The Efficient, Egalitarian, Libertarian, Utilitarian Way to Double World GDP — Bryan Caplan
March 9, 2012 Leave a Comment
This website is dedicated to making the case for open borders. The term “open borders” is used to describe a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances. Read more of this post
May 16, 2013 4 Comments
Post by John Roccia (see all posts by John Roccia)
I’m a pro-natalist. I’m in favor of people being born. Be careful when you think to yourself, “that’s a silly thing to be specifically in favor of; isn’t everyone?” Because I assure you, not everyone is. There are plenty of Malthusians out there, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. There are people who believe in eugenics; people who think the world would honestly be better if we revoked reproduction privileges from those with low IQ’s, criminal histories, certain racial or ethnic backgrounds, genetic defects, etc. And if the idea of forcibly spaying and neutering everyone with a wheelchair, a below-average IQ, the wrong skin color, or any other factor appalls you – then breathe a sigh of relief: You have a conscience.
Sadly however, this belief is not universal. I’m not sure it’s even a majority belief (I hope it is, but the cynic in me says that if you really asked all seven billion people, most would come up with a certain class of people that they’d rather not see more of). But there is a specific category of person, with a specific category of belief that I want to address here. That is: People who do not believe that we should limit births based on any factor, but who are restrictionists when it comes to immigration policy.
In a way, birth is a form of immigration. Someone is moving from the generic “somewhere else” to the here and now. The place you occupy and call your home is getting a new occupant. But obviously there are many differences between a newborn in America and an immigrant in America, for example (by no means do I intend to say that these concerns are limited to America – I use that country solely as an example). The newborn is going to use vastly more social resources. The newborn is statistically more likely to be a criminal. The newborn is less likely to join the labor force, and infinitely less likely to do so within the next ten years. On the other hand, most newborns immediately have a private support network (albeit one that will rely heavily on public services).
Newborns have lots of other differences from immigrants, of course – they look like natives, they sound like natives, and they’ll probably share native cultural beliefs and social norms. These are all reasons that other natives will like them more, but they’re not reasons why they would be more beneficial to the country than immigrants, so we’re going to ignore those for now.
Other than the instinctual reasons for liking a newborn more than an immigrant, is the only real benefit that a newborn offers over an immigrant as a choice for “new addition to the country’s population” that they have a private support network of mostly self-sufficient people (at least, as self-sufficient as anyone gets in a modern first-world country)? If that’s the case, it seems like the immigration issue is pretty easy to solve. If the one and only criteria that potential immigrants needed to meet before coming in was to find a voluntary supporter, it seems like we’d have plenty of immigration!
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s pretend that current citizens of America can invite immigrants in using only the same criteria by which they can have children. Any two people could invite an immigrant in – and the same two people could invite in as many immigrants as they wanted. They would not have to be able to support those immigrants, though socially speaking there would be pressure to do so. If you decided two years later that you didn’t like your immigrant, you couldn’t send him or her back, any more than you can “send back” a baby; though you could in theory put yours up for adoption. Since immigrants can generally take care of themselves, this seems like less of an issue for immigrants than it does for children, so that’s an extra point in favor of immigrants. You could be irresponsible and invite too many immigrants in the same way that you can be irresponsible and have too many children; but since immigrants can work and are far less dependent on their caregivers than children are, it seems like this is far less of an issue – score another point for the immigrant.
You don’t need to submit to a background check to have a child, so you wouldn’t need one to invite in an immigrant. The child obviously doesn’t have a background to check, while the immigrant might – but given the respective crime rates, it seems like it would make more sense to check potential parental backgrounds to weed out potential criminals than to do the same with immigrant backgrounds. Since we don’t do the former, it’s hard to make a moral case for the latter.
Of course, children can’t vote for at least 18 years, so immigrants wouldn’t be able to, either – fair enough (and as a keyhole solution, this has already been suggested).
For those whose restrictionist attitude stems from the fear that immigrants might eventually “take over” the country due to sheer numbers – well remember, that’s guaranteed with children. If immigrants were brought into this country by a parental figure, the same as children, you’d have the same opportunity to influence them. It might even make people of competing political or cultural outlooks compete to have MORE immigrants, for the same reason you want to have more kids in that circumstance: If you think your culture is so great, you want to pass on that culture to the next generation in larger numbers than the “other people” – whoever they are in your eyes.
So there you have it. Regardless of what opinions you hold about birth and immigration respectively, there’s very little non-instinctual reason to restrict immigration more than birth, relatively.
Of course, there are those that don’t believe births should be restricted along any categorical lines, but do believe that overall restriction in terms of sheer quantity should happen. Again, I’m a pro-natalist, so I don’t share this view. But even if you do hold that view, that view isn’t analogous to the view most people have about immigration. Most people who you’re likely to meet on the street have one of two opinions on immigration: Either we should restrict it even more than we do now (even to the point of zero), or we should be increasing “high-skill” immigration while decreasing other kinds. But statistically speaking, only a tiny fraction of American newborns will grow up to be the kind of people the “high-skill” immigration proponents want. What’s the native birth rate of engineers compared to the total native birth rate?
But let’s say you actually hold comparable quantity-restriction views on both birth and immigration. You don’t believe in restricting either by category, but you do believe in strict quantity limits on both. There are a number of problems with this view. First – what’s the optimal number? A quota of any kind means that something other than spontaneous order is determining the number of births and/or immigrants, and that’s therefore pretty much guaranteed to be the wrong number. Then of course are all the administrative difficulties – how do you parcel out the set number, given that the desired number will be higher? Who gets to come and who doesn’t? There’s almost no way to do a quantity restriction without also imposing a categorical one, except for some sort of “first come, first served” method that is very unlikely to be satisfactory. We need only to look to China to see some of the negative effects of a quantity restriction on birth; like any prohibition of something nearly universally desired, the unintended consequences are severe.
Restrictions on immigration based on quantity have all the same problems as restrictions on birth rates based on quantity, and immigration restrictions based on category appear significantly less moral than birth restrictions based on the same. Considering that we don’t restrict births in any way in America, it would seem difficult to build a moral or utilitarian case to restrict immigration.
May 16, 2013 Leave a Comment
Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)
The article below, by me, was published this morning at the Daily GOOD: http://www.good.is/posts/why-erasing-all-the-world-s-borders-would-double-gdp.
Economists have estimated that opening the world’s borders to migration could double world GDP. To get the gist of that number, imagine that your boss walked into your office tomorrow and said, “we’re doubling your salary”—and the same thing happened to everyone else, too.
May 15, 2013 Leave a Comment
Post by Chris Hendrix (see all posts by Chris Hendrix)
The rise of modern communications technology has drastically changed the way humans interact with each other. Physical distance matters less than ever. You my dear reader may be seeing this post of mine from 10 minutes away from my apartment or from 12,000 miles away. Indeed the difference in time which you might theoretically be able to first read this is insignificant between those two locations. Compared to times when it took six months to traverse the silk road from Europe to China that is absurd. And this technology is not limited by borders (with some important exceptions, though just like real borders people find ways to sneak around that). Looking at the author list for this site even it’s possible to find people from across the globe writing about open borders. Technology might be beating us to the punch on open borders (for a similar argument that poverty might end before we open the borders see Vipul’s earlier post). So if this is all true does this mean there’s no point to open borders advocacy? Has technology already won the battle for us?
Sadly this post doesn’t end with me cracking open a bottle of champagne and celebrating victory (or maybe just a beer, champagne isn’t really my thing…anyways…). Read more of this post
May 14, 2013 Leave a Comment
Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)
When I wrote Principles of a Free Society, I believe that I very dimly had in mind Hans-Hermann Hoppe as an intellectual adversary, but for some reason– some stray remarks at the Cato Institute which I over-interpreted, I think– I had the impression that Hoppe was so disreputable that it would be a kind of sin to mention him or read him. Thinking it over now, that’s hardly fair! My views on the Iraq War would, I suppose, make me at least as heretical from a Cato Institute perspective as Hans-Hermann Hoppe for his views on immigration (and homosexuality, but that’s not relevant here). Hoppe seems, like me, to aspire to a thoroughgoing rationalism, and to like Lockean homesteading as an origin for property rights. We have enough in common to provide the basis for an argument. Moreover, what I realize now is that even before I wrote Principles, I had heard a rumor about Hoppe’s argument for migration restrictions, guessed the nature of the argument from that rumor, and wrote Principles, among other things, to refute it. But since my argument against Hoppe is spread out throughout Principles and does not explicitly mention Hoppe, it seems worthwhile to bring Hoppe’s argument and my refutation together in one place. This is my contribution to the debate summarized at our anarcho-capitalist counter-factual page.
First, Hoppe’s argument, from “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem.” Hoppe starts by suggesting, without really arguing for it, that:
People of one ethno-culture tend to live in close proximity to one another and spatially separated and distant from people of another ethno-culture. Whites live among Whites and separate from Asians and Blacks. Italian speakers live among other Italians and separate from English speakers. Christians live among other Christians and separate from Muslims. Catholics live among Catholics and separate from Protestants, etc.
Well, no, they don’t tend to, really, except when the government compels them to. Segregation occurs often in history, but so does integration. And anyway, given that the suggested groupings of people overlap greatly– there are white, Asian, and black Christians; there are white Christians and Muslims and atheists; there are people who speak both Italian and English– the proposed regime of spatial segregation doesn’t seem to make sense (unless the segregation is very fine indeed, e.g., “only Italian-speaking white Catholics in this neighborhood”… but that’s hardly typical). But Hoppe’s next move is what makes his argument distinctive:
Let us take one more step and assume that all property is owned privately and the entire globe is settled. Every piece of land, every house and building, every road, river, and lake, every forest and mountain, and all of the coastline is owned by private owners or firms. No such thing as “public” property or “open frontier” exists. Let us take a look at the problem of migration under this scenario of a “natural order.”
First and foremost, in a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property. Essentially, a person can move only if he is invited by a recipient property owner, and this recipient-owner can revoke his invitation and expel his invitees whenever he deems their continued presence on his property undesirable (in violation of his visitation code).
Given this assumption, the rest of the argument is rather predictable, at least to me. Still, we may as well follow Hoppe a little further. First:
In a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property.
Second, on roads and other transportation:
There will be plenty of movement under this scenario because there are powerful reasons to open access to one’s property, but there are also reasons to restrict or close access. Those who are the most inclusive are the owners of roads, railway stations, harbors, and airports, for example. Interregional movement is their business. Accordingly, their admission standards can be expected to be low, typically requiring no more than the payment of a user fee. However, even they would not follow a completely non-discriminatory admission policy. For instance, they would exclude intoxicated or unruly people and eject all trespassers, beggars, and bums from their property, and they might videotape or otherwise monitor or screen their customers while on their property.
To this we will return. Finally, it is in residential property where Hoppe expects to see the highest degree of segregation:
It is in the residential housing and real estate market where discrimination against and exclusion of ethno-cultural strangers will tend to be most pronounced. For it is in the area of residential as contrasted to commercial property where the human desire to be private, secluded, protected, and undisturbed from external events and intrusions is most pronounced. The value of residential property to its owner depends essentially on its almost total exclusivity. Only family members and occasionally friends are included. And if residential property is located in a neighborhood, this desire for undisturbed possession—peace and privacy—is best accomplished by a high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity (as this lowers transaction costs while simultaneously increasing protection from external disturbances and intrusions). By renting or selling residential property to strangers (and especially to strangers from ethno-culturally distant quarters), heterogeneity is introduced into the neighborhood. Transaction costs tend to increase, and the peculiar peace-and-privacy-security—the freedom from external, foreign intrusions—sought and expected of residential property tends to fall, resulting in lower residential property values.
Many very interesting things to note here. First of all, Hoppe’s scheme must create a strong bias in favor of the right to invite. Second, Hoppe’s scheme justifies not only immigration restrictions but also domestic residential segregation of the kind that existed in the US before the 1960s. I suppose one must give Hoppe credit here both for consistency and for political incorrectness. Hoppe does not presuppose the moral relevance of countries and assume a right to free migration within but not across national boundaries. He explicitly envisions a society of ethno-culturally homogeneous neighborhoods, based on a generalized preference that he seems to regard as an indelible human propensity to stick with one’s own kind. Though Hoppe is much too complacent about this, Robert Putnam’s work probably demands that this view be taken more seriously than political correctness might admit. Hoppe goes on to introduce the state, and argue that the lack of freedom of migration that, he supposes, would prevail in a “natural order” should cross-apply to a society ruled by a state. Even then, the right to invite persists:
If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited).
It’s not clear to me that VDARE restrictionists are right to claim Hoppe as an ally within the libertarian camp. After all, an unlimited right to invite might not look much different from open borders– many US natives would quickly learn to sell their rights to sponsor immigrants to the highest bidder– and limiting the right to invite violates Hoppe’s principles. But I’m not not too interested in how to apply Hoppe’s argument at this stage, because my dissenting argument branches off at the stage in the argument where Hoppe defines the “natural order.” Read more of this post
May 14, 2013 1 Comment
Post by John Lee (see all posts by John Lee)
I just picked up my copy of the latest edition of The Economist, which had plenty to say about the recent elections in Malaysia (see this story, for instance). I’ve been asked to comment on this from an open borders standpoint — specifically, on how being a Malaysian living overseas has affected my ability to contribute to the political life of my nation. A common concern raised about open borders is that permitting migration more broadly might delay political reform in dysfunctional countries. I think I am well-placed to discuss this: this was the second Malaysian election in my adult life, and also the second I’ve participated in from overseas.
When I was a student during the last Malaysian national elections in 2008, I contributed financially to the causes I support. I also helped write campaign communications material, and I had no issues following the campaign from my university’s New Hampshire campus. Throughout the time I’ve been in the US, I’ve stayed abreast of Malaysian affairs, and for a few years, penned a regular column on Malaysian politics for a popular news website .
It’s actually remarkable how to a significant degree, online news and social media have made it easy to keep one’s thumb on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Sometimes readers would ask me how I knew what people were thinking or feeling back home, and it almost felt cheap to say that I just read blog comments or listened to what people were saying on Facebook. Of course, it also helped that I spent a few weeks at home whenever I had vacation time. This recent election, I similarly helped by donating money to the candidates I supported. Coincidentally, I donated to one of these candidates because another Malaysian currently living and working in Mongolia prodded me to, and offered to match my donation.
But beyond these basic things, which I could have done from Antarctica, I also plugged into the Malaysian diaspora in the US. There aren’t many of us here, but for the past 5 years in a row, I’ve helped organise a conference on Malaysian affairs in the northeast (and advised others as they began to organise similar gatherings in the midwest and west coast) — the Malaysia Forum. I organised and attended demonstrations in Washington, DC and New York City demanding a fairer political process.
I still remember how only a couple days after moving into my apartment near Washington, DC I was preparing a poster saying “Where is MY vote?” — a reference to how Malaysian policy then disenfranchised most citizens living overseas. I don’t think any of us at that demonstration outside the Malaysian embassy in DC less than two years ago expected that by this election, we would have the right to vote. And yet, our struggle came through. We were part of a global movement holding simultaneous rallies, in Kuala Lumpur and across the globe, for free and fair elections in Malaysia. At the same time I demonstrated in Washington, I had friends gathering and marching in London, Paris, Melbourne, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. The global synchronicity of it lent a powerful impetus to the movement; it was inspiring to Malaysians to think that scattered across our planet, there were Malaysian citizens sharing in the same struggle for democracy in our country. This election, I not only voted for the first time in my life at our embassy in Washington, but I also served as an election observer.
There is a concern that under open borders, people would flee dysfunctional countries instead of trying to fix them, this “brain drain” dooming these countries to failure in perpetuity. This concern is definitely applicable to Malaysia, and it’s something Malaysians openly wonder about and discuss all the time. (If you doubt me, come on over to next year’s Malaysia Forum and listen in.) The size of our diaspora perennially raises concerns that bad government policies are driving Malaysians away — which itself puts paid to the suggestion that emigration papers over domestic political problems.
Moreover, it’s not enough to suggest that apathetic Malaysians are disproportionately represented among emigrants as proof that permitting such migration is an issue. After all, there’s a selection bias going on: would the kind of people who leave Malaysia because they don’t care about it start caring about the country if immigration restrictions forced them to stay back? On the flip side, would the kind of people who love Malaysia but decide to leave it for other reasons stop loving their country?
I think these questions speak for themselves. But some further historical evidence unique to the Malaysian context: the overseas Chinese and Indian communities in Malaysia were extremely politically active in their homelands up until World War II. Sun Yat-Sen paid frequent visits to Malaysia to fundraise and organise, and Jawaharlal Nehru toured Malaysia to drum up political awareness. With a modicum of open borders, people were able to travel and so stay in touch with affairs of their respective homelands. Nowadays with the internet, there is absolutely no reason one can’t play an active role in the political life of one’s home, even from afar.
Another curious political event of note: the affiliates of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang / Guomindang) and the Indian Congress Party in Malaysia eventually morphed into the Malaysian Chinese Association and Malaysian Indian Congress. Both went on to fight for Malaysian independence from the British, and remain influential Malaysian political parties today. It is not easy to classify political participation as an either/or thing.
Migration is a socially complex phenomenon. Not all who leave choose to do so permanently. Many return. Some stay. I have met many Malaysians in the US who, for various reasons, have wound up staying here and may wind up dying here. Perhaps their children will grow up as Americans rather than Malaysians (something I personally, at this point in time, can’t conceive of doing as a parent). But they have impressed on me their love for Malaysia despite spending years, if not decades, away from home.
There is no denying that living away from one’s homeland is tough, whether or not you have line of sight to eventually returning home. There are certainly things I could have contributed in this past election had I been home, instead of in the US. But I confess I do not see how forcing me to remain in Malaysia instead of being in the US would have made the political life of my country significantly better off. Neither do I see how forcing the thousands of Malaysians who have left the country to instead stay behind our country’s arbitrary borders would have made things significantly better.
Malaysia may be a unique case because we are a partially democratic country, and so overseas Malaysians have more opportunities to plug into the political struggles of our homeland. But neither pre-WWII China or India were democratic, and yet the Chinese and Indian diasporas stayed looped into the struggles of their respective home countries. One would not refuse refuge to someone fleeing North Korea. The US has open borders for Cubans who can make it to US soil, and Cuban-Americans continue to be vocal about the affairs of their ancestral homeland.
My suggestion is that political involvement primarily depends on how much you care about the issues at hand, not where you are. It might be that where you are affects your ability to hear about the issues, and thus how much you care about them. But that was not much of an excuse when the borders were open enough to let dissidents like Nehru travel, and it certainly isn’t much of an excuse now when we have the internet and Facebook connecting us to far-flung friends and family.
If anything, because of how it promotes exchanges of ideas and commerce, open borders arguably lends greater impetus to far-flung political movements: I earn far more in the US than I could in Malaysia, and can remit my income to Malaysian causes I support. The ideas I learn of in the US are ideas I can translate to a Malaysian context — and similarly I can transmit Malaysian ideas to my US friends and colleagues. Malaysian opposition leaders Anwar Ibrahim (a former Georgetown professor) and Lim Guan Eng (a former Australian student) are fond of quoting American figures like Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr. In a world where ideas are free to roam, it hardly seems right to keep the people behind them in a cage.
May 13, 2013 28 Comments
Post by Sebastian Nickel (see all posts by Sebastian Nickel)
The generally accepted idea that the institutions of countries and citizenship have considerable moral relevance has always struck me as bizarre. To me, it seems obvious, on the face of it, that where a person was born, or who a person’s parents are, are arbitrary matters (that said person has no influence over) and therefore cannot be relevant to such evaluative questions as whether that person has a right to rent property or accept a job in location X. (See John Lee’s post on Phillip Cole’s moral argument for open borders, which also relies on this point.) Likewise, where we have come to conventionally draw borders on maps seems to me a matter of historical circumstances that virtually nobody alive today has any responsibility in and that therefore can have little moral relevance in evaluating people’s actions. (While I think some compelling consequentialist arguments can be made along the lines that disrespecting existing borders might dangerously offset an equilibrium, I do not think this kind of argument can take you all that far. More on this in an upcoming post.)
Perhaps most people can at least relate to my prima facie attitude described in the previous paragraph, but I am clearly in a small minority in persisting in such a view in the face of common political discourse. Almost everybody treats the moral relevance of countries and citizenship as a given (often in the form of citizenism).
This renders discussions of the morality of migration restrictions difficult and unpromising for people with views similar to mine, as it seems that those who disagree with me reason from entirely different starting points and have very different ideas about who holds the burden of proof, compared to my views. Consider the last paragraph from a response by Sonic Charmer (aka The Crimson Reach) to Michael Huemer’s guest post on Open Borders:
Let’s just note that in this ridiculous construction, not allowing someone to permanently relocate to the United States has been equated with abusing them to one’s heart’s content. Is this a real argument? I don’t think so. Even if the intended point here were stated in a more sober and less straw-manny way, the problem is that there is simply no Universal Human Right To Immigrate To The United States Of America. Such a thing is, if anything, even more problematic and mythical than the concept of a literal ‘social contract’. But if the professor nevertheless thinks there is such a Universal Human Right, where did it come from? Why didn’t he include his actual argument for its existence in that (already very long) piece?
The idea, as I understand it, is that the onus is on Michael Huemer to establish the existence of a Universal Human Right To Immigrate To The US. (Thomas Sowell expresses apparently the same view here.) This task seems hopeless, as the idea of a “Universal Human Right To Immigrate To The US” seems ridiculous. I agree that it seems ridiculous, but not because I do not think that people are generally within their (moral) rights to move to the US. I also think it would seem ridiculous to posit a Universal Human Right To Ride A Bicycle On A Tuesday, even though people generally are well within their rights to do so. We simply do not normally talk of moral rights to actions with specific, morally irrelevant features. (Compare this point with the 9th amendment to the US Constitution; HT: Vipul.) Given that I see no good reason for considering countries morally relevant in such matters, I contend that all that is needed is a right to rent property and to accept a job, and that the burden of proof is on restrictionists to establish that the geographical location of the property or of the work environment nullifies this right.
When I say that I see no good reasons to overrule the prima facie moral irrelevance of countries I described above, I suspect that many people will diagnose me with outrageous naiveté and ignorance of strong arguments that “everybody knows” (even if they may not be able to properly articulate those arguments themselves, but then they might defer this task to figures of “obvious authority”). But while this puts me under some social pressure to pretend otherwise, the truth is that no arguments I have heard for the moral relevance of countries have seemed compelling, let alone sufficient to me.
If I were to attempt an Ideological Turing Test (i.e. to argue the position that countries are morally relevant as best I can), I might try a social contract angle, a “fragile political equilibrium” angle, a “collective property” angle, a social capital angle, a “brain drain” angle, a “differences in national IQ and personality factors averages” angle, or a “cultural differences” angle, and perhaps I would not fare much worse than many people who really hold that position – but I would find myself very unconvincing, especially because it seems to me that most of these arguments are compelling only if we’re already assuming that countries are morally relevant. (This is particularly true of the welfare state objection to open borders, as the moral relevance of countries seems essential to justifying a national welfare state as opposed to non-nation-bound welfare programs.)
Since it seems necessary to me to take such a “back to basics” approach, given the persistent disagreement about what the morally relevant starting points are, I hereby issue a bleg: What are the strongest arguments (both in objective terms and in terms of their appeal to the masses) for the moral relevance of countries – particularly concerning such questions as where one may rent property and work? (Not excluding arguments pertaining to one of the “angles” I’ve listed above – I do not claim to have conclusively laid the viability of any of these general lines of argument to rest.)
Afterthought: Although this is isn’t what I primarily have in mind, Vipul’s previous bleg about universalist defenses of citizenism might provide an interesting way of approaching this question, too.
May 12, 2013 Leave a Comment
We’re glad to announce that Sebastian Nickel will be joining our website as an occasional blogger, adding to a steadily growing list of contributors to this website.
Sebastian works as a freelance translator and studies mathematics at The Open University. He is a citizen of Switzerland and Germany, was born and raised in Luxembourg, has lived in several European countries, and has previously completed a degree in psychology at the Université Paris 8. He has recently migrated from London, UK to Berlin, Germany.
Sebastian’s interests range widely across cognitive science, economics and moral and political philosophy. He has blogged sporadically on these topics at Seb’s Cogblog.
As far back as he can remember, Sebastian has always considered migration restrictions morally unacceptable. More recently, he has been persuaded by the writings of Bryan Caplan that open borders is probably the single most important policy issue of our time. He’s further been inspired by the Open Borders community to engage in personal efforts to try and help change the public perception of migration restrictions. He is particularly interested in exploring the philosophy and the psychology of countries and citizenship, with their typically assumed ramifications. He will also aim to bring a European perspective to our website.
His first post will be published soon.
Plug: If you’re interested in blogging for Open Borders in any capacity, consider filling in our potential guest blogger contact form.
May 12, 2013 4 Comments
Post by Chris Hendrix (see all posts by Chris Hendrix)
This is the question asked by Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. In particular in an interview with NPR in 2011 he argues:
“Our take on it is really that a modern society has no need for any immigration,” he says. “We don’t actually need immigration. Our land is settled, we’re a post-industrial society, and so … from our perspective, we need to start from zero — like zero-based budgeting — and then say, ‘Are there groups of people whose admission is so compelling that we let them in despite the fact that there’s no need for this sort of thing?’ “
So do we need immigration? Krikorian goes into more detail on his reasoning in his book, The New Case Against Immigration:
A better approach would be to learn from the principle of zero-based budgeting, defined in one dictionary as “a process in government and corporate finance of justifying an overall budget or individual budget items each fiscal year or each review period rather than dealing only with proposed changes from a previous budget.”
So in considering the amount and nature of legal migration, we shouldn’t start from the existing level and work down; instead, we should start from zero immigration and work up. Zero is not where we’ll end, but it must be where we start. From zero we must then consider what categories of immigrant are so important to the national interest that their admission warrants risking the kinds of problems that the rest of this book has outlined.
To tackle this argument we need to consider whether the “needs” of the society are the primary issue at stake here, or even one of significance. This is not to say that society and concerns about it must be discarded, but they may not be particularly relevant even given pessimistic assumptions about the results of large-scale immigration. But first, why should “zero-based” budgeting be our analogy here? Read more of this post
May 12, 2013 Leave a Comment
Open Borders: The Case started out (in March 2012) as mostly a reference website, with an occasionally updated blog. Over the last 14 months, however, we have grown our blog section considerably and it is now one of the main draws of the site. Our team of regular, occasional, and guest bloggers has been growing gradually and currently includes people who currently live or have lived in the past in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. We blog about migration-related issues around the world.
The article about us by Shaun Raviv for The Atlantic (April 26, 2013) brought a lot of media attention our way. Our readership, Facebook likes, and Twitter follows all seem to have roughly doubled since Shaun’s piece was published, and much of our external coverage has been in the aftermath of Shaun’s piece.
In light of the increased traffic and attention to the site, we are looking for more people who might be interested in blogging (guest-blogging, occasional blogging, or regular blogging) for our site.
If you’re interested, please fill in the potential guest blogger contact form. It’s called a “potential guest blogger contact form” in light of the fact that we expect most respondents to be interested in writing one-off guest posts or series of posts rather than taking on a commitment to write for the site on an ongoing basis. However, if you express interest and there is sufficient congruence between you and the site, we might work out an arrangement for you to be on occasional or even a regular blogger.
May 10, 2013 Leave a Comment
Post by John Lee (see all posts by John Lee)
Well, not quite. But a better lifting of the global Rawlsian veil there never was. Citing a study by The Economist, the Washington Post published this map of the best countries in the world to be born in today (the bluer the better):
![where-to-be-born-map3[1]](http://openborders.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/where-to-be-born-map31.jpg)
The summary of the results is worth reading, but there were a couple money quotes:
Even Portugal and Spain, for all their very real troubles, score highly. A child born today is likely to have a better life, according to the data, in Poland or Greece — yes, Greece — than in rising economic giants such as Brazil, Turkey or China.
…
Though countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam are projected to show astounding economic growth over the next generation, they are poor today. This map is a reminder that being born into a poor society, even one that offers opportunities for new wealth, can still mean life-long challenges.
…
So, if you’re a Westerner fretting about American decline or European collapse, then if nothing else, know that your children have still lucked into one of the best deals in history: being born in the right place at the right time.
Being born in the right place at the right time counts for a lot. There’s nothing ironclad that makes the amount of people being born in Portugal or Greece or Australia or the US today the right amount. If I took ten babies from Bangladesh and dropped them off in Germany tomorrow with forged German citizenship papers, in what conceivable way could their presence harm anyone there, growing up as German as can be? Yes, there is in principle some limit to how many people a country can have, and coming up against that constraint is a plausible reason to enforce immigration restrictions. But adopting restrictions without bothering to prove such a limit has been reached is nothing more than creating a new aristocracy.
Putting aside difficult-to-quantify social factors for now, from a purely economic standpoint, the global aristocracy of birthplace is immensely inefficient. How inefficient? The most conservative estimate is that true open borders would make humankind 67% richer. The most aggressive estimate suggests it would make us 150% richer. We’re talking doubling world GDP, folks. Even if you make allowance for social frictions necessitating some immigration restrictions, there is absolutely no rational basis for believing the economically rational thing to do is to, as a general rule, only have people live and work in the country of their birth.
Much of what I am today, I owe to my parents and my country, and to my creator who made me who I am. But I also owe an immense amount to studying and working in the United States, which literally offered me opportunities no other country could give me. I was lucky enough to be born in circumstances that could get me to the US. How many billion others can say the same?
It’s one thing to punish someone because if you don’t, they will harm you. That is at least prima facie plausible. But it’s another thing to punish someone purely for an accident of birth out of their control. I had no choice in where I was born. Neither did you. Let’s be glad we were born in pretty good circumstances (because if you’re able to read this, you’re almost certainly one of the luckiest people alive). But let’s not use birth as a reason to deny those less fortunate than us some of the same opportunities you and I had.
May 9, 2013 7 Comments
Post by John Lee (see all posts by John Lee)
Political philosopher Jason Brennan recently gave an interesting interview to 3:AM Magazine, focusing primarily on the ethics of voting and political participation. He has some interesting comments on libertarianism and liberalism as well, and this is where the interview becomes relevant to open borders, for Brennan makes this comment (I have made some formatting changes and added emphasis):
I think equality misses the point of social justice. The point isn’t to make people more equal. It’s to make sure first everyone has enough, and then that everyone has more. With that in mind, I find it bizarre that so many people focus on the plight of the least well-off in rich societies, and yet ignore the issue of immigration.
From my point of view, if you do not advocate open immigration, any claim to be concerned about social justice or the well being of the poor is mere pretense. When economists estimate the welfare losses from immigration restrictions, they tend to conclude that eliminating immigration restrictions would double world GDP. The poorest immigrants would see the largest gains. The families and friends they leave behind would see large gains.
Immigration restrictions expose the worlds’ poor to exploitation. If you have an economic system where everything can be globalised, except poor labour, then you make the world’s poor sitting ducks for exploitation. They can’t go where labour is scarce to get a good deal. They are forced to wait for capital to come find them and give them a bad deal. It’s not just that these restrictions are inefficient. Immigration restrictions impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
I do not think I could have said it any better myself. The conclusions in that final paragraph epitomise my personal journey to full support for open borders.
You can argue that open borders impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on many people as well. But strong claims require strong evidence. The evidence of the oppression of closed borders is staring us in the face. Every person who jumps a wall, swims a river, paddles an ocean, or dodges bullets in search of a better life is telling us just how much open borders is worth to them as an individual, and can be worth to us as a human race.
The economic evidence demanding open borders is compelling. But coupled with the fundamental immorality of oppressing the most vulnerable people on the face of the earth, there is absolutely no way to stomach the status quo. Closed borders are not just another example of governmental inefficiency: they are a graphic illustration of the evil things that humans can do to other people, and of the capacity we have for self-deception.
You can argue that now is not the right time to end immigration restrictions. That we’re not ready. That greater immigration levels bring all kinds of harms which we either absolutely cannot address, or simply cannot find the resources to address. All fair points; I might even agree with you on some of these (I am particularly sympathetic to the argument that a sudden influx of immigrants undermines a strong sense of community).
But these fair points only militate for gradually opening the borders. They demand experimentation with keyhole solutions — policies that mitigate the risks of opening the borders. We have a tendency to think that the status quo of closed borders is desirable. But if current immigration levels are desirable at all (a very dubious proposition), that is only because keeping them this low is a necessary evil — not a positive good. Brennan puts it so well that I can’t help but quote him again for emphasis:
If you have an economic system where everything can be globalised, except poor labour, then you make the world’s poor sitting ducks for exploitation. They can’t go where labour is scarce to get a good deal. They are forced to wait for capital to come find them and give them a bad deal. It’s not just that these restrictions are inefficient. Immigration restrictions impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
If we have to impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world — if we have to shoot Starving Marvin in the face for the greater good — let’s at least be honest about it. And let’s be absolutely sure that such barbarism for the sake of saving civilisation really is necessary — that we’ve optimised the cruelty of our immigration regimes. The feasibility of open borders may be an open question. But as long as people are dying because governments refuse to give them a legal way to move in search of a better life, the onus is on us to examine the immigration policies enforced in our name. If we must close our borders, close them only as much as we need to, and no more. Fundamental morality demands it.
May 8, 2013 3 Comments
Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)
A task for the industrious, or perhaps for us here at Open Borders, only we would need a lot of help: write a history of borders. When did the concept of a border appear? How has it evolved? What did borders mean at different times in history? My/Bryan Caplan’s/Steve Camarota’s Huffington Post TV interview last week (also see here and here) featured this exchange:
STEVE CAMAROTA: Well right, I mean, obviously, the fraction of the American people or even public officials who think we don’t have a right to control our borders and regulate our borders and control who comes in is trivially small, it’s a marginalized position. From that perspective, but in academia, and among a lot of the groups that pressure for high levels of immigration, this is a kind of mainstream perspective, that people have a right to come into our country. The only way you could do that would be to push it down the throats of the American people. All societies, all sovereign states throughout all history have always had the idea that they can regulate who comes into their society–
NATHAN SMITH (interrupting): Well, that’s not really accurate, but–
Here’s what I would like to know, and am not enough of a historian to say for sure: is Steve Camarota more like 70% wrong, or more like 90% wrong, setting to one side the issue of armed invasion? Unfortunately, “setting to one side the issue of armed invasion” is not so easy, because Camarota and other restrictionists tend to try to confuse the obviously different issues of how one deals with hostile armies intending to kill and plunder by superior strength, and peaceful migrants asking nothing but to be left alone or to be allowed to offer their wares or their skills. Of course, if the mistake has been made often before, Camarota’s claim would still be true. I’m pretty sure it’s not generally true, but just how often past societies have dealt out to peaceful migrants treatment appropriate to armed invaders would be an interesting historical question to answer. Again, has the right to emigrate, or the right to invite, been widely recognized? What of hospitality, the obligation of hosts to guests? What is the history of that? What made a person a guest? I’ve been reading The Odyssey, and one of the most persistent moral themes in it is hospitality. The good characters are invariably distinguished by their kindness to guests, not simply invited guests by any means but even and especially wayfarers, wanderers and beggars such as Odysseus is in most of the places he goes throughout most of the epic. The bad characters are marked, above all, by their harshness and violence against the same. Was this peculiar to the Greeks or is it universal? Walls have occasionally been built: the Great Wall of China, or Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, but of course they are more often not built. How have borders been guarded? How often have they been unguarded? How often have they been undefined? When they are defined and guarded, what kind of traffic has been stopped, and what allowed through? And in the shadowy background of all this, perhaps never very well-defined even to the actors in history let alone in written records that can be discovered later, what ideas about borders existed in people’s minds? To what extent did they feel that they, or their rulers, had a right to control who entered and who exited the territory associated with this or that polity? What motives were appropriate for such regulation, and what were the limits of it?
The project would require a lot of assistance from historians, but from other specialists, too, for historians tend to be good with documents and dates but can’t be relied on to think through the issues carefully and abstractly. Historical studies often help people to escape the ideological parochialism of their own times, but in a patchy and idiosyncratic fashion. Social science abstractions such as the concepts of economics can blind their adherents in certain ways, but can also enable them to overleap the narrow certainties of a particular time or country or class. I suspect that the result would be quite useful to the open borders cause, because it would reveal that something like open borders– not precisely in the sense advocated by myself or the other bloggers here, of course, but still– has been the norm in human history, while the Passport Age (1914-present, roughly speaking) is an aberration. But if it did turn out that the Passport Age is less distinctive than I thought, that probably wouldn’t affect my support for open borders much, nor, if open borders were the historic norm, would that necessarily force the restrictionists could back down. They could argue that immigration restrictionism (it’s too bad the phrase world apartheid sounds polemical: it seems like a more cogent and specific description of today’s migration regime) is a novel invention indeed, but a beneficent one. But, advocacy impact aside, I’d simply like to know.
UPDATE: More resources: a quick summary post by Vipul, my devastating takedown of the claim that Rome fell because of open immigration (that one’s worth reading!), this post, my post on metics in ancient Greece, and my long Old Testament post. Also see our page on the “alien invasion” metaphor; Vipul’s post on why immigration was freer in the 19th century, and Bryan Caplan on “The Golden Age of Immigration.”
May 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
Post by John Lee (see all posts by John Lee)
I recently finished Michele Wucker’s Lockout, a 2006 book advocating a liberal US immigration policy. Superficially, it’s overly similar to Jason Riley’s Let Them In; both co-blogger Vipul and I find that mainstream pro-immigration US literature suffers from the pitfall of focusing too much on the US (well, this is a pitfall from an open borders standpoint), and being anchored too much to the status quo. However, compared to Riley, Wucker is much more solutions-focused — and from the solutions she proposes, I would actually suggest she was grappling with the early embryos of all those ideas which eventually led to the formation of this Open Borders blog.
Riley says he wrote his book to rebut mainstream anti-immigration arguments in the US, but Wucker goes one step further to propose a number of changes to US immigration policy. The first 10 chapters of Wucker are incredibly similar to Riley, but the 11th chapter is breath of fresh air. Some of Wucker’s proposals:
Most of these are what we at Open Borders: The Case call keyhole solutions — policies that mitigate the risks of migration. They might do this by ensuring that some of the gains from migration go to natives, such as through the immigration levies which Wucker proposes. Or they might do this by managing the inflow of immigrants using some transparent rules to ensure that a country’s institutions are not overwhelmed by sudden, unexpected influxes (which, at least on paper, is what a streamlined bureaucracy would be able to do).
At the same time, there are some things which open borders advocates would probably part ways with Wucker on. Wucker’s strong belief that employers should be punished for hiring unauthorised immigrants seems sincere, and not just a sop to the restrictionist crowd. I think she finds it incredibly unjust that employers can illegally discriminate against these immigrants because of their unauthorised status. She seems to hint that she would prefer the reverse of the current US system (presently the immigrant bears all of the risk in taking up employment, and the employer takes none) — which I suppose is more compatible with an open borders viewpoint. It sounds like she might not be opposed to programmatic, ongoing “amnesties” which some countries have done, allowing unauthorised immigrants to regularise their status even after entering/overstaying without following the standard immigration rules.
Wucker seems incredibly cognisant (at least relative to most participants in mainstream immigration debates) of the terrible suffering that closed borders inflict on immigrants and prospective immigrants. Because of this, I don’t doubt her sincerity in advocating a guest worker programme or something similar to ensure those who seek honest work in the US can come. Putting this in context, when she wrote, most mainstream pro-immigration activists in the US were rejecting any guest worker programme as a form of legalised slavery. Instead, Wucker explored some bold proposals for immigration reform that dovetail incredibly well with open borders and open borders-like keyhole solutions:
The solution to [the dilemmas of immigration policy] is not to dictate what immigrant workers should do but to tailor a menu of options that lets each worker’s individual circumstances guide his or her decision…we could require [high-skilled] immigrants who decide to stay in America longer than ten years to pay a premium; some of that money could be redirected to the immigrant’s homeland and/or to to job training for U.S. workers.
Similarly…lower-skilled immigrants could pay a fee if they decide to stay after their guest worker status ran out….Another possibility could be to ask guest workers or their employers to pay a deposit to be held in an escrow account; if the worker decided to stay in America, the money would be forfeited to a development bank for use in the home country.
Wucker explicitly says that immigration policy should form part of a development strategy that will close the income gap between rich and poor worlds:
Paradoxically, in the long run, the best way to slow desperate immigration is to let people come here, build their skills, and then take those skills back to their homelands. Also paradoxically, the best way for people to help their homelands is to adapt as fully as possible to American society, for this is the key to succeeding here. By encouraging people to study here and go back and forth freely, we can encourage brain circulation and the creation of industries that will provide jobs in migrant-sending countries and markets for U.S. goods.
This development focus I find incredibly unusual for a mainstream immigration policy book. Wucker wrote in 2006, before economists Lant Pritchett and Michael Clemens fully fleshed out the concept of the place premium, showing how closed borders artificially create wage gaps that result in some people earning 6 cents (adjusted for purchasing power) doing work in their home countries, for which the equivalent wage in the US would be 1 dollar. Clemens and Pritchett would go on to argue that such wage gaps, as high as 94%, have never existed between any jurisdictions that permit freedom of movement. Following from this, the labour market convergence of open borders would end the worst poverty in the world and double world GDP. It amazes me that Wucker would take this angle in 2006, before development economists had even gotten around to begin digging into quantifying how badly closed borders is holding back the world economy, and the economies of our poorest countries.
Finally, one last remarkable thing is how antsy Wucker is about conceding much ground to restrictionists. She makes the usual sops to restrictionism, such as stricter internal labour market enforcement, and reducing the number of visas for citizens’ siblings, and…that’s it. Unlike other mainstream liberalisation advocates, she doesn’t plump for a border fence, or neglect the all-important need to reform the US’s broken visa system. It’s quite clear she wants more immigrants, because morality and good economics demand this, and she’s not afraid to say it. She says she rejects open borders, but literally in the same breath insists her only concession to restrictionists will be reducing the visa quota for citizens’ siblings.
From an open borders standpoint, Wucker’s book is not particularly useful or illuminating. In a sense, because of the work of Clemens and Pritchett, Wucker’s Lockout is now substantially outdated. But it is for that reason that I find Wucker so interesting: she was advocating open borders-style keyhole solutions, using the same stylised arguments as open borders advocates, years ahead of us.
May 7, 2013 2 Comments
Post by Joel Newman (see all posts by Joel Newman)
I assume that other open borders supporters cringed, as I did, when it was reported that the suspects in the Boston bombings were immigrants. For some people, the Boston atrocity appears to have reinforced fears that immigrants could be terrorists. A man interviewed in a Philadelphia suburb said, “’I’m a little more of an extremist now after what happened in Boston… I think we should just stop letting people in.’” Even maintaining current immigration levels or instituting small liberalizations of American immigration policy may be threatened by what happened in Boston and similar immigrant-connected terrorism, let alone their negative impact on the push for open borders.
Concerns about the connection between immigrants and terrorism involve Muslim immigrants. The Boston suspects were Muslims and may have been inspired by religious extremism to carry out the attacks. The Bipartisan Policy Center reports that the U.S. has “a domestic terrorist problem involving immigrant and indigenous Muslims as well as converts to Islam.” ((9/10/10, Bipartisan Policy Center, Assessing the Terrorist Threat), page 31) Even some open borders advocates seem uncertain if an open borders policy should apply to Muslim immigrants. In the site’s background page on terrorism, Vipul paraphrases a view (not necessarily his own): “[F]or those who believe that Islamic immigration to the United States poses a unique threat, this may be a reason to maintain present restrictions on immigration from Islamic countries and self-identified Muslims from other countries.” Muslim immigration would increase with open borders, and some of these additional immigrants could become terrorists. (see also here and here).
However, especially after situations like Boston (and there have been others), open borders supporters should explain how open borders could actually help protect the U.S. from terrorism and that open borders should be available to all individual immigrants, regardless of religion, so long as they pose no terrorist threat. Vipul has collected some of these arguments at the link above. My vision of open borders and that of a number of other supporters does involve keeping out potential terrorists through security screenings at the border. So one argument notes that, unlike our current restrictionist policy which devotes considerable resources and focus on keeping out unauthorized immigrants seeking to work in the U.S., resources under an open borders policy could be focused on screening out terrorists. Another argument is that the free movement of people between countries could lead to the spreading of ideas contrary to those which inspire terrorism; immigrants who move between the U.S. or other western countries and their native countries would share values such as individual rights, tolerance, and democracy with their compatriots who remain in the native countries. A third argument is that if terrorism grows out of weak economies in native countries, the free movement of people from those countries and the resulting economic benefit to those countries (through remittances and immigrants returning to their native country to establish new businesses) could help prevent terrorism.
There is another reason open borders could help combat terrorism. Kevin Johnson, author of Opening the Floodgates, notes that “carefully crafted immigration enforcement is less likely to frighten immigrant communities—the very communities whose assistance is essential if the United States truly seeks to successfully fight terrorism.” (page 35) Without the fear of being the targets of immigration enforcement, immigrants would be more likely to cooperate with authorities in identifying individuals who are potential terrorists in the U.S. and assist with efforts against terrorist groups abroad. This would fit with the government’s strategy to gain the cooperation of Muslims in the U.S. in addressing terrorism. Quintan Wiktorowicz, a national security staff member in the White House, notes in a discussion on an administration plan to fight terrorism in the U.S. that “Muslim communities and Muslims in the United States are not the problem, they are the solution. And that’s the message we plan to take to those particular communities in addressing at least al-Qaida inspired radicalization of violent extremism…”
For the effort abroad, Nathan Smith suggests that “emigrants from Islamic countries could provide a valuable resource for the intelligence services of the West in their fight against Islamic terrorism.” Open borders would presumably increase the number of immigrants from countries that have been sources of terrorism against the U.S., such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Some of these immigrants could provide the cultural and language skills which would bolster our intelligence resources and help America stay safe from future attacks. Indeed, our intelligence agencies have often lacked agents who could infiltrate groups that threaten the U.S. (In an article in the Atlantic Monthly in the summer of 2001, Reuel Marc Gereht quoted a former CIA operative as saying “‘The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist…’” (pages 38-42, July/August 2001))
In addition to articulating the potential benefits of open borders to stopping terrorism, open borders advocates must emphasize that most Muslims are peaceful and should be allowed to immigrate. Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, warns “we should not fall into the trap of thinking that Muslims are a uniform and separate community whose identity is wholly defined by their religion, still less an inevitably hostile or violent one.” (page 304) He notes that Muslims come from many different countries, each with their own traditions, and, like other religious groups, some are religious, some not. “There are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims and Muslims who reject their faith.” (page 304) In addition, “only a small minority of Muslims are fundamentalist,” and only a tiny number of fundamentalists are terrorists. (page 305) There are over 2.5 million Muslims living in the U.S., about two thirds of whom are immigrants, but very few are involved in terrorism. The Bipartisan Policy Center reports that in 2009 “at least 43 American citizens or residents aligned with Sunni militant groups or their ideology were charged or convicted of terrorism crimes in the U.S. or elsewhere, the highest number in any year since 9/11.” (Page 5 of this report ) Mr. Legrain explains that “the threat of Islamic terrorism is a reason for increased vigilance, surveillance and scrutiny; it is not reason for limiting immigration.”
Nathan Smith has noted that when dramatic events occur, such as an act of terrorism by immigrants or a plane crash, people often overestimate the frequency of such events, a phenomenon called “availability bias.” This mental overreaction to “extremely unrepresentative events” makes people attribute more importance to the events than they deserve. This dynamic suggests that open borders supporters have a lot of work to do convincing the public that most Muslims who want to immigrate pose no threat and that open borders may actually help in the fight against terrorism.
May 7, 2013 4 Comments
Post by Alex Nowrasteh (see all posts by Alex Nowrasteh)
This post was originally published on the Cato-at-Liberty blog here and is republished with the permission of the author.
In the Washington Post today, Jim DeMint and Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation invoke the free-market pantheon in arguing their anti-immigration stance: “The economist Milton Friedman warned that the United States cannot have open borders and an extensive welfare state.”
They’re halfway right about that. What Friedman actually said was that immigration is “a good thing for the United States…so long as it’s illegal.” He meant that open immigration is highly beneficial to the economy, provided those productive but inexpensive laborers do not have access to welfare. Friedman later wrote that, “There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state.” Friedman’s problem was with the welfare state, not immigration. His remarks are fundamentally at odds with the position Heritage is trying to argue.
It’s not the first time that I’ve questioned the free-market credentials of my friends at Heritage lately, and that’s making me sad.
On Monday, Heritage released a new study entitled “The Fiscal Cost of unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer” by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, PhD. I criticized an earlier version of this report in 2007, arguing that their methodology was so flawed that one cannot take their report’s conclusions seriously. Unfortunately, their updated version differs little from their earlier one.
I’m joined in this view by a host of prominent free-marketeers. Jim Pethokoukis at AEI, Doug Holtz-Eakin at American Action Forum, Tim Kane at the Hudson Institute, and others have all denounced the fundamentals of the Heritage report.
The new Heritage report is still depressingly static, leading to a massive underestimation of the economic benefits of immigration and diminishing estimated tax revenue. It explicitly refuses to consider the GDP growth and economic productivity gains from immigration reform—factors that increase native-born American incomes. An overlooked flaw is that the study doesn’t even score the specific immigration reform proposal in the Senate. Its flawed methodology and lack of relevancy to the current immigration reform proposal relegate this study to irrelevancy.
Even worse, the Heritage study recommends a “solution” to the fiscal problems it supposedly finds. It suggests:
Because the majority of unlawful immigrants come to the U.S. for jobs, serious enforcement of the ban on hiring unlawful labor would substantially reduce the employment of unlawful aliens and encourage many to leave the U.S. Reducing the number of unlawful immigrants in the nation and limiting the future flow of unlawful immigrants would also reduce future costs to the taxpayer.
Professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda of UCLA wrote a paper for Cato last year where he employed a dynamic model called the GMig2 to study comprehensive immigration reform’s impact on the U.S. economy. He found that immigration reform would increase U.S. GDP by $1.5 trillion in the ten years after enactment.
Professor Hinojosa-Ojeda then ran a simulation examining the economic impact of the policy favored by Heritage: the removal or exit of all unauthorized immigrants. The economic result would be a $2.6 trillion decrease in estimated GDP growth over the next decade. That confirms the common-sense observation that removing workers, consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs from America’s economy will make us poorer.
Would decreasing economic growth by $2.6 trillion over the next ten years have a negative impact on the fiscal condition of the U.S.? You betcha.
Do the authors consider the fiscal impact of their preferred immigration policy? Nope.
For those of us who “grew up” on the fine policy analysis long produced by Heritage, the immigration report is a supreme disappointment. No one has done more than Heritage to promote the importance of dynamic scoring, which is critical to understanding the true effects of government activity on the marketplace. For that organization to have seemingly abandoned its core principles for this important debate is a stinging blow to those of us who crave an honest, data-driven debate on the fiscal merits of policy.
May 6, 2013 3 Comments
Post by Chris Hendrix (see all posts by Chris Hendrix)
A position long held by Steve Sailer is that citizenism is “ the least destructive and most uplifting form of allegiance humanly possible on an effective scale.” Long term readers of this blog might guess that many of the bloggers here would tend to disagree. But here Sailer argues that of our options, we aren’t going to get better than citizenism.
My starting point in analyzing policies is: “What is in the best overall interests of the current citizens of the United States?”
In contrast, so many others think in terms of: “What is in the best interest of my: identity group / race / ethnicity / religion / bank account / class / ideology / clique / gender / sexual orientation / party / and/or personal feelings of moral superiority?”
Given the options he presents, I might be hard pressed to say that citizenism is any worse than those options and it is clearly superior to many of them. “Personal feelings of moral superiority” for instance seems to devolve simply into straight egoism. Meanwhile the other options have problems of either arbitrariness or stifling of diverse ideas. But is universalism, namely the idea that all humans should carry equal moral weight to each other, truly not possible on “an effective scale”?
May 4, 2013 4 Comments
Post by Vipul Naik (see all posts by Vipul Naik)
I define “open borders between the US and Canada” as meaning that US and Canadian citizens are free to enter the other country not just for short-term visits but for long-term visits and can settle in the other country to live, work, marry, or do other stuff, without needing to go through any immigration bureaucracy. Border checkpoints may still exist. One might define open borders more expansively to include all permanent residents of either country. As co-blogger John Lee noted in this post, the US-Canada border is not completely open in this sense: while citizens and even permanent residents can move freely between the countries for short-term visits, they still need to go through a bureaucratic (and uncertain) process in order to take up a job or settle long-term.
My two bleg questions:
UPDATE: A friend on Facebook had pointed me a while back to Annexation movements of Canada.
May 3, 2013 2 Comments
Post by Grieve Chelwa (see all posts by Grieve Chelwa)
Two objections to open borders are that under open borders (1) recipient countries are likely to experience an increase in crime and (2) natives, since they are on average richer than the new comers, are likely to bear the full brunt of crime. The two objections are not necessarily related: one can think of a scenario whereby the crime rate falls following open borders but the residual crime is disproportionately borne by natives. This post does not confront the first objection, namely that open borders might lead to an increase in crime, because others on this site have done so. In addition, I have speculated in a previous post that the increase in crime that immediately followed the collapse of apartheid in South Africa (to all intents and purposes an “open borders event”) was due to the fact that background checks were never performed on the “new comers” to isolate those with criminal records. (In that post, I also noted that it was impossible to perform such checks in South Africa’s case without upsetting an already delicate situation). My intention in this post is to confront the second objection, namely that natives are likely to bear the brunt of any crime that takes place under open borders. I will do so by appealing to South Africa’s post apartheid experience.
The dominant narrative on South Africa is that crime increased and has continued to increase in the post apartheid period and whites have largely been the victims of the crime wave. I took on the first part of this narrative in this post and showed that it was largely false — homicide rates (the most reliable measure of crime) have been declining every year since 1995 (apartheid officially ended in 1994). As a matter of fact, homicide rates are 50% lower today than they were in 1995. The second part of the crime narrative has a common sense appeal: whites are disproportionately the victims of crime because the average white South African is many times richer than the average black South African making him/her an attractive target for criminals. Official confirmation of this narrative seemed to have arrived when in 2009 Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) granted Brandon Huntley, a white South African living in Canada, refugee status on the basis that “[Huntley] would stand out like a ‘sore thumb’ due to his color in any part of [South Africa]“. Huntley ”reported being the victim of several assaults by black South Africans. He alleged that those assaults were racially motivated, and stated that he did not seek police or state protection because the authorities [were] unwilling or unable to help white South Africans…The [IRB] found [Huntley] credible and accepted his evidence with regard to the attacks. One of [Huntley's] witnesses, Ms. Kaplan, whose brother was victimized by black South Africans, also testified that the police [were] corrupt and [do] not help white South Africans, and that a genocide is occurring against white South Africans” (source). The ruling by the IRB sparked off a series of heated debates in South Africa with some seeing the decision as vindication of their long-held suspicions and others condemning it as unfounded. This prompted James Myburgh, the editor of Politicsweb, a popular local news and opinion website, to analyze several rounds of national victimization surveys whereupon he found that “whites were somewhat more likely to fall victim to crime than other race groups”. Myburgh’s conclusions were regarded as the final verdict on the matter by many since national victimization surveys were nationally representative and were conducted by Statistics South Africa, the Institute for Security Studies and the Human Sciences Research Council, bodies widely regarded as credible. The matter did not rest there, however. In December 2009, Gavin Silber and Nathan Geffen published an article in SA Crime Quarterly arguing that national victimization surveys (or NVSs) were not the best tool to use in answering the crime victimization question because they relied heavily on people’s opinions. Silber and Geffen advanced the following reasons [footnotes omitted]:
Firstly, the very concept of crime or criminality can be relatively subjective, as indeed is the case with ‘victimhood’. Some respondents to NVSs classify the threat of violence as a criminal act, while others might only classify its use as criminal. In addition, the distinction between perpetrator and victim can also be somewhat blurred in cases such as assault.
Secondly, there is strong evidence showing that reported victimization levels tend to increase with education, which is obviously (and particularly in South Africa) linked to income. A study in the United States showed that people with university degrees recalled three times as many assaults as those with a high school education. It is conceivable that over-exposure to a particular crime category amongst certain NVS respondents (in this case people with little education) may result in lesser infringements – such as assault – not qualifying as ‘criminal’. This has also been observed in studies illustrating how various developed cities/countries have produced higher victimization rates than poorer countries with higher levels of recorded crime.
Thirdly, reporting of property-related and violent crime tends to differ significantly, based on various circumstances. When a given sample is questioned on exposure to violent interpersonal crimes such as assault and sexual abuse (particularly when it involves a non-stranger), the results are likely to reflect a significant underreporting of actual exposure, due to a reluctance to report sexual abuse, child abuse, general assault and domestic violence. Moreover, there might be differences in the way poor and relatively wealthy respondents perceive property-related crime. Relatively wealthy people have more items of value, and are able to afford insurance, which requires reporting such crimes to the authorities. This might mean they are more likely to be conscious of, or remember, thefts they have experienced in the period covered by the NVS.
They proposed an alternative method that looked at trends in deaths from non-natural causes, and in particular homicide rates. Such an approach yielded a different set of conclusions to those arrived at by Myburgh. For instance [footnotes omitted]:
In 2008/2009 18,148 people in South Africa were murdered. This amounts to 37.3 people per 100,000, or just under 50 per day. The evidence we have examined indicates that the victims are disproportionately african and coloured working class people. We examined Statistics South Africa mortality data to determine the breakdown of murders by race. Our analysis is inconclusive but it indicates that victims are disproportionately africans and coloureds.
More compelling data come from the Medical Research Council (MRC). In an investigation into female homicide rates in South Africa in 2004, the MRC used national mortuary data to determine that 2.8 of every 100,000 white women die as a result of murder, whereas 8.9 africans and 18.3 coloureds meet the same fate. This shows that, at least for women, Myburgh is very likely wrong [...] Black women are disproportionately murdered.
Another recent study by the Centre for The Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) analysed homicide rates in high-risk areas in Kwazulu-Natal, Western Cape, and Gauteng, using a representative sample of police dockets. Of the sample 85% of homicide victims were black, 9% were coloured, 5% asian and 1% of victims were white.
Silber and Geffen also looked at mortality reports produced by Statistics South Africa going all the way to the year 2000 and arrived at similar conclusions to those reported above.
So using an approach that counts the actual victims of crime shows that, contra Myburgh, the burden of crime in post-apartheid South Africa has largely been borne by the country’s non-white population.
The above notwithstanding, it is still quite possible that the homicide rate of whites has gone up since 1994 even though whites bear a lesser burden of crime when compared to other groups. Unfortunately, race specific homicide data were not collected prior to 1994 making it difficult for us to work out and compare victimization rates for whites before and after apartheid. But the information that exists currently suggests that homicide rates for whites have come down or at the very least stayed the same since 1994. For instance, South Africa’s homicide rate began rising in the mid-1950s and continued on this upward trend, with an additional 5,000 homicides per decade, until 1994 (see the figure on page 10 of this document). And this happened during the period when the definition of South Africa excluded the homelands where most blacks (who were the majority of the population) lived suggesting that the increase in homicide rates over this period must have been largely borne by the citizens of South Africa as it was then defined. This piece of evidence coupled with the fact that homicides rates for the country as a whole have fallen by 50% after 1995 suggests that the homicide rate for whites must have declined alongside the country’s homicide rate or at the very least stayed the same since 1994.
Or perhaps certain types of victimization have increased since 1994 even though whites as a group are less vulnerable to crime when compared to whites before 1994 or when compared to other racial groups in contemporary South Africa. The typical case that is usually cited to illustrate this concern are the widely publicized attacks on white farmers. However, even here the current evidence seems to suggest that white South African farmers and their families are no more likely to fall victim to murder than the typical South African citizen. It is however important to point out that there is currently not a systematic and reliable way of collecting data on attacks on white farmers so the best analyses rely on data triangulations and assumptions implying that there is bound to be some dispersion in the conclusions. But be this as it may, all reasonable analysts of this story agree that there is currently no evidence to suggest that there is a genocide of white South African farmers, contrary to what some groups are claiming. Further, all experts agree that these attacks are not racially motivated nor do they have a political angle to them. According to a researcher who has had first-hand experience in investigating farm attacks, “most farm murders were criminal acts committed with a material motive behind them“.
What implications, if any, might this have for the open borders discussion since I have argued elsewhere that the fall of apartheid was an open borders event? Firstly, South Africa’s experience shows that crime rates do not necessarily rise following open borders — in South Africa’s case, the rate of crime has fallen in each year since 1995. And secondly, it is not clear-cut that the burden of crime will always be borne by natives following open borders — in South Africa’s case, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the victims of crime have overwhelmingly been the black (and to some extent, the coloured) population. In any case, open borders would present a way out for people such as Brandon Huntley who believed they were in danger of victimization. And under open borders, people like Huntley would not have to prove their case.
The specter of crime does not, in my mind, constitute sufficient grounds to overturn the presumption in favor of open borders — South Africa’s experience, with zero background checks, shows that crime is much more a concern for the new comers than it is for the natives. And I think it is possible to reduce the possibility of crime to a minimum by relying on background checks among other options. The alternative of consigning poor people to countries where they are perpetually the victims of crime, and to say nothing of poverty, is much worse.
May 3, 2013 1 Comment
Post by John Lee (see all posts by John Lee)
A year ago, co-blogger Vipul briefly reviewed Mark Krikorian’s The New Case Against Immigration and Jason Riley’s Let Them In. I have not yet read Krikorian’s book, but I have finished Riley’s. Overall, I second Vipul’s sentiment that despite the radical book cover (the book’s full title is Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders), Riley’s book is incredibly weak because:
I don’t want to sound overly harsh; I actually would recommend Riley’s book if someone has already exhausted the most basic open borders literature. So if you’ve finished Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come (I would say that if you can only read one book about open borders, you need to make it Pritchett’s), maybe consider reading Let Them In. The main selling points for Riley:
In his conclusion, Riley states:
My primary goal in writing this book was to offer a rebuttal to some of the more common anti-immigrant arguments that I’ve come across while covering the issue as a Wall Street Journal editorialist.
Once I read this, I understood why Vipul and I felt the book had oversold itself as a case for open borders. Riley’s true intention was never to make such a broad case in this book. (In fact, Vipul goes as far as to characterise Riley as a political moderate — this is true of the book’s tone, but from its content, I would say Riley probably is pretty close to the liberal extreme on immigration.) If you’re looking for some good rebuttals to common mainstream anti-immigration US-specific arguments, I highly recommend Let Them In. But if you’re looking for the case for open borders, I would without hesitation point you to Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come.
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