migration for men and US$6,000 (or 62 percent) higher for women. Again, differences were large across different migrant groups. For men who immigrated on employment visas, the average increase in annual income was US$27,000. At the same time 28 percent of men and 27 percent of women earned less in the United States than what they had done at their last job abroad.