Migration Without Borders : The Ethics, Economics and Governance of Free Movement

The paper is organised in three sections. Section 1 examines the ethical case for and against free movement as defined above. In this section, we demonstrate that the level of analysis and the interdependence between actors at different levels are crucial issues that must be tackled by the ethical debate on free movement. Taking into account the consequences of strategic interaction between actors at the individual, national and global levels, we demonstrate that an ethical case against free movement cannot be made. Then, in section 2, we examine the impacts of international migration on national income, the labour market and fiscal balances of receiving countries. The theoretical and empirical findings suggests that international migration would have positive but small impacts on output, combined with some distributional effects that are in favour of capital but against the low-skilled section of the labour market. We conclude this section by arguing that the distributional effects can be tackled through compensation for the adversely-affected sections of the host country labour force, which can withstand the erosion of their wages only by investment in skill enhancement. Finally, in section 3, we propose a governance structure similar to that we observe in the area of trade. A World Migration Organisation (WMO), just like the WTO, must be based on three principles: multilateralism, non-discrimination, and reciprocity. The conclusion highlights the main findings and discusses the feasibility of free movement as a policy option in the current political climate