Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them by Philippe LegrainReview by: Phillip CloeInternational Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 83, No. 6, Africaand Security (Nov., 2007), pp. 1207-1208Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Royal Institute of International AffairsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4541931 .

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Ethnicity and cultural politics

Samuel Bowles considers institutional poverty traps harking back to the days of the British Raj in the Bengal presidency where later the disastrous 1943 famine occurred. The reader becomes inured to a catalogue of seemingly insoluble problems explaining how the poor are so well and truly trapped.

Steven N. Durlauf's chapter urges caution in the conclusion to his contribution: 'Poverty traps are high on the set of pernicious phenomena any just society will wish to guard against. Yet one message of the renaissance of research on income inequality over the last fifteen years is that relatively little is still understood about whether such poverty traps exist and if so, what produces them' (p. 170). He shows how various attempts to help the disadvantaged, especially black, families-in education and housing, for example-obtained only mixed results and to evaluate their ultimate beneficial effect is a statistician's nightmare. Moreover some folk act as though they do not want to be helped the more they obviously need it.

So, as in the UK, social engineering does have its limitations too. Once in the trap, there is no way out. Robert J. Sampson and Jeffrey D. Morenoff examine the despair. Michael E. Sobel essentially argues the same, but in greater detail and with due sophistication.

Surely the basic problem of poverty in the US is colour, as is shown in the Chicago plotted poverty-graphs? Families are often single-parent, earnings accordingly low. But is poverty a trap from which there is no escape as this publication concludes?

Paul Collier's The bottom billion (Oxford University Press, 2007) points out that the 'concept of a development trap' is not new and seeks to show how escape is possible. He details practical ways of how to do so. Stephen C. Smith's Ending global poverty (Palgrave, 2005) speaks for itself. Moreover, apart from private initiatives, such as Oxfam, there is even a whole industry developed in India for producing products which the poor can afford and where the manufacturers can still make a profit. So there may be hope after all. Yet the real tragedy remains: most of those in the poverty trap are women and children.

John A. S. Abecasis-Phillips, Japan

Immigrants: your country needs them. By Philippe Legrain. London: Little, Brown Book Group. 2006. 374PP. Index. £I2.99. ISBN o 316 73248

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Book reviews

suspecting that they are deeply flawed. According to World Bank figures, says Legrain, 'if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell

by a mere 3 per cent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries $143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion' (p. 19). Studies in the I980s suggested that removing immigration controls could more than double the world economy. Research in 2004 suggested that the global gain would be even greater.

When it comes to global poverty, Legrain argues that nothing will come close to the positive impact of free migration (p. 329). Wealth is redistributed through remittances sent by migrant workers, and according to official estimates around $ I6 billion is sent every year. If we add informal movement of money, the total could be $480 billion, six times official government aid to the poor world.

The one area where Legrain acknowledges there may be cause for legitimate concern is the emigration of the highly skilled and educated workers from the poor world to the rich, especially that of healthcare workers, which is causing a crisis in many developing countries' health systems. Here, Legrain argues that while emigration is a factor that contributes to the shortage of healthcare workers, it is not the only or most significant one, and the solution is not to restrain or discourage the movement of those workers, but for both the rich nations and the poor nations to directly address the under-investment in their healthcare systems, including pay and conditions.

Legrain's ideal is complete freedom of movement, but he is prepared to be patient. It should be made easier for workers to move temporarily, and governments should stop trying to select and control the skilled workers they think their economy needs. In the first place, unskilled migrants are an important element of the success story free migration offers, and the current emphasis on skilled migration by European and other governments is simply a mistake. In the second place, governments cannot know which workers an economy needs at any particular time (p. iii). Only market forces can decide.

On that note, I am reminded that I should disapprove of this book. But, instead, I admire it and welcome it. As Legrain declares, "'Let Them In" is a cry that should unite the free-market right, who oppose the dead hand of government controls on domestic labour markets, and the internationalist left, who believe that solidarity for our fellow-human beings should not stop at the border' (p. 330).

Phillip Cole, Middlesex Unviersity, UK

Energy and environment

Keeping the lights on: towards sustainable electricity. By Walt Patterson. London: Chatham House and Earthscan. 2007. 2o8pp. Index. $36.95. ISBN I 84407 456 3.

Patterson has written a very civilized book inviting the reader to revisit the idea of distributed electricity generation. It is in a non-adversarial style, using an argument totally accessible to the general reader. It is something like the introductory chapter of a guidebook to a new country: not perhaps enoughjust on its own to persuade you to live there but enough to persuade you that you may have totally misjudged the place. Like any good guidebook, it offers many routes to deeper reading.

The thesis is simple. Policy, not markets, now define electricity prices. Policy for at least the last 40 years has been formulated in a conceptual framework which misunderstands the physical uniqueness of electricity. The consequence is that policy has incentivized large central generation systems, at the expense of small locally distributed generation. This in turn has reduced the incentives to be efficient in end use and maintain supply security. It is time to rethink from fundamentals.

An amusing introduction describes how the idea of 'energy' came into being but still lets off Thomas Young who coined the term from everyday speech to mean the thing apparently conserved in Joule's mechanical equivalent of heat experiments. As the text observes it is a little odd to say 'we must conserve energy' in common speech if energy is now defined to be conserved anyway! If Young had picked another word maybe the confusion would never have set in. For Patterson, the next wrong

12o8 International Affairs 83: 6, 2007

© 2007 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International

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