In the EA movement, there's a lot of enthusiasm for significantly increasing the number of immigrants able to come to countries like the United States each year. This would help the global poor in two ways: it would directly help immigrants who come to rich countries but wouldn't have been able to without the policy changes, and it would help family members of those immigrants who remain in the home country but receive remittances.
But lately, I've been thinking a lot about other policy changes on the part of rich countries that could greatly benefit poor countries, ones that don't get discussed as much in the EA movement. Some ideas:
Increasing government aid to poor countries: This is kind of obvious, and I suspect many people dismiss it on the grounds that most voters wouldn't support it. But the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief under George W. Bush suggests that efforts in this area may be more feasible than commonly assumed.
Debt cancellation/creating a global bankruptcy process: It might be tempting to assume that it would be easier to get money for, say, programs to combat disease than it would be to get money for outright cancellation of the debts of poor countries. On the other hand, the fact that many poor countries have debts that were originally contracted by corrupt dictators creates a moral case for debt cancellation that many find compelling.
There's also the argument that creating a formal system for countries to go bankrupt would be an important reform, because well-designed financial systems need a bankruptcy process. This is especially true when we're talking about government debts of countries that borrow in foreign currencies, who can't simply reduce their debt burden thought inflation (something the United States could do if it really had to). The idea of creating an international government bankruptcy process has advocates from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to Pope Francis.
Abolishing rich-country agricultural subsidies: Like tight restrictions on immigration, there's a strong economic case to be made that agricultural subsidies don't actually help rich countries. But they do potentially do great harm to farmers in poor countries. I'm not very confident about how large the harm is–I've heard claims that agricultural subsidies cost farmers in developing countries
$24 billion per year, though I haven't tried to check that particular number.
Of course, any of these policy changes would be more difficult to get implemented than simply donating a little more to AMF or GiveDirectly, so the potential benefits would have to be weighed against the difficulty of bringing about these policy changes. Still, they look worth investigating. I've only started looking into them myself, which is why I'm creating this thread, so that if anyone has anything to add to what I've said, or has other ideas for things that could be high-impact, they can post their ideas here.
There's a difference between "labor mobility" reform, and "open borders". I don't know how often these two are conflated by effective altruists. Open borders is the idea a nation removes all restrictions for people from any country to exit and enter the country to live and work there. A reaction is citizens of a country worry this will flood the citizenship or immigration systems, will put strains on government welfare systems, and dramatically change the nature of the countries culture. I haven't read too much on open borders yet, but I blieve a counter to this worry is open borders doesn't ensure legal citizenship or other entitlements or political rights, such as the right to vote, are granted to any migrants moving in for work and a better economic life. Some advocates of open borders claim changing the nature of the granting citizenship in a given country also be changed to assuage these worries, while implementing open borders at the same time would realize most of the economic benefits of the policy.
Labor mobility reform is immigration reform which makes it easier for professionals and/or laborers to move between countries, particularly from developing countries to developed countries. I think the greatest example of this is easing the way for the most educated professionals from developing countries to move to and be engineers or doctors in, e.g., the United States. The Open Philanthropy Project (Open Phil) is still investigating labor mobility as a possible space to make grants for policy reform to. The result of their investigation hasn't come out yet, and while they may conclude it's intractable, there investigation yet complete or published. I've never read the phrase "open borders" or a euphemism for it in any blog posts or conversation notes from Givewell or Open Phil. Thus, we cannot and should not assume "labor mobility" implies "open borders" when talking about Open Phil.
Not that you, Jonathan, Topher, or anyone else in this discussion does that. I'm just making the point to repeat help us all out when having this conversation with others more broadly. I'm surprised Dr. MacAskill made a blanket statement labor mobility is intractable, considering labor mobility is a broad tent which could imply relatively modest reforms to only a single law restricting the ease by which a certain type of professional can emigrate to work in a country, to very broad reforms applying to any sort of laborer in general.
I haven't read Doing Good Better yet. What more did Dr. MacAskill expound upon labor mobility?
MacAskil discusses this in a section titled "international labor mobility" but does not mention "open borders" or draw the distinction you have. He writes:
"Increased levels of migration from poor to rich countries would provide substantial benefits for the poorest people in the world, as well as substantial increases in global economic output. However, almost all developed countries pose heavy restrictions on who can enter the country to work. ... Tractability: Not very tractable. Increased levels of immigration are incredibly unpopular in developed countries, with the majority of people in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom favoring reduced immigration."