Economic Judgment on Arizona’s Immigration Law

April 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Post by Alex Nowrasteh (see all posts by Alex Nowrasteh)

This is a cross-posting, with permission from the author, of an article that originally appeared in the Huffington Post here.

On April 25, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over the constitutionality of Arizona’s controversial immigration law. But jurisprudence aside, the economic verdict is already in: The law has damaged Arizona’s economy.

Arizona’s immigration law burdens businesses with regulation and penalizes workers. It has driven tens of thousands of laborers, consumers and entrepreneurs from the state, turning its bad economy even worse.

At its heart, Arizona’s immigration policy is an unfunded mandate that raises the cost of hiring workers and expanding production. Neither is good policy in even the best of economies, which we are far from experiencing currently.

The worst example: E-Verify. It’s an electronic verification system that employers are supposed to use to check the legal work status of all new employees. Besides failing to detect unauthorized immigrants 54 percent of the time — thus flunking its core function — E-Verify falsely identifies legal workers as illegal about one percent of the time. Read more of this post

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A Meta-Ethics to Keep in Your Back Pocket

April 24, 2012 by 5 Comments

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

The relevance of this post to open borders will not be immediately obvious, but bear with me, I’ll get to it. “Meta-ethics” is a real word, as my sister, a professional philosopher, recently confirmed to me. I was afraid I had made it up, because it’s so useful in immigration debates. Meta-ethics is basically theorizing about where ethical rules or values come from. “Don’t steal” is ethics. “Seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number” is meta-ethics. Specifically, it’s a statement (a rather clumsy one) of utilitarian meta-ethics. People can have similar ethical views derived from quite different meta-ethical starting places. For example, a virtue ethicist might act bravely because courage is part of the good life for man, while a utilitarian acts bravely because he is convinced that the greatest happiness of the greatest number will be served, in a particular crisis, by his keeping cool while running terrible risks. People can also arrive at quite different views on a whole range of particular ethical questions starting from the same meta-ethical starting point: one utilitarian might believe in largely laissez-faire capitalism, while another is a Communist. If one wants to make a rational argument against a particular ethical rule (e.g., stay in the country you were born in unless some foreign government gives you permission to migrate there), I don’t see much possibility of doing this without appealing to one or more meta-ethical standards. On the other hand, one can argue against a meta-ethical position via a reductio ad absurdum showing that a consistent application of it would lead to monstrous moral positions. For example, one might attack utilitarianism by arguing that, under certain circumstances, consistent utilitarians should be willing to torture children to death. Anyway, in the course of many debates, I’ve found that a surprisingly satisfactory meta-ethics is comprised by the following two rules:

1. Universal altruism. Regard the welfare of every human being as equally important, and act accordingly. The ultimate end or standard of behavior should be to maximize the happiness of all mankind, with no special preference either for oneself or for any subset of humanity– family, tribe, nation, class, religious community, whatever– to which one happens to belong.

2. Division of labor. But as Adam Smith so lucidly explained, people are rendered more productive by specialization and division of labor, and we will do the task of caring for humanity much better if we split it up into many different tasks and assign most people, at least, a much smaller range of activity. Nature and circumstances gives us a kind of rough draft of how to arrange this division of labor, giving us all impulses to serve our families and those neighbors who evoke our pity or who have done us a good turn and earned our gratitude. Reason might urge us to modify this template somewhat, but not to discard it completely.

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Immigration, trade, and reciprocity

April 22, 2012 by 1 Comment

Post by Vipul Naik (see all posts by Vipul Naik)

In a recent blog post titled What I like about “Alien Nation”, I highlighted some points where I agreed with Peter Brimelow’s book Alien Nation, which features on the anti-open borders reading list. In this blog post, I want to consider in more detail an interesting and valid point raised by Brimelow about reciprocity in immigration law. I’d mentioned this as one of my points of agreement with Brimelow, but now it’s time to voice some disagreement.

Here’s a small excerpt of his argument (about Page 251):

If immigration is such a moral imperative, why don’t the Mexicans/Chinese/Indians/Koreans/ Japanese (fill in any of the other recent top-ten suppliers of immigrants to the United States) allow it?

Don’t say: “These countries already have enough people.” The United States already has more than all of them except mainland China and India.

And don’t say: “They’re too poor.” As we have seen, the whole economic theory of immigration, as developed by immigration enthusiasts, is that immigration does not displace workers: it complements them. Well, it should work both ways.

In my previous blog post, I expressed agreement with Brimelow’s fundamental point that the moral case for open borders applies to all countries, not just the United States or the developed world.

Later in the book, as part of his list of proposals to deal with the perceived problems of immigration, Brimelow suggests (about Page 262):

No immigration should be permitted from countries that do not allow reciprocal emigration from the United States.

The way Brimelow frames the argument, it seems he is saying that allowing immigrants from a country is akin to doing that country a favor, and hence, such a favor should be done only if there is a reciprocal favor from the other country. Read more of this post

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Open Borders and Derrida’s “Cities of Refuge”

April 17, 2012 by 1 Comment

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

Might the late French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida serve as the prophet of open borders, as another impenetrably arcane Continental philosopher, Immanuel Kant, served as the prophet of the democratic peace? It seems that he advocated roughly my idea of passport-free charter cities, in articles entitled “Hospitality” (gated) and “On Cosmopolitanism” (part of a Google eBook). Derrida is the kind of French philosopher for whom vagueness seems to be a virtue. Not really my type. I read him as an undergraduate and struggled to understand him. One article entitled “Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty” (Vincent B. Leitch, 2007) (available on JSTOR and Scribd) summarizes his career thus:

During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Jacques Derrida published numerous books, approximately two dozen in French, virtually all translated into English,  but in the 1990s and thereafter up to 2004, the year of his death and  the year in which I am writing, he brought out roughly three dozen more books in France, not including the revised editions of earlier works, coauthored works, and introductions to books. In this period, which I here label late Derrida, about two dozen books by Derrida appeared in English translation, without counting three substantial Derrida readers. Not surprisingly, recent introductions to Derrida have found it especially challenging to systematize this sprawling corpus. The preferred approach is to foreground key Derridean concepts (so-called undecidables or quasitranscendentals) such as the early standbys—difference, iterability, margin,  supplement, text—and later ones like gift, hospitability, forgiveness, democracy to come, justice, messianic, responsibility, spectrality.

Hmm.  Perhaps one shouldn’t expect to understand much about the thought of any moderately subtle thinker from 35,000 feet like that (I was delightfully impressed that Vipul Naik managed to summarize parts of Principles of a Free Society accurately and succinctly; I’m not sure I could!) but Derrida doesn’t get easier close up. But in Sean Kelly’s article “Derrida’s Cities of Refuge: Toward a Non-Utopian Utopia,” (gated) the idea of charter cities seems relatively clear: Read more of this post

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Excluding versus avoiding strangers

April 16, 2012 by 4 Comments

Post by Vipul Naik (see all posts by Vipul Naik)

John Derbyshire, an American writer of British origin, attracted some controversy with his article The Talk: Nonblack Version published in Taki’s Magazine. In an article for The Atlantic titled Why John Derbyshire Hasn’t Been Fired (Yet), Elspeth Reeve quotes the following passage from Derbyshire’s original column:

(9) A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

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What I like about “Alien Nation”

April 16, 2012 by 9 Comments

Post by Vipul Naik (see all posts by Vipul Naik)

I’ve just finished reading Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, originally published in 1995 and made freely available in 2007 (the book is available for free download here and has a Wikipedia page here). The book is part of the anti-open borders reading list on this website.

I was expecting that I would disagree extensively with the book, given its advocacy of immigration restriction, but I was surprised to see a number of points where I was in agreement with the author. Further, the book was more pleasant and less polemical to read than I’d expected, given the standard fare at VDARE, an immigration restrictionist website that Peter Brimelow founded.

Below, I list some of the many points of agreement: Read more of this post

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Are Open Borders Utopian?

April 14, 2012 by 4 Comments

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

I can’t remember if anyone has ever actually responded to my advocacy of open borders by calling them “utopian,” but they often seem to be thinking it. Are open borders utopian? It would be truer to think of them as “back to normal.” The attempt to control migration through a comprehensive passport regime is a 20th-century innovation. The late 19th century was a kind of golden age of open borders, when passport regimes were removed and the world’s leading countries accepted immigrants with few or no restrictions, but even before that migration was restricted only in certain places and for certain groups and not very rigorously. Certain countries– England in the Middle Ages, Spain a couple of centuries later– expelled the Jews, but you didn’t need a visa to travel from Rome to London.

That said, for most of history, no one, native or foreign, enjoyed the degree of protection of human rights that people in the advanced nations of the West take for granted today. Much of the history of civilization was dominated by absolute monarchs of one kind or another, who were above any law. Often, too, aristocratic castes had the de facto power and/or the de jure right arbitrarily to violate the property or persons of their social inferiors. Courts have tended to be more arbitrary and corrupt than in the contemporary West; and crime rates were higher. Economic opportunity was limited and more dependent on scarce resources, which gave people more valid reasons to see a migrant as a security threat. (How will he survive, unless by stealing our cattle?) Literacy was less widespread, and there has never been a lingua franca with a reach comparable to that enjoyed by English today. For all these reasons, the practical opportunities for safe migration have surely been limited for most of historical mankind, even if passport control was not among the obstacles.

So if we were to abolish passport controls today, we would be giving rise to something rather new under the sun. Relative to the late 19th century, freedom of migration has been politically restricted but technologically and socially enabled. It’s hard to get a visa, but once you do, you can hop on a plane, arrive speaking English, and are unlikely to encounter racism. If we were to remove the passport controls, human beings worldwide would be born with a far greater prospect of practical mobility than ever before in history. Considering that (a) it’s always presumptively good to give people more options, and (b) a glance at the global distribution of income makes it clear that some people could benefit a lot by moving, that’s a very good thing. Is it too good? Are open borders utopian? Read more of this post

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All Ethical Roads Lead to Open Borders

April 10, 2012 by 1 Comment

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

That’s a one-line summary of Joseph Carens’ article “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” first published in 1987. More exactly, Carens shows how three broad ethical theories– I prefer the term meta-ethics, but it’s an idiosyncratic term– namely, (1) Nozick’s, (2) Rawls’, and (3) utilitarianism, all imply a case for fully open borders or at least much more open immigration than rich countries permit today. That’s what I’ve always thought. At some point, I’d like to look through the 515 citations to see whether any counter-arguments have any strength. Carens’ job seems rather too easy, but it’s good that someone’s done it, and in a charming and easy to read style. Carens discusses, however, a “communitarian challenge” to the case for open borders, as argued by Michael Walzer. Read more of this post

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Open Borders with Migration Taxes are the Optimal Policy

April 7, 2012 by 5 Comments

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

I just posted my article, “Open Borders with Migration Taxes are the Optimal Policy,” at SSRN. The abstract:

For some reason, economists are less willing to advocate open migration than free trade, even though the traditional free trade models, such as Ricardian comparative advantage and Heckscher-Ohlin, cross-apply to migration. In fact, however, the case for open migration is stronger than the case for free trade, because it is possible to tax foreign-born beneficiaries of open migration policies, through migration taxes. It is here proven that a policy of open borders with migration taxes is Pareto-superior to the alternative of closed borders (or discretionary migration control). Political norms of local inequality aversion seem to prevent the adoption, or even consideration, of such a policy, and the enormous gains in human welfare that would result from it. Some proposals, including a World Migration Organization and passport-free charter cities, are proposed as steps towards a world of open migration.

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Dani Rodrik Argues for More Migration

April 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

Dani Rodrik is probably the most prominent critic of globalization among academic economists. He thinks the global trade regime and global norms favoring financial liberalization have unduly constrained the policy space available to national governments. But while he’s for re-regulating trade and finance, he wants to liberalize flows of people. He writes in The Globalization Paradox: Read more of this post

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Accusations of racism in the immigration debate

April 3, 2012 by 3 Comments

Post by Vipul Naik (see all posts by Vipul Naik)

One of the tactics that many people on the pro-immigration side of the immigration debate adopt is to point out the unsavory “racist” and “eugenicist” associations that some immigration restrictionists have, or might have. I’m going to argue here that focusing on these associations, whether or not they are true, does not do much to advance the case for open borders, and detracts from the substantive debates. Read more of this post

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Hong Kong: City of Immigrants

April 3, 2012 by 2 Comments

Post by Nathan Smith (see all posts by Nathan Smith)

Below are the top ten countries in the world by per capita GDP in US dollars at purchasing power parity, according to Wikipedia:

1. Qatar 102,891
2. Luxembourg 84,829
3. Singapore 59,936
4. Norway 53,376
5. Brunei 49,517
— Hong Kong 49,342
6. United Arab Emirates 48,597
7. United States 48,147
8. Switzerland 43,508
9. Netherlands 42,330
10. Austria 41,805 Read more of this post

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