Enhancing the international mobility of workers is arguably the most powerful engine for global prosperity and income redistribution. Yet we in the development community seem to have turned our back on this concept, focusing instead on a defensive strategy that is proving disastrous. The costs of this omission are unbearable and it’s time for reform.

When it comes to human displacement, most development organisations are better at explaining what they do not like than what they do. Three years into the most important crisis of forced displacement on European soil since the second world war, the bulk of our work has been aimed at either calling attention to human rights violations, or guaranteeing humanitarian assistance to refugees. Both areas are essential. But they are also insufficient. Try to find ambitious systemic alternatives, however, and NGOs and development agencies are nowhere to be seen.

In part, their attitude is the same as other players – a protectionist and paternalistic position best summarised as: “Let’s help them not to move.” It is harder to explain the collaboration of public and private development organisations with the EU’s effort to externalise border control. Multimillion development programmes are being implemented in destitute regions of Africa and elsewhere with the intention of creating economic alternatives so that people stay where they are.

There is another way to harness migration for development, one that would allow increasing numbers of poor people to seek security and prosperity under a more flexible, predictable and safe regime. The gains of reform are hard to estimate, not least because the real-life precedents of (more) open borders are scarce. But a few pieces of work allow us to glimpse the potential that may lay along this route.

A fascinating experiment in which a group of 14 Haitians were granted temporary visas to work in the agricultural sector of the US was documented by Michael Clemens and Hannah Postel, at the Center for Global Development. The programme was designed as part of the American government’s response to Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, and its results were surprising in a number of ways. Firstly, households with a worker within the initiative were able to double their annual income in just one month or two. Secondly, more than 85% of the workers’ earnings were brought home, benefiting hard-hit families in Haiti. And thirdly, in one month each of the migrant workers generated $4,000 (£3,100) for the US economy, and $3,000 (£2,300) for the Haitian economy.

The multiple ways in which migration flows have a positive impact on the prosperity of both sending and destination countries have been extensively documented in the last decades. Their scale is far above other development strategies that get more attention from donors, academics and practitioners. An estimation by the World Bank in 2006 suggested that a modest increase in the number of migrants in OECD countries (equivalent to a 3% of the total labour force) could generate over $350bn (£270bn) in global gains by 2025. More recent reports from a diversity of institutions, such as the OECD and the international consulting firm McKinsey, have confirmed this argument and taken it forward.

We can only imagine what could happen if instead of the 14 individuals from Haiti, the US would allow 14,000 workers to join a similar kind of development-oriented temporary migration programme. Or 140,000.

The storm of frogs brought upon us by conservative populism is awakening improbable partners

Or, even better: what if donor countries in Europe, North America and Oceania complemented aid commitments with a new 0.7% target in the form of an equivalent percentage increase in the number of legal temporary migrants from poor origin communities? Take the existing total number of migrants as a reference (around 244 million worldwide), and that would mean some 1.7 million workers per year who could be distributed across developed regions according to agreed objective criteria (size of population in destination countries, for instance). Considering that in any year between 2010 and 2013, three countries (US, Germany and UK) received at least that many people between them, the idea doesn’t seem inconceivable.

The development gains could potentially be unprecedented. One of the key messages of the OECD and World Bank studies is that increased migration levels do not come at the expense of jobs and salaries in destination economies. As a matter of fact, the reverse is often true: according to McKinsey’s report, “40–80% of labour force growth in top destinations between 2000 and 2014 was contributed by migrants”. Short-term negative effects are real for certain groups (pdf) such as low-qualified native workers. But these can be neutralised by active social and fiscal policies that cushion the effects on low-income families and redistribute monumental gains in the benefit of the broader interest. When governments fails to do so – as Spain did during the past decade – countries are bound for a conflict among the vulnerable.

These are the facts. But we are sucked into a largely emotional debate that is proving to be impermeable to facts. Is it gullible to campaign for more open borders when the likes of Trump, Orbán and May are wielding political power?

Quite the contrary. The storm of frogs brought upon us by conservative populism is awakening improbable partners that used to be comfortable with the status quo. Cities, business, academics and activists, liberals and agnostics alike, are joining forces across the planet to fight for facts, justice and intelligence. They have understood that there is no space for neutrality and that the only way to avoid moving backwards is to move forward decisively. That implies a profound reconsideration of the norms, policies and institutions that have governed international workers’ mobility up until now. It could be the start of a struggle that resembles other multi-generational achievements such as women’s suffrage or civil rights.

Sadly, the development community is still not part of this vanguard. This should change as soon as possible.

Gonzalo Fanjul is the co-founder of porCausa Foundation and a research associate at the Overseas Development Institute.

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