Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people's morale, but the momentum. It is happier to live in a poor country that is moving forward - where expectations are high - than it is to live in an affluent country that is looking back.anybody who has been to a developing country* knows that this is absolutely positively false. i have been to several poor countries, all were very different from one another. but the only thing that all of them had in common was most people i met wanted to get out.
in 2001 i visited mali. mali always gets high marks in freedom house's annual rankings. and although it is among one of the poorest countries in the world, it had a healthy 5% growth between 1996 and 2002. but 5% of almost nothing is still almost nothing. the people i met there didn't give a shit about whether their country had "momentum" they wanted a comfortable lifestyle for themselves and their families. virtually everyone i met there asked me to help them get out. some of them still write to me, almost four years later, begging for help. indeed, my very first real post on this site was about a malian friend who pleaded with me for help getting his sister a visa.
but it's not just mali. just this morning, i got an email--hardly my first--from a friend in uzbekistan asking for help leaving the country. actually, every one of my uzbek friends has, at one point or another, asked for help in leaving. people who's names i never learned would pepper me with questions about the american green card lottery during casual conversations on the street. the other day i mentioned that i met an uzbek while i was at wiscon. she's an american citizen now and told me how she was under tremendous pressure from her family to marry a distant cousin so he could get a green card. ("my girlfriend wouldn't like that" she added with a smile). and yet uzbekistan is another country whose economy is growing.
and there's more. in 1995 i visited kenya and uganda and experienced the same thing. in vietnam women would throw themselves at me because of my passport and the possibility of marriage to someone from the first world. in tunis, mrs. noz and i saw a line people of camping out in front of the french embassy, waiting for the visa office to open. we couldn't even tell how many people were there, the line of people snaked around the block and out of our view.
and yes, they wanted to go to france. as did most malians i spoke to. the uzbeks and ugandans and kenyans would probably be happy with europe as well. they seemed more concerned with getting to the first world than with where exactly in the developed world the ultimate destination would be.
that's just it. one of the main reasons the EU constitutional referenda failed to pass in france and the netherlands this week is because of european concerns about immigration. the reason they are concerned about that is because lots of people want to go to europe.
brooks' overall point is that the european economic model is not attractive because it is economically stagnant. but the votes this week indicate precisely the opposite. the european model is very attractive to people. that's why the french and dutch cast votes this week to preserve it.
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*i'm excluding people who have only been to resorts in the third world. you get a really warped view of a country when you only stay in those things.
