Exodus

Exodus is an insightful, expert foray into the explosive issue of immigration, from Paul Collier, award-winning economist and author of The Bottom Billion Mass international migration is a response to extreme global inequality, and immigration has a profound impact on the way we live. Yet our views - and those of our politicians - remain caught between two extremes: popular hostility to migrants, tinged by xenophobia and racism; and the view of business and liberal elites that `open doors` are both economically and ethically imperative. With migration set to accelerate, few issues are so urgently in need of dispassionate analysis - and few are more incendiary. Here, world-renowned economist Paul Collier seeks to defuse this explosive subject. Exodus looks at how people from the world`s poorest societies struggle to migrate to the rich West: the effects on those left behind and on the host societies, and explores the impulses and thinking that inform Western immigration policy. Migration, he concludes, is a fact, and we urgently need to think clearly about its possibilities and challenges: it is not a question of whether migration is good or bad, but how much is best? `Exodus is an important book and one I have been waiting to read for many years ... [it is] a work that is humane and hard-headed about one of the greatest issues of our times` - David Goodhart, Sunday Times `Paul Collier is one of the world`s most thoughtful economists. His books consistently illuminate and provoke. Exodus is no exception` - Economist `Tinged with poignancy ... a humane and sensible voice in a highly toxic debate` - Colin Kidd, Guardian Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and a former director of Development Research at the World Bank. He is the author of, among others, the award-winning The Bottom Billion and The Plundered Planet.