Folk Marxist arguments for open borders

August 28, 2012 by 2 Comments

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

While creating the Open Borders website, I’ve tried to include a wide range of perspectives for the moral case — libertarian, utilitarian, egalitarian, and various hybrid versions. I’ve also tried to search for a wide range of practical arguments in support of open borders. But there’s one category of arguments that I’ve avoided, and I’ll try to explain the reasons behind that in this blog post.

The arguments fall broadly under the category of folk Marxism, a term introduced by Arnold Kling in the essay Folk Beliefs Have Consequences. Roughly, folk Marxist theories are theories that see events and actions in the context of a struggle between oppressor classes and oppressed classes. Folk Marxist arguments for open borders see developing countries and migrant workers as the oppressed classes. Business interests in the developed world and racist/nationalist type folks in the developed countries are variously seen as oppressors. It’s argued that the actions of the oppressors cause violence and poverty in the lands of the oppressed, forcing them to migrate to the lands of the oppressors (developed countries) and work there. On this view, mass immigration is not something to celebrate, but rather, an unfortunate consequence of exploitative policies. Turning away the immigrants, or dehumanizing their status (for instance, by labeling them as illegal and denying them rights and privileges accorded to citizens) is a further wrong against them. Welcoming immigrants is the least that can be done, while the root causes of mass migration are fixed. I present below a passage from the beginning of the final chapter (Myth 21) of They Take Our Jobs: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration (Amazon ebook) by Aviva Chomsky (Wikipedia page).

Today’s immigration is structured by contemporary relationships among countries and regions, and by their history of economic inequality. Unequal economic relationships should be changed — not because they lead to migration, but because they lead to human suffering and an unsustainable world. High levels of migration are a symptom of a global economic system that privileges the few at the expense of the many. It could be called capitalism, it could be called neoliberalism, it could be called globalization, it could be called neocolonialism. As long as it keeps resources unequally distributed in the world, you’re going to have people escaping the regions that are deliberately kept poor and violent and seeking freedom in the places where the world’s resources have been concentrated: in the countries that have controlled, and been the beneficiaries of, the global economic system since 1492.

So, why is this line of argument not included in the Open Borders website? The reason is three-fold. First, I personally don’t think that this line of reasoning is correct or plausible in general as a reason to support open borders. This is not to deny that exploitation does not occur, but rather, to claim that the occurrence of exploitation is not a suitable generic rationale for open borders.

Second, and more importantly, it is in tension and contradiction with the other pro-open borders arguments presented. While it’s good to present multifaceted case for open borders, it is bad to present an internally contradictory case.

Third, even if the folk Marxist arguments were correct, I don’t think they add much weight to the pro-open borders position. Yes, folk Marxists often do make correct and convincing arguments favoring open borders. However, these are typically the arguments that can also be made, and have been made, from a non-folk Marxist perspective. The value added by the folk Marxist perspective seems to me to be zero or negative. For instance, folk Marxists often seem to side with restrictionists when they accept mass migration as a problem but shift blame from the migrants to capitalists and other oppressors. This is not exactly a position that bolsters confidence in open borders.

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Did Border Closure Cause the Productivity Slowdown?

August 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

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

By “the productivity slowdown,” economists have generally meant the slowdown in GDP per capita growth rates that occurred after 1973 (e.g., see here). Note that the word “slowdown” is a bit misleading: it doesn’t mean that we’re getting poorer, just that we’re not getting richer as fast. Still, it’s an unwelcome change, and calls for an explanation. There was then a productivity acceleration in the 1990s, but not a return to the “halcyon days” of the 1950s and 1960s.That productivity slowdown can’t have been caused by closed borders, because the borders were already closed in the 1950s and 1960s.

However, Alexander Field’s A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and US Economic Growth casts a different light on things. Field’s most surprising finding is that the 1930s actually experienced the highest rates of productivity growth in the 20th century. Manufacturing, whose productivity rose at its highest-ever pace in the 1920s, slowed down a bit in the 1930s, but fast productivity growth spread to other sectors. The fast productivity growth of the 1950s and 1960s was actually a decline relative to the 1930s, and the post-1973 productivity slowdown a further decline.

I am not always convinced by Field’s analysis. He often seems insufficiently suspicious of aggregate numbers that have to be calculated on the basis of market prices which change over time and can’t easily be adjusted for quality changes. Still, Field altered my view of 20th-century economic history, and my tentative best guess would now be to defer to him. Let me now tentatively and speculatively extend his analysis a bit. The post-1973 productivity slowdown that attracted so much attention was something of an accident, in the sense that the oil price spike and macroeconomic conditions created a kind of “joint” in the path of GDP, but the lasting productivity slowdown had to do with long-run trends and not really with anything that happened in 1973 per se. In the “halcyon days” of the 1950s and 1960s, two non-technological factors masked an ongoing slowdown in the pace of technological innovation. First, demographically, the US population was quite young, and it’s characteristic of young people to learn and become more productive at a faster rate than their elders. Second, competent monetary policy and much reduced political uncertainty relative to the 1930s contributed to investment and capital formation, enabling the macroeconomy to exploit much more fully the space of technological possibilities that had already been opened up by the innovative 1920s and 1930s. Productivity growth slowed down in the 1970s because the exploitation of the technological backlog from the Depression and war years, as well as the demographic boost from the youthful post-WWII population, had played themselves out. Read more of this post

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The Old Testament on Immigration: Follow-Up

August 28, 2012 by 2 Comments

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

My post The Old Testament on Immigration was discussed at Reddit. Briefly. Here’s the initial comment:

This is filled with inaccuracies about OT law. One example:

“In walking through the grainfields (which were certainly not their own since Jesus was a traveling preacher), and picking heads of grain while they passed, Jesus and the apostles were doing what was allowed by the Law.”

The act of gathering on the Sabbath is explicitly forbidden in the OT. Numbers 15:32-26

OK, I admit the wording was an error here, and I’ve put an update in the original post to reflect that. What I meant, and I think it’s quite clear from the next sentence, is that what Jesus and the apostles were doing was allowed by the Law, except for the fact that they were doing it on the Sabbath. Of course, this particular “inaccuracy,” if that is what it is, has no bearing on the topic of the post. That people were allowed, under the old Law, not only to walk through one another’s grain fields, but even to pluck heads or pick fruit by hand while doing so, is a striking contrast with modern property law, and is relevant to immigration since it relates to issues about physical movement through land, and suggests (as do many other verses) that nothing comparable to modern immigration restrictions was or would have been countenanced by the Law of Moses. Sabbath regulations are quite a separate question.

I am tempted to say that if a reader who claims to have found “multiple inaccuracies” can offer nothing less trivial than this, he (or she) is bluffing, and I’m even more convinced of the argument of the post than I was before. But no, I shouldn’t go there. I’m not an expert in the Law of Moses, which I’ve found off-putting for much of my life. I’ve read the New Testament much more than the Old, despite its being so much shorter. My Old Testament post was based on some Google searching and reading chapter by chapter, here and there. I haven’t read the entire Mosaic Law from beginning to end, let alone studied it closely. So I could certainly be wrong, and would be grateful to anyone who can explain why. I would be glad to hear of the “multiple inaccuracies,” and to see if they would force me to modify my position, probably not on open borders per se, but on the Mosaic Law’s attitude to open borders. Certainly I have been given no reason to do so yet.

Someone else read the post and wrote to me about it privately. I hope he won’t mind my quoting his letter (if so, I’ll remove it, and I’ll leave him anonymous for now but will be glad to put his name if he wishes it):

[Removed, on second thought, for lack of permission from the person who wrote this to me.]

My reply:

Very interesting, thank you. I don’t know Hebrew and it’s possible that there’s just no way for me to get the exact shades of meaning, but I have read much of the Pentateuch in English translation (not all, I’m sorry to say, perhaps not even half, but a good deal). Could you point to any texts that make this clear? I did kind of get the sense of what you mention… that is, that resident foreigners were subject to the Law to the extent that they were like observant Jews… but there were some texts that seem to point the other way, for example:

Do not eat anything you find already dead. You may give it to the foreigner residing in any of your towns, and they may eat it, or you may sell it to any other foreigner. But you are a people holy to the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 14:21)

In this case, it seems clear that “the foreigner residing in any of your towns” are allowed to eat what observant Jews are not—which would make them, it seems, not the same as observant Jews. Or is this a different word for “foreigner” here, in the Hebrew? In that case, perhaps there are two statuses, say resident convert foreigner versus resident foreigner who just lives there because he lives there, and why not, and anyone by what right would you kick him out? I would also ask whether the term convert is anachronistic—or at least, whether what the word “convert” means to me, as a Christian, would be anachronistic as applied to Old Testament Judaism. The Jews of Old Testament times had a definite marker of who was “in” and who was “out”—circumcision—but by its nature that can only apply to females, so it’s not clear what it would mean in the story of Ruth. Anyway, very interesting, you’ve provoked me to take a closer look sometime.

Of course, the larger point is that this correspondent’s version of what the Mosaic Law claims doesn’t really undermine the case for open borders at all. Suppose the US were to implement a policy saying that anyone can come to the US, as long as they agree to abide by US laws and participate in national festivals like fireworks on the 4th of July. Surely that would qualify as advocating open borders! It seems to me, then, that ancient Israel did allow foreigners simply to enter without impediment, and they were not even completely bound by the rules of Israel, but there may have been some scope to convert to Judaism, a process akin to naturalization (though here I’m less sure). All the verses about “resident aliens” do seem to cross-apply directly to a modern case for open borders. Indeed, I don’t see how I can escape the conclusion that the Old Testament advocates an even stronger form of open borders than I do. And of course I only covered a small part of the Old Testament. Here’s another perhaps relevant passage:

2: 1 This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem:

2In the last days

the mountain  of the Lord’s temple will be established     as the highest of the mountains;it will be exalted  above the hills,     and all nations will stream to it.

3 Many peoples  will come and say,

“Come, let us go   up to the mountain   of the Lord,     to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways,     so that we may walk in his paths.” The law   will go out from Zion,     the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 4 He will judge  between the nations     and will settle disputes  for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares     and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation,     nor will they train for war anymore.

5 Come, descendants of Jacob,     let us walk in the light  of the Lord. (Isaiah 2:1-5)

So the prophet Isaiah envisions a future in which “all nations will stream to” the mountain of the Lord, which seems to mean Jerusalem; many peoples are exhorting one another to go there, in order to walk in the ways of the Lord. Admittedly, this is a prophecy for a vaguely envisioned and distant future, but that doesn’t seem to help all that much. Isaiah clearly regards this as desirable. What would Isaiah’s attitude be towards a policy that, when the nations resolved to come to Israel and learn its ways, set up passport controls that prevented them from coming? Can there be any doubt that he would regard such a policy as intolerable?

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Open borders and world government

August 27, 2012 by 2 Comments

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

One of the concerns that some (not many) restrictionists occasionally express regarding open borders is that by weakening national boundaries, open borders put us on a slippery slope toward world government. See here and here for instance. While this concern seems mistaken to me, I think it highlights a few important things.

There are two ways of getting rid of vast disparities in the price of a good across different parts of a region. One is to fix a single, uniform price across the entire region and enforce this through regulatory fiat. If, indeed, this is possible. The other is to reduce, as far as possible, the barriers that prevent the good from being transported between the different parts of the region, and then rely on the market’s law of one price to cause the prices to converge. While the law of one price doesn’t work perfectly, it does lead to some convergence in prices and reduction of the vast disparities. Its main advantage over regulatory price-fixing is that it’s better at yielding a correct, efficiency-enhancing choice of price point, and avoid the problems of surplus or shortfalls inherent in regulatory price-fixing.

You can probably see where I am going with this. There are vast disparities in the price of otherwise identical labor across the world (see place premium). These price differences are due to the differing legal and regulatory frameworks, infrastructures, and cultures across the world. One way of trying to fix the problem is to try to fix the issues with different legal and regulatory systems one by one. The most elegant (for some) way of achieving this is world government: have a single government on top that enforces a legal and regulatory framework and promises a certain infrastructure across the world. Another way of trying to fix the problem is to massively reduce the restrictions and barriers placed on migration. While neither will lead to complete elimination of the place premium, the latter approach, when tried, has led to labor market convergence.

The main advantage of freedom of motion rather than the imposition of a uniform standard is that laws and regulatory frameworks cannot be determined by fiat. Like prices, laws need to be discovered through an exploratory process where some things are tried, then altered based on feedback, or borrowed from elsewhere, then adapted. A single world government would mean a single point of failure. The effect of bad laws would be hard to see because there is no control group to check against.

So now, getting to the question of whether open borders will lead to world government. This is very similar to the question of whether unfettered free markets lead to monopolies. I think the answer to the second question is, generally speaking, no, and by analogy, the answer to the first question should also be no. It’s obviously possible to construct arguments that there are various efficiencies of scale with government that make it a “natural monopoly” but it isn’t clear that these arguments carry more weight than the arguments that cut in the other direction — namely that governments that deal with smaller populations tend to be more responsive to the needs of the populations and the populations themselves tend to participate in government to a greater degree and with higher rationality (because they have a higher probability of influencing the outcome).

That being said, there may be a role for various international agencies and advisory bodies to help govern and coordinate international labor flows. In his article Open Borders with Migration Taxes are the Best Policy (which he blogs about here), Nathan Smith proposes the creation of a World Migration Organization which would play a role analogous to the World Trade Organization.

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More on IQ and immigration: Collins, ParaPundit, LGDL

August 24, 2012 by 2 Comments

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

A while back, I blogged about Lynn and Vanhanen’s book Intelligence in a blog post titled intelligence, international development, and immigration. L&V’s earlier books have been important references in many restrictionist arguments based on the alleged IQ deficit of immigrants, so critiquing L&V’s work is crucial to the immigration debate. My basic thesis was that whereas IQ might be quite important in explaining the creation of technology, sustaining and benefiting from technology is less sensitive to IQ, and low IQ people can benefit from new, improved technologies quite well. I asked Garett Jones, a researcher on the nexus of IQ and economics, to comment on my blog post, and I subsequently published another blog post including his response and my further thoughts.

Since then, I’ve discovered some other writings on the web that touch on this issue. I’ll mention them briefly.

  • Immigration externalities, a blog post by Jason Collins where he lays out the key points of contention between competing hypotheses: the intermediating role of institutions, and the debate about whether it is the high IQ fraction or the low IQ fraction that is more predictive. I recall that some of Heiner Rindemann’s results suggest that the high IQ fraction may be more predictive, but I don’t think anything definitive can be said yet.
  • Benthamite Libertarian Collectivists Wrong On Open Borders, a blog post by Randall Parker (for ParaPundit) that offers a number of standard arguments against immigration, including the welfare objection, cheap labor leading to a technological slowdown, crime, and political externalities. The post also links to many other standard restrictionist IQ-based arguments, so it’s worth a read.
  • Smart Fraction Theory II by La Griffe Du Lion, which posits an explanation for how national IQ differences lead to differences in the trajectories of nations.

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IMF/World Bank Conditionality and Open Borders

August 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

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

Suppose a country can’t pay its bills. It has a lot of outstanding debt coming due, and it doesn’t have sufficient reserves to pay it. Nor can it find lenders willing to buy its debt. Without money, it will have to stop paying social security checks, interest on bonds, or salaries of civil servants, teachers, and doctors. The problem may take the form of a currency crisis, if the country is trying to maintain a pegged exchange rate which is under attack by forex traders, or simply a debt crisis. It could try to raise taxes, but that would be likely to depress the economy further. Catastrophe looms.

A lot of countries have found themselves in this situation. It’s basically where Greece has been for the past few years, and more recently Ireland, Portugal, to some extent Italy and Spain. Asian countries found themselves in a position like this in the late 1990s. So did Brazil and Argentina. Typically they go to the IMF, which is the official fire-fighter for these kinds of situations. The IMF will provide money, conditional on some reforms that are expected to improve the country’s ability to pay in future. In return, the IMF provides an immediate injection of cash to pay creditors and dispel the crisis. Often the reforms the IMF imposes are unpopular. They may also be necessary and/or beneficial. Asia recovered strongly after the IMF’s intervention in 1997-98, though whether the IMF deserves much or any credit for that is controversial.

Anyway, I doubt this has ever entered the IMF’s collective head– though possibly I’ve blogged about it before, I forget– but in principle, one of the reforms the IMF could demand in return for assistance during crises is an opening of the borders to more immigrants. Though no one thinks about it this way, every country in the world is foregoing a perhaps substantial revenue source by not allowing foreigners to come and receive working visas in return for paying either just ordinary taxes or perhaps special surtaxes of one sort or another. If the IMF were to demand that a country permit more immigrants to enter, it would be operating very much within the proper scope of its responsibilities as a creditor. It could then offer technical assistance to help the countries set up the institutional means to register guest workers and establish credible legal protections for their rights going forward. The policy would be somewhat counter-intuitive in countries which are going through crises and probably have high unemployment. But foreign workers are likely to be complements to, rather than substitutes for, domestic workers. Some may be entrepreneurs, bringing investment capital and know-how with them, and creating jobs upon arrival. If the policy is unpopular, well, imposing unpopular but wise policies and taking the heat for them is what the IMF is for.

The World Bank isn’t a crisis fire-fighter in the same way the IMF is, but it, too, might be able to play a role in liberalizing the world’s borders. It could encourage to be hospitable to immigrants, both to help the immigrants– “Our dream is a world free of poverty” is the World Bank’s motto– and to facilitate economic development in the host countries. It could monitor inter-ethnic frictions that arise and look for ways to ameliorate them. In some cases, migration might mitigate existing inter-ethnic frictions by giving societies more of a “melting pot” character. As I’ve previously suggested, it could promote and administrate passport-free charter cities.

The World Bank and IMF are staid, groupthinky organizations that don’t pioneer radical ideas. They strive for internal consensus, the content of which they derive from the views of global elites seasoned with bright ideas from academia and from NGO activists. They’d only do this if the tide of ideas swung strongly in the direction of open borders. Not that open borders would have to become standard policy for the IMF and World Bank to make them part of the development agenda, but that there would have to be powerful, widespread, deep-rooted sympathy for the goal of liberalizing migration.

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New paper on open borders by John Kennan

August 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

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

John Kennan has come out with a NBER paper titled Open Borders (ungated PDF). The paper is heavy on mathematical economics, and adds to a growing literature that indicates that relaxing immigration restrictions would have massive utilitarian benefits while the negative effect on native wages would be small. I haven’t had time to go through the paper in detail, but here’s the abstract:

There is a large body of evidence indicating that cross-country differences in income levels are associated with differences in productivity. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, restrictions on immigration lead to large efficiency losses. The paper quantifies these losses, using a model in which efficiency differences are labor-augmenting, and free trade in product markets leads to factor price equalization, so that wages are equal across countries when measured in efficiency units of labor. The estimated gains from removing immigration restrictions are huge. Using a simple static model of migration costs, the estimated net gains from open borders are about the same as the gains from a growth miracle that more than doubles the income level in less-developed countries.

While you’re reading the literature on open borders, check out the pro-open borders reading list on this site, which includes a mix of web articles, research papers, and books. If there’s one research paper on open borders you should read, it is Michael Clemens’ “trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk” paper (ungated PDF).

H/T: Arnold Kling

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“The Right of a Nation to Exist”

August 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment

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

Open borders is sometimes attacked as a threat to “the right of a nation to exist.” I seem to remember this phrase from various arguments, but I don’t recall any linkable example off the top of my head, however, a critic of Bryan Caplan quoted in Vipul’s recent post says something close to it: “You have to be a special kind of genius to fail to understand basic points like: nation-states exist, and have borders, and have a fundamental interest in controlling those borders, meaning, ideally, via law enforcement.” Of course, an interest is not the same thing as a right– I may have an interest in taking your car, but not a right to do so– so this commenter isn’t articulating the notion of a “right of a nation to exist” which I wish here to critique. However, he seems to implicitly assume this. After all, if it is not presumed that nations have a right to control their borders, to assert that they have an interest in doing so is irrelevant.

Now, I would assert that rights belong only to individuals, or at least that they belong most fundamentally to individuals, and the rights of collective entities such as nations are derived from individual rights. I won’t attempt to prove that in this post. Rather, I will point out some problems with the notion of “the right of a nation to exist.”

Suppose that 99% of the residents of Germany express an intention to emigrate to friendly countries, say Britain, France, and the USA, which agree to accept them as immigrants. Suppose further that the 1% of the German population which will be left behind is too small to sustain national life. To sustain basic services and cultivate the land, they will have to let in English-speaking immigrants, and the German language will soon become nearly useless and probably extinct in a couple of generations. Does this decision by individual Germans violate the right of the German nation to exist? Could Germany justly prohibit the emigration of these people, in order to secure the continuance of its national life? Read more of this post

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Undocumented No Longer

August 21, 2012 by 2 Comments

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

I welcomed Obama’s “DREAM decree,” which just took effect on August 15th, with an article at The American entitled “A Face for the Faceless.” In it, I celebrated the career of Jose Antonio Vargas (life story, blog posts about him on Open Borders), characterizing his stance and that of the movement he is leading as civil disobedience:

By coming out publicly, Jose Antonio Vargas and many others have transformed the lawbreaking of illegal immigration into something heroic—civil disobedience. They have become, to adapt an exquisite phrase from writer David Bentley Hart, “a face for the faceless.”

Hart, describing the impact of Christianity on the culture of the late Roman Empire, writes that “to the literate classes of late antiquity … a rustic could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man’s sympathy,” and that the story, in the Gospels, of Peter weeping after he denied Christ on the eve of the Crucifixion, would “likely have seemed like an aesthetic mistake.” By contrast, in the Gospels and other Christian texts, “we see something beginning to emerge from darkness into full visibility, arguably for the first time in history: the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of an infinite value.” (Hart, p. 167)

To feel human sympathy for someone makes it much harder to abuse, exploit, or brutalize them, or in general, to do unto them as one would not have others do unto oneself. Over time, though sometimes with terrible tardiness, this new appreciation of human dignity has altered man and society, making charity more urgent and beautiful, making slavery first anomalous and then untenable.

I also explore the charge that Obama’s DREAM decree is a violation of the principle of “rule of law”: Read more of this post

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Optimistic futility arguments against open borders

August 20, 2012 by 1 Comment

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

In the past, I’ve addressed Roy Beck’s argument on the futility of open borders. There is, however, another direction of argument that comes from an optimistic, rather than pessimistic, view of the future.

This argument emphasizes the rapid strides being made in the elimination of world poverty, improvement in other human development measures, and progress of technology around the world. The end of 2010 saw a lot of celebratory articles about the past decade and the promise of the future (such as this). One website aims to end poverty by 2015, and their ambitious blueprint doesn’t include open borders or anything close. The Global Poverty Project uses a simple line fitting to estimate that poverty can be ended by 2040 or so, provided the right steps are taken — steps that don’t involve significant changes to immigration policies (see here and here). Open borders advocate Bryan Caplan thinks that, even without a shift to an open borders policy, absolute poverty will be completely eliminated and living standards will be much higher a hundred years from now.

If open borders advocacy does significantly open world borders, the process is likely to take at least 15-30 years. If all the things that people are already doing will lead to the elimination of poverty within 15-30 years, doesn’t that dramatically undercut the end of poverty argument for open borders? And once poverty is eliminated, won’t the pressure for open borders dissipate considerably? Perhaps open borders will be rendered redundant, and so there’s no point working oneself up over them?

This argument has some merit, but I list here some counter-arguments.

Open borders now help people now, and 15-30 fewer years of poverty mean a lot

If open borders can solve the problem of world poverty more rapidly, then they’re worth it. It’s true that completely open borders will take a long time to achieve. But even minor, partial reductions in migration restrictions that can help a few people would be a meaningful improvement in their lives. Read more of this post

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The moral foundations of immigration restrictionism

August 20, 2012 by 6 Comments

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

It recently occurred to me that it would be interesting to try to interpret the seemingly irreconcilable differences in worldview between open borders advocates and restrictionists in terms of moral foundations theory. This theory has been developed by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, and others. It attempts to identify the different foundations that people draw upon to make moral judgments and how people differ in the extent to which they draw upon the foundations. Quoting from the website, there are six moral foundations:

  1. Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
  2. Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
  3. Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.
  4. Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
  5. Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
  6. Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

A crude summary would be that welfare-state liberals are focused on (1) and (2), libertarians are almost completely focused on (3) (with a bit of (1) and (2)) and conservatives are somewhat concerned about all foundations.

How does this picture fit open borders advocates and restrictionists? A first guess is that since restrictionists have tended to be more on the conservative side, restrictionists draw significantly upon all moral foundations. In contrast, open borders advocates tend to be either libertarians or liberals (and some economic conservatives) which indicates that they draw upon foundations (1)-(3). This suggests that there are a number of arguments that restrictionists would make as moral arguments but which open borders advocates wouldn’t consider “moral arguments” at all because they draw upon foundations that aren’t recognized as sources of morality.

I think the data bear these out. In the rest of this post, I consider the three moral foundations that are employed to much greater effect by restrictionists.

Loyalty/betrayal (in-group)

This foundation is employed quite a bit by restrictionists. Most of the objections to the libertarian case as well as the philosophical bases for anti-immigration arguments such as citizenism, territorialism, and nation as family employ the foundation of loyalty to one’s nation. Obviously, many open borders advocates spend time touting the benefits to immigrant-receiving countries. But possibly due to negativity bias, and the fact that the harms claimed by restrictionists are far more dramatic than the gains claimed by open borders advocates, the restrictionist arguments seem more salient.

There is another factor at play here. Most open borders advocates are (rightly) unapologetic about considering the substantial benefits to migrants when making the case for open borders. But strong in-group loyalty coupled with a zero-sum mindset might make this argument backfire. More indirectly, it might lead some of those with strong national loyalties to suspect that those advocating for open borders are traitors of some sort and that even their arguments about benefits to the nation are the result of spin.

There is also a huge divide between restrictionists who see loyalty to one’s nation as paramount and some open borders advocates who view national loyalty as no more a deep moral requirement than loyalty to one’s sports team. Read more of this post

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Garett Jones responds to my intelligence post

August 20, 2012 by 29 Comments

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

[UPDATE: Check out Nathan's related post Immigration and Institutions]

In my previous post on intelligence, international development, and immigration, I referenced some of the writings of Garett Jones. I sent an email to Jones asking him for his thoughts on the post, and he replied with the following email:

A very nice, thoughtful post. Thank you for giving my writings a careful reading. Much appreciated.

I’d have one critique of your claim, one that is common to many supporters of freer low-skill immigration.

You claim that institutions are important, something I agree with. And you claim that low IQ populations tend to have bad institutions, partly because of the low IQ population, again something I agree with.

But from there you conclude that low-IQ immigrants should be allowed to come to countries with good institutions. That might be reasonable as a moral case but I’m no expert on morality so I’ll leave that to others.

I would emphasize a different conclusion: That the low-IQ immigrants will tend to worsen the institutions of the higher-IQ countries they move to. Low IQ immigrants will, to some degree, tend to make the country they move to more like the country they came from.

Partly this will be due to MRV and Caplan/Miller reasons: low IQ groups vote for bad policies. Partly it’s because they will tend to elect individuals from their constituencies, which will, on average, tend to lower the average IQ of the legislature. And partly it’s because the bureaucracy will tend to hire individuals from low-skill groups, which will lower government quality.

For these and other reasons, new low IQ citizens impose a tax on the nation’s institutions, and this institutional cost should be counted in a candid cost-benefit analysis.

*Shorter version: Good institutions are rare treasures, and institutions are endogenous with respect to (among other things) citizen IQ. *
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Again, many thanks for drawing attention to my work, much appreciated.

I think Jones is correct, particularly for those aspects of institutions that are determined through electoral political processes (for more on the political externalities arguments made by restrictionists, see political externalities). I should have acknowledged more explicitly in my original post. This concern would have less applicability to market processes or to those aspects of the law that are deeply entrenched and less subject to political change. [UPDATE: Nathan Smith's comment below reminded me that I should mention the following: even for those of you who consider the political externalities case to be serious, there are keyhole solutions to the problem such as guest worker programs that allow people to migrate to work but don't given them voting rights. The focus of this post, however, is to consider the strength of the concern per se, not to propose remedies.]

I still stand by the key point of the original post, namely, that sustaining high quality institutions is a lot easier than creating high quality institutions, and even low IQ people would be able to discern that institutions in the country they migrate to are better than institutions in the country they migrated from, which would limit (but not eliminate) their desire to recreate the situation of their source country.

To make my point a little clearer, I’m arguing that it’s a lot harder to improve a country’s poor institutions by importing a lot of high IQ people than it is to sustain a country’s good institutions even allowing low IQ immigration (importing the institutions themselves might work — that’s the hope behind charter cities). In a sense, I’m arguing that institutions have their own inertia. This argument can be thought of as a version of status quo bias, and it has been made by Bryan Caplan in his digest version of the political externalities of open borders, where he writes (emphasis added by me):

2. The political effect of immigrants on markets and liberty is at worst modestly negative. The median American isn’t a libertarian, and the median immigrant isn’t a Stalinist. We’re talking about marginal disagreements between social democrats, nothing more. Immigrants’ low voter turnout and status quo bias further dilute immigrants’ negative political effect.

I’m actually arguing something slightly stronger: institutions have their own inertia, but good institutions have more inertia than poor institutions, even with low IQ populations, because people can see the results and tell the difference, at least when it’s sufficiently dramatic. They may misdiagnose the causes, and may even misjudge minor differences. But they’re unlikely to undo all the gains achieved through improved institutions.

In Jones’ language, my framing of his assertions that “institutions are endogenous to (among other things) a country’s IQ” would be that it is changes in institutions that are endogenous to a country’s IQ.

That said, I do agree with Jones that, viewed solely from the angle of the quality of institutions in the target country, immigration of low IQ people could have a negative impact, or, even if not a direct negative impact, an “opportunity cost” (i.e., institutions don’t improve as rapidly as they otherwise might).

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Intelligence, international development, and immigration

August 19, 2012 by 10 Comments

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

For background reading on the topic of IQ as an objection to immigration, see IQ deficit.

I recently learned from Arnold Kling’s blog post of a new book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen titled Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences (buy here). The book is an extension of earlier work by Lynn and Vanhanen, including IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Wikipedia page).

In IQ and the Wealth of Nations Lynn and Vanhanen introduce the concept of “national IQ” — the average IQ of a nation — and then attempt to demonstrate that national IQ is correlated with a number of measures of national per capita wealth. They then try to argue that at least part of the correlation is causal from IQ to per capita wealth. Controlling for IQ, they find that the extent to which an economy is a free market economy is the best predictor of national wealth. Roughly, they contend that national IQs explain about 1/3 of the variation in national wealth, market orientation explains another 1/3 of the variation, and the remaining 1/3 is explained by a host of other factors (which they don’t attempt to enumerate in full).

In Intelligence, Lynn and Vanhanen extend the analysis beyond wealth to various other measures of well being including health measures, water access, democratization, crime, and happiness. They argue that IQ can explain a significant portion of each of these (though in some cases it is not as significant) and conventional explanations such as market orientation and specific historical events can account for some of the residual. Their overall thesis is that intelligence should be treated as a unifying construct and explanatory variable across a wide range of social sciences, akin to the way that concepts from physics have explanatory power across all domains of the natural sciences.

While L&V’s thesis is new, I think that they make reasonable arguments and attempt to address all the prima facie objections one may have. How well they succeed, and whether their thesis withstands further empirical assault, is not something I feel confident to comment upon. However, I think that L&V sometimes draw the wrong conclusions from their data on the rare occasions that they try to discuss the implications for international development.

Although I don’t have any credentials in this area, I’ve relied, in addition to L&V, on the research of Garett Jones, who largely agrees with the L&V framework but tries to dig deeper into the mechanisms by which IQ might play a causal role in creating wealth. While the synthesis I present is largely my own, it relies on Jones’ work to quite an extent.

Also note: my critique of some of the conclusions that L&V (and others) draw from their work presupposes, for simplicity’s sake, that L&V’s overall framework is correct. Even if it isn’t, and IQ is not as powerful an explanatory variable as claimed, my arguments may still work in a modified sense (replacing IQ by whatever X factor is driving national differences).

National IQs versus individual IQs

Jones, L&V, and many other students of national IQs have argued that there is a relationship between national IQ and economic measures, and that this relationship is logarithmic: a one point increase in national IQ leads to a fixed proportional increase in productivity, hence also in per capita GDP and other measures. However, one of the remarkable findings is that the effects at the national level are much more salient than the effects at the individual level. Read more of this post

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Wars of liberation versus open borders

August 18, 2012 by 7 Comments

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

Open borders advocate Bryan Caplan talks about good and bad arguments for pacifism in his blog post How Not to Be a Pacifist. The blog post talks about the Vietnam War and the morality of US intervention in the conflict. Caplan argues that while there were strong humanitarian reasons to oppose the communist regime in Vietnam, these ends would have been better served through a policy of open borders in the US for refugees from Vietnam. He bolsters his case by considering the 300 days of open borders between North and South Vietnam.

The case that emigration is an important weapon in the battle against communist and other tyrannical regimes has been made elsewhere as well, but Caplan’s argument adds a new twist by comparing open borders with wars of liberation. My paraphrasing of his argument would be that if you think that a humanitarian injustice justifies a military intervention (war of liberation) you should also think it justifies open borders for the victims of that injustice. With this in mind, let’s look at the chart of possibilities for a person’s attitudes towards wars of liberation and open borders:

Rows represent attitudes to wars of liberations, columns represent attitude to open borders for victims Support open borders for victims of tyrannical regimes Oppose open borders for victims of tyrannical regimes
Support wars of liberation Uncommon, but consistent. Found among some neoconservatives and internationalists (liberal and libertarian). Example: My co-blogger Nathan Smith (his views on Iraq) Common, but inconsistent. Include significant fraction of mainstream US conservatives
Oppose wars of liberation Uncommon, but consistent. Example: Bryan Caplan (blog post) Uncommon, but consistent. Found among paleoconservatives, some isolationist liberals. Example: Steve Sailer (article)

The top right quadrant — support wars of liberation but oppose immigration — is the most interesting because it seems prima facie inconsistent, yet is widely held by a large number of people who identify themselves as conservative in the United States. Unfortunately, I don’t have any convincing theory or idea to explain this inconsistency.

UPDATE: See also the immigration and wars of liberation page on this site and a related piece by Jacob Hornberger.

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