The immigration debate that rages in the United States and Western Europe today focuses on the impact of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in their countries of destination. In order better to understand that impact, it’s worth taking a look at where they’re coming from. The majority of Third World countries’ populations suffer from poverty. Of course, for millennia the entire population of the world was desperately poor. Only since the early 1800s have those suffering from such abject impoverishment found it possible to rise out of their formerly permanent condition, and billions have done so. How that came to pass is, however, as Mr. Anzures, my Spanish teacher in Mexico, put it 63 years ago, “flour of another sack.” But the realization that they could improve their condition was both new and powerful. And the very possibility of economic development implanted in the consciousness of those populations plays the fundamental role in today’s immigration crisis. Let’s take a look at some of the core