Migration, Aid and Trade

In November 2005, Glenys Kinnock, Co-President of the ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, reported that “there are more nurses from Malawi in Manchester than in Malawi and more doctors from Ethiopia in Chicago than Ethiopia.”1 These Africans had been lured North by work permits targeted at health-care workers, in short supply in the United Kingdom and the United States. On the face of it, this is reasonable policy making: the African health care workers in Manchester and Chicago clearly prefer their new situation to the one they left, and the general public in Manchester and Chicago benefit from the increase in the availability of health-care services. At the same time, however,...