Tanzanian albino body parts.  They are supposed to bring good luck.  Unfortunately they are killing and mutilating the albinos to get them.

Here is my NYT column on globalization, excerpt:

Despite all these gains, the prevailing intellectual tendency these
days is to apologize for free trade. A common claim is that trade
liberalization should proceed only if it is accompanied by new policies
to retrain displaced workers or otherwise ameliorate the consequences
of economic volatility.

Yes, the benefits of a good safety net
are well established, but globalization is not the primary source of
trouble for most American workers. Health care problems, bad schools
for our children or, in recent times, bad banking practices have all
produced greater disruptions – and these have been fundamentally
domestic failings.

What’s really happening is that many people,
whether in the United States or abroad, are unduly suspicious about
economic relations with foreigners. These complaints stem from basic
human nature – namely, our tendency to divide people into “in groups”
and “out groups” and to elevate one and to demonize the other.
Americans fear that foreigners will rise at their expense or “control”
some aspects of the economy.

One approach is to appease these
sentiments by backing away from trade just a bit, or by managing it, so
as to limit the backlash. Giving up momentum, however, isn’t
necessarily the right way forward. If we are too apologetic about
globalization, we can feed core irrationalities, instead of taming
them. The risk is that we will frame trade as a fundamental source of
suffering and losses, which would make voters more nervous, not less.

Do read the whole thing.  A few further points of note:

1. Virtually all of the "second best worrying" about trade could be applied also — in fact more so — to technical progress.  Or to trade across the fifty states.  Yet when it comes to foreigners, the worries acquire a more dangerous credibility.  That is the real second best problem, not any theorem you might derive about trade and externalities.

2. I don’t see the evidence that marginal strengthenings of the safety net will diminish anti-foreign statements.  Yet this has become an article of faith among the globalization "middle roaders."  A crude look at the cross-sectional evidence does not indicate a clear pattern.  France and Germany have a strong safety net but they are skeptical about economic globalization; Sweden and the Netherlands are more sympathetic.  Switzerland, with a weaker safety net, is pro-globalization for the most part.  Like Will Wilkinson and unlike Bryan Caplan, I am for a safety net but often a bigger safety net makes people even more fearful of loss and change.  Note it is the Bismarckian welfare state, the world’s most advanced at the time, which turned to The Dark Side during the 1930s.  I’m hardly suggesting causality here but it didn’t halt the process either.

3. Yes I know about Denmark but job retraining programs in the U.S. hardly have a stellar record.

4. When it comes to improving the quality of economic adjustment, the overwhelming priority should be to delink health insurance from having a job.  I doubt if that will decrease skepticism about foreigners, however.

5. Most of the world’s wealthy economies are, if only because they are smaller and less diversified in terms of resources, more open than is the United States.  They do just fine and by no means do they all spend more on social welfare than does the United States.

6. Cite Samuelson and Stolper all you want, here is yet another paper showing that outsourcing has not been placing significant downward pressure on American wages.

7. China is now the world’s leading supplier of photovoltaic cells. 

But it is really the first point that is the key.

Addendum: Brad DeLong comments extensively.

In the long run we are all the Grateful Dead.

That’s Paul Krugman summarizing the economics of digital information.  Damn, I wish I had written that.

Will Wilkinson has the scoop.  NotSneaky writes:

Bottom line is that most of the so called “gains from remittances” are
straight up gains from IMMIGRATION. Or in other words, they are gains
from the fact that some person from a poor household in a poor county
has managed to make their way to a rich country and now has a richer
income. Strictly speaking the gain from remittances is just the gain
from INTER-HOUSEHOLD reallocation of income between the migrant and
those who stay behind, not the overall increase in household income due
to migration.

This is oh so tricky and of course we must refer back to the 1920s debates on the "transfer problem," involving Keynes, Ohlin, and others, so ably surveyed by Jacob Viner’s Studies in the Theory of International Trade.

Let’s say a Mexican in Texas sends pesos in his pocket back home.  His family benefits and he gets the warm glow but for the nation as a whole that’s just inflation and a redistribution of wealth.  How about if he sends dollars back home?  Well, he converts through pesos, the real Mexican exchange rate appreciates, and Mexican exporters are penalized, to some extent offsetting the family gains.

How different are the two cases?  Ha!  That would make a nice exam question. 

Does it matter if the receiving family plans to spend the money on imports or does that not matter?  Does it matter if the big hotels in Cancun — tourism is Mexico’s largest export sector — are foreign-owned?  The clock is ticking…

Ultimately NotSneaky has the correct intuition that the gains are to be found in the immigration itself, not the subsequent transfer.  Beware double counting.  Here is my previous post on remittances but please note the comments on this post are for remittance talk, not a general discussion of immigration.