Mirko Bagaric: Free movement of people is the way to global prosperity

Free people movement, not the free movement of goods, is the way to achieve the World Trade Organisation's principal objective of improving the welfare of the peoples of the 149 member countries. The Doha Round of trade talks predictably stalled on the thorny issue of abolishing protection of agricultural products, which prevents African farmers selling their products to the west. Talks will recommence shortly and are due to finish on April 30.

It is time for some clear thinking and straight talking when it comes to evaluating the goals of the debating club that has become the WTO. People matter, goods don't. A pair of sneakers or bunch of bananas are indifferent to whether they are located in Africa or the United States. Goods are only valuable to the extent that they enhance human flourishing.

Rather than indirectly trying to enhance net global flourishing by eliminating protectionism on local goods, we should directly pursue this aim by freeing up the flow of people so that they can travel to where the goods are located.

It is only once this occurs that we will effectively deal with the dispiriting irony of 30,000 Africans dying daily from hunger and poverty, while much of the First World gorges itself to ill-health. The ongoing starvation crisis has nothing to do with a food shortage. The problem is simply one of distribution. There is enough grain produced on earth to make every person fat.

The rhetoric of free trade has done nothing to cure the ills of the largely starving Third World. The number of chronically hungry people has hardly changed since the 800 million or so recorded approximately a decade ago. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair was correct when he noted several days after the tsunami that there is a tsunami-scale tragedy in Africa every week.

The WTO ideal of free trade has little prospect of improving the plight of the Third World. All deals struck as part of this pact are on the basis of negotiation, not principle. As with any negotiation, self-interest prevails and the stronger party nearly always comes up trumps. Thus, it is not surprising that as a result of subsidies European cows earn $2 a day, while people in sub-Saharan Africa subsist on less than $1 a day.

The best way to ameliorate Third World poverty is by massively increasing migration to the West. Left to their own devices many people would gravitate to life-sustaining resources, leading to a rough equilibrium between the world's resources and its population.

That's not to suggest that Africa would empty overnight into the Western World. Some of its citizens are too destitute to hobble to a more plentiful border. Some will not want to come. But huge numbers will follow the yellow brick road to prosperity in the West.

There is one fundamental obstacle to Western nations relaxing border controls: racism. Discrimination on the basis of race is the linchpin of the whole of Western migration policy. Nationhood and the practice of excluding others from our shores is so embedded in our psyche that many will find it jarring to contemplate that this practice is morally objectionable. No doubt our forefathers would also have found disconcerting the suggestion that precluding aboriginals from voting and taking their children from them was founded on a racist ideology.

While most of the Western world has made remarkable strides by eliminating most forms of discrimination and ensuring most people enjoy something approaching adequate (if not equal) access to the nation's resources, there is a fundamental failing with this enlightenment: the benefits are limited to people within the borders of the nation.

For most of human history there have been few migration limits. Now we are moving to an age of anti-migration. In 1976 only some 7 per cent of UN members had restrictive immigration policies. This rose to 40 per cent in the early part of the 21st century. Advanced (Western) economies are at the forefront of this regrettable trend.

We must accept that restrictive immigration policies are racist unless there is a morally relevant basis for tightly limiting the number of people we permit to join our privileged society.

A relevant reason cannot be a person's birth place. This is merely a happy or unhappy accident. Much of what is important to a person's flourishing should not turn on so little. Morality requires that to the maximum extent possible, luck is taken out of the benefits and burdens equation.

National security is commonly used to justify a tight migration policy. While we have a legitimate right to security, this only justifies a policy of strict security checks. This is tacitly accepted by governments. Western nations accept a far greater number of tourists than migrants. In 2004 Australia had approximately 4.8 million tourists and only approximately 130,000 new migrants. Tourists have ample opportunity to commit crime. Rarely do they use this opportunity.

We are relaxed about tourists because we derive positive economic advantage from them. But this gain is not a moral justification for consigning much of the world to a life of destitution, merely a Western expedient. It has been claimed that too many foreigners would diminish our material prosperity. Research is equivocal about this. Some models suggest the opposite: immigrants have a positive effect on the economy.

In any event, a slight diminution in the living standard of Western countries is a small price to pay to reduce global destitution. To determine whether a more relaxed approach to migration is justifiable, one cannot look at the situation only from the perspective of the locals. There is no ethical basis for ranking the interests of one person higher than another.

Arguments that open migration would lead to cultural dilution are unsound. What for one person represents cultural dilution, for another amounts to cultural enrichment. There is no objective point of reference from which these positions can be set off. They are by definition culturally relevant. Morality on the other hand consists of universal principles, which apply to all people equally.

This vision represents a vastly different world. People ought to be able to travel and settle in any country of their choice so long as they do not present a security threat and the nation has the resources to sustain them.

Is this likely to happen in the foreseeable future? No. Patriotism and materialism are such powerful forces that no amount of moral persuasion is likely to significantly reverse existing Western migration policies. We must at least start seriously debating the notion of the free movement of people.

Close our mind to this debate and we are forced to confront the racist within us. The quest for universal economic prosperity will have been halted by invisible lines on the earth's surface called borders we have built up to the size of near insurmountable mountains. This will ensure we will continue to live in a world where economic reform based on a desire to improve net global flourishing continues to be a sham, except of course for European cows.

* Professor Mirko Bagaric is head of Deakin Law School, Melbourne, and author of Principles of International Commercial Law (Oxford University Press, 2006).