Matthew Yglesias » Evaluating the North American Union

Matthew Yglesias » Evaluating the North American Union:
it’s hard not to notice that Mexican people, in general, seem to wind up doing much better for themselves when they’re able to relocate and live under American or Canadian institutions. So one of the goals of North American political integration would be for Mexico to begin to be governed by more US/Canadian-style institutions, extending the opportunities that are currently provided only through migration. You might also see more reverse migration, as retirement to Mexico could be a compelling opportunity for American or Canadian senior citizens living on fixed incomes.

World Economic Forum - The India Gender Gap Review

World Economic Forum - The India Gender Gap Review: "The India Gender Gap Review has been released on 9 November by the World Economic Forum"

After the Wall

Matthew Yglesias:

The [Berlin] wall was built to bottle up an incipient revolt—a mass emigration that threatened to expose the Soviet system as inferior to the West, as an oppressive dungeon that its most educated young people yearned to escape. The wall not only blocked those yearnings; it also made clear to the brighter young Soviet and Eastern European leaders that the system itself—the ideological basis of their rule—was suspect, that it could not be sustained, much less compete with the West, without the internal imposition of force.

It’s interesting to reflect that it’s very much still the case that millions of people living in Ukraine and Russia and for that matter Mexico and Mozambique would love to engage in mass emigration to the West and expose the systems under which they live as corrupt and uncompetitive. Indeed, according to Gallup 700 million people would like to migrate permanently to a new country:

But of course the voters of the United States and Canada have no intention of letting as many people show up as might like to come, and the voters of Western Europe have even less desire for this, and those of Japan even less.