Immigration: The Best Aid Program

'As a tool for spreading wealth, open borders make foreign aid look like a child's lemonade stand," writes Robert Guest, business editor of the Economist, in "Borderless Economics," a rapid-fire case for the free movement of labor from one country to another. Central to his case is a 2005 study by Lant Pritchett, a former economist at the World Bank, titled "Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility." Mr. Pritchett found that if developed countries slightly liberalized their immigration laws and increased their work forces by a mere 3%, the gains in remittances and other benefits to developing countries would amount to more than $300 billion.