Around the world, in many countries, a third or more of the population has no formal employment and survives through some form of informal activity. Here, by contrast, we often hear that, because of low birth rates, we are running short of workers.

This seems to suggest that there is a need to move unemployed people—or jobs—from one country to another.

We should bear in mind that most of the countries that are developed today did not achieve that development through their own efforts and resources alone. In the case of the Basque Country, companies, entrepreneurs and technologists from England, France, Germany, Belgium and Italy also played an important role during the 19th and 20th centuries. For many Basque companies, including numerous cooperatives, licences for foreign technologies and external know-how were essential to their creation and development.

Those foreign companies, investors and technologists, of course, came to make money, not to help us. But along the way, in addition to creating companies and jobs, they played a key role in developing industrial capabilities and an entire economic ecosystem.

So the initial question can also be asked in a different way: what would we prefer? For Mercedes and Volkswagen to have plants in the Basque Country that sustain thousands of direct jobs and an entire industrial ecosystem, or for thousands of Basque people to have the opportunity to emigrate to Germany?

In both cases, thousands of people would have jobs, here or there. But in the first case, those people would work in their own country and contribute to its economic, industrial and technological development. In the second, workers would have to leave their families, friends and homeland behind, while their country would not benefit from that boost to its economic development.

Shouldn’t we want the same thing for Pakistanis, Moroccans and Colombians that we want for ourselves? Perhaps, if we want a fairer world, rather than asking how to move people to where the jobs are, the more important question is how to ensure that all people and all communities have the opportunity to develop.

Beñat Arzadun_Mundukide