More On The Importance Of Entrepreneurship

See Urban Magnets, a book review from yesterday's WSJ by MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. The book is about what happens when immigrants arrive in new cites. Excerpt:

"Property rights is another essential ingredient. The violent squatter communities on the outskirts of Istanbul were revolutionized in the 1980s by the late Turkish president Turgut Özal, who introduced a law that gave squatters formal ownership of their makeshift houses and title deeds to the land under them. Almost literally overnight, millions of Turkish citizens became property owners with a stake in the economy.

Ozal recognized that this new private property would be used as seed capital, Mr. Saunders notes, allowing poor peasants to start small businesses, build up savings and earn rental incomes. In giving squatters property rights, Ozal both created the beginnings of a new Turkish middle class and defused the political threat of the rootless people who populate the country's arrival cities. In contrast, the banlieus of France and the Turkish ghettoes of Germany are often pathways to failure, where migrants can't fully participate in their new countries as citizens and are prevented by local laws from forming businesses."