That’s the headline given to a piece that Glen Weyl and I wrote for TNR. Migration is probably the greatest force for improving the well-being of the very poor, and hence for reducing global inequality. However, migration is extremely unpopular. Native workers fear labor competition, and everyone dislikes foreigners, with their strange ways, and fear that if foreigners settle and become citizens, they will vote their customs into law. (Europeans once assumed that their Muslim immigrants would adopt European attitudes toward women’s rights, personal freedom, and the like, but now fear and dislike them because they have not.)

The Gulf countries have cut this Gordian knot by allowing massive migration while granting migrants few rights and no political freedoms. It is obvious that these two polices are connected. The question is what we should think about them. (We in the US benefit from a similar system, albeit a de facto rather than de jure system, and much smaller on a per capita basis, with our 10 million+ illegal immigrants. By contrast 95 percent of Qatar’s population are migrant workers.)

The overwhelming view among elites, NGOs, and commentators is that the Gulf model is odious. The Gulf states should offer all their migrants the full panoply of human rights (and their citizens as well, presumably). But that’s not going to happen. And it seems likely, based on a comparison of us and them, that the rejection of migrants and the denial of rights are linked. And so the question is unavoidable: who (on a per capita basis) do more for the poorest people in the world: the authoritarian Gulf states with generous migration and no rights, or the democratic, human rights-loving but migrant-excluding West?