Large numbers of migrant populations going out of a particular area or nation should be viewed in large part as a signal of something. There are reasons for people to pick up and move, and policy and governing bodies would do well to examine these reasons.
When business close facilities and open elsewhere, it is usually because the destination location has a better economic and business-friendly environment. So the natural course of action when examining this phenomena is to ask what is it about the place that these businesses are leaving that makes it inhospitable? Michigan’s single-business tax is a great example of a contributing factor on a statewide scale.
Similar analytical methods should be applied to the question of individual or personal immigration. There is a reason that so many residents of the country of Mexico want to leave: there is better opportunity for flourishing in the United States. In particular, the primary motivation for many immigrants is economic opportunity, but the yearning for other sorts of freedoms (religious, political) can be the motivation for immigration as well.
In an article on NRO today, “The Economics of Immigration,” Larry Kudlow makes this same point regarding economic opportunity. He writes, “As long as the American boom beckons, Mexicans in search of prosperity will continue to stream to this country.” The movement of people from Mexico to the United States says a lot about immigrants’ opinions regarding the comparative advantage of living in the US.
A long term answer to immigration reform must include the economic reform of Mexico. Mass immigration out of a country is a symptom of poor economic conditions in the originating nation (other freedoms being equal).
Kudlow writes, “Instead of an Asian or Irish Tiger, Mexico has become a poodle-like Chihuahua, with economic growth of less than 2 percent a year and per-capita growth at less than 1 percent. That’s pathetic. In an age when free-market reforms are sweeping emerging economies worldwide, Mexico should be growing at 8 to 10 percent each year.”
If immigration is a symptom of economic disease, the cure is development, prosperity, and stability in Mexico. And on that score, investment in the manufacturing sector in Mexico, as in the case of outsourcing, is a good thing.