Migration: Global development's biggest good news story ... almost
Migration is big news — it makes headlines when UK Prime Minister David Cameron proposes to limit immigrants’ access to tax credits, and it leads the bulletins when boats loaded with migrants and refugees drown in the Mediterranean.
But there is something missing from the public discourse: the lives of migrants themselves. We’re pretty good at talking about what we as a country get out of immigration: depending on your position, migrants are either viewed as engines of entrepreneurship, growth and diversity or the source of economic decline and cultural decay.
On International Migrants Day (Dec. 18), it’s worth pointing out that we are far less good at putting a face to the numbers. Each movement across an international border is underwritten by a human story, whether it’s the family fleeing the horror of a civil war or the young worker bitterly frustrated by the lack of opportunities at home.
The fact that this perspective is usually absent from the debate in turn obscures a simple yet powerful idea: that international migration is one of the most effective ways of reducing global poverty. To put it into perspective, more than $400 billion of remittances were sent back by international migrants in 2012; compare this to the $135 billion spent by OECD donors on foreign aid in 2013.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/18/migration-globaldevelopmentasbiggestgoodnewsstoryaalmost.html
