Fighting Poverty with Guest Workers!

Dani Rodrik has a op-ed in NYT;

Each foreign worker in this country earns a multiple of what he would make in his home country — an extra $17,500 per year for the average Mexican worker in the United States, according to unpublished estimates by a Yale economist, Mark Rosenzweig.

Multiply this by 200,000 guest workers per year, and by the end of a decade, an income gain of $35 billion per year would be generated for workers from poor nations.

This exceeds the $23 billion the federal government spent on foreign aid last year. It is also larger than the benefits — amounting at most to $30 billion per year — that poor nations are projected to reap from the current round of multilateral trade negotiations. And unlike foreign aid and trade agreements, the benefits in this case go directly to working people.