Forced Labor in Malaysia's Electronics Industry
If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth.  There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand.<p>Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state.<p>As with any prohibition, the economic opportunity gets colonized by criminals. People seeking a better life will be taken advantage of and some of them will even wind up worse off than they started. But the root problem isn&#x27;t the criminals, and it isn&#x27;t customers who want cheap electronics. It&#x27;s the prohibition of migration.