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Labor

Help Workers by Breaking Down Barriers to Labor Mobility

Labor Day is a great time to remember that we can make workers vastly better off by empowering more of them to vote with their feet, both within countries and through international migration.

Ilya Somin | 9.7.2026 10:10 AM

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Each Labor Day since  2021, I have written posts explaining how breaking down barriers to labor mobility can help many millions of workers around the world. The main points everything  last year's post are just as relevant today. So I am reprinting it with some updates and modifications, many of them related to the awful deterioration in immigration policy over the last year:

Today is Labor Day. As usual, there is much discussion of what can be done to help workers. But few focus on the one type of reform that is likely to help more poor and disadvantaged workers than virtually anything else: increasing labor mobility. In the United States and around the world, far too many workers are trapped in places where it is difficult or impossible for them to ever escape poverty. They could vastly improve their lot if allowed to "vote with their feet" by moving to locations where there are better job opportunities. That would also be an enormous boon to the rest of society.

Internationally, the biggest barriers condemning millions to lives of poverty and oppression are immigration restrictions. Economists estimate that eliminating legal barriers to migration throughout the world would roughly double world GDP - in other words, making the world twice as productive as it is now. A person who has the misfortune of being born in Cuba or Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, is likely condemned to lifelong poverty, no matter how talented or hardworking he or she may be. If they are allowed to move to a freer society with better economic institutions, they can almost immediately double or triple their income and productivity. And that doesn't consider the possibility of improving job skills, which is also likely to be more feasible in their new home than in their country of origin.

The vast new wealth created by breaking down migration barriers would obviously benefit migrants themselves. But it also creates enormous advantages for........

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