There are many reasons to read James Fallows’ Atlantic article on what happens when your email is hacked (and anyyone who uses gmail should definitely read it) but buried within it is this snippet on the
Emphasis added. Clearly, helping put an end to email scams is not the only or even anything like the best argument for international labour mobility but it’s a reminder that exclusionary immigration policies come at a price too. This is, for sure, a modest point but not a wholly trivial one. (Of course, there’d be costs to alternative measures too. But that’s a different matter and, given the temper of the times, an academic one too.)In “The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment,” this past May in TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy portrayed a number of the hackers she had met in Lagos. In other circumstances, she said, the best of them might have been like Sergey Brin or Max Levchin, the immigrants who co-founded Google and PayPal, respectively. They were that clever and technically gifted. Or, more modestly, they could have been like the engineers and managers I’ve met over the years at Google, Microsoft, Intel, and other companies, at least half of whom were born and raised overseas. But these hacking entrepreneurs couldn’t get out of Nigeria, and so they dealt with the outside world via “Mugged in Madrid” messages. Shreyas Doshi, a Google senior project manager, said that the company had run analyses to see how much money the scams might produce. “With a variety of assumptions, we believe they could easily make about $500 a day, if not more,” he said; that many people fall for these scams.
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