Immigrants

Trying to stop illegal immigration is a multibillion-dollar undertaking involving armed patrols, fences, helicopters, video surveillance and gun-toting civilian vigilantes. Journalist and economist Philippe Legrain finds that blockade effort inhumane and economically misguided. In this scrupulously researched treatise, he makes the case that immigrants are seldom job-stealing, wage-suppressing, welfare-scrounging invaders. Instead, studies reveal that less-fettered immigration boosts host nations’ employment and wages. Pointing to such successful immigrants as Google’s Sergey Brin and novelist Junot Díaz, Legrain argues that foreigners’ fresh perspectives stimulate a society’s creativity and innovation. His argument is clear and passionate. Legrain mixes a truckload of statistics with interviews with individual immigrants who relate their harrowing and heartening stories. The drawback is that the book dates from 2006 (it was shortlisted for the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award), so it doesn’t address crucial current events such as the 2015 refugee crisis. While always politically neutral, getAbstract suggests Legrain’s eye-opening, contrarian view to policy makers, employers, NGOs, students and all citizens.