This is a guest post by Michael Huemer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Huemer’s webpage is here. His paper Is There A Right To Immigrate? has been referenced at many places on the Open Borders site, particularly on the starving Marvin page. Huemer’s most recent book, The Problem of Political Authority, argues against political authority and for the proposition that anarcho-capitalism is a superior and feasible alternative to the status quo of nation-states. It received a rave review from fellow anarcho-capitalist and open borders advocate Bryan Caplan.
Vipul Naik invited me to contribute a post, and he suggested (among other possible topics) addressing the citizenist argument against open borders. As most readers probably know, this argument claims that the state is justified in closing its borders to foreigners because the state has special duties to promote the interests of its own current citizens, duties that it does not owe toward anyone who is not presently a citizen.
This citizenist argument has three main problems. First, it’s unclear why we should think the government has these special duties. Second, even if the government has special duties to its citizens, the citizenist argument requires arbitrarily privileging some citizens over others. Third, even if we ignore the previous two problems, the citizenist argument doesn’t work because one’s having special duties toward certain people does not make it permissible to violate the rights of other people.
I. Does the State Have a Duty to Benefit Citizens?
To begin with, then, why do citizenists believe that the government has special duties to its current citizens? Some just assert this without argument (see, e.g., Steve Sailer). Others appeal to the social contract theory (see, e.g., Sonic Charmer): maybe the social contract requires the government to serve the interests of its own citizens.
Sonic Charmer also pointed out the most obvious problem with this argument (though it doesn’t stop Sonic from embracing the argument anyway):
[A]ll Smart People think the ‘social contract’ is nonsense and couldn’t possibly imagine anyone with a brain believing in it. The whole idea that the basis and legitimacy of a government comes from anything resembling a ‘social contract’ is totally out of favor, and indeed is considered to have been long ago fully and definitively discredited by (whoever … some professor I think).
I could not have said it better. I know of no living person who works on political authority and thinks that we actually have a valid social contract. And I say that after having just written a book on political authority that contains 359 references.
Very briefly, contracts, in any other context, satisfy at least the following four principles: (i) all parties to a contract must have a reasonable way of opting out (without being forced to give up things of great value that belong to them), (ii) explicit, up front statements of non-agreement should generally be recognized as a way of not accepting a contract, (iii) an action cannot be interpreted as signaling agreement, if the terms of the contract would have been imposed on the agent regardless of whether they performed that action or not, and (iv) contracts generally require both parties to undertake enforceable obligations to each other, and if one party repudiates or simply fails to uphold its obligations under the contract, the other party is no longer bound to hold up their end either. The “social contract” violates all of these principles, and blatantly so. This is discussed at length in my recent book, The Problem of Political Authority, chapter 2. This is why I say that the “social contract” bears no resemblance to real contracts, as understood in any other context. If you took someone to court for an alleged “breach of contract”, no court in the world would recognize a claim of contractual obligation if you had nothing better than the sort of arguments that social contract theorists have relied upon.
But let’s say you don’t care what those annoying egghead intellectuals say. They’re always trying to convince us of ridiculous things, like that the Earth is round and that we came from monkeys. There’s a social contract, arguments to the contrary be damned! Okay, but what does the contract require? Here are two views:
- The contract requires the government to promote our interests, in general, in any manner it can think of. Now, even when the social contract theory was popular, I don’t think anyone held this view of it. Usually, when you make a contract with someone, you contract for some reasonably specific service, not a completely general “promotion of your interests.” Citizenists like to compare the government’s duties to fiduciary duties, for example, the duty that a lawyer might owe to a client. But while a lawyer is required to serve his client’s interests, he is required to do this only in certain ways, within a certain domain – roughly, speaking, the legal domain. Your lawyer isn’t supposed to make sure you eat right, or smooth things over with your girlfriend, or get you a promotion at your workplace. Similarly, the social contract theorists, back when the theory was taken seriously, thought that we hired the government to provide a relatively specific service – protection from rights-violators. And there is a good reason for thus restricting the government’s mandate: to authorize the government to “promote society’s interests in any manner” is a prescription for totalitarianism. There is essentially nothing that the government wouldn’t claim to be covered by that mandate (whatever they do, they always claim that they’re serving society’s interests).
- Thus, we return to what the social contract theorists actually thought: the contract requires the government to protect the rights of individuals against both domestic aggressors (criminals) and foreign aggressors (invaders). In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that it was “to secure these rights” (namely, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) that “governments are instituted among men.” How could this lead to the conclusion that the social contract requires the government to restrict immigration? Steve Sailer writes:
[O]ur politicians have a moral obligation to the current citizens and their descendents to preserve the scarcity value of their right to live in America. […] Uncontrolled immigration, […] by driving up the supply of labor and the demand for housing is importing Latin American levels of inequality into immigrant-inundated states such as California.
But the mandate to protect our rights says nothing about the government being required to try to keep your wages high. It doesn’t say that the government has to make sure you get a job. It doesn’t say the government has to keep real estate prices low, or try to preserve the kind of culture that you like. Nor do the majority of immigration proponents think that those things are the government’s job in general.
I can’t catalog all the reasons that someone might offer for immigration restriction, but let’s just say that the most commonly offered reasons obviously fall flat, even if you accept a social contract theory, on the most common traditional understanding of the terms of the social contract. It would be the burden of the citizenist to explain how the social contract authorizes immigration restriction – a burden they have thus far not discharged.
II. Does Immigration Restriction Benefit Citizens?
But okay, let’s say you’re not convinced by that. You still think the government has to promote our interests in general, without restriction. The second problem with the citizenist argument is that it requires arbitrarily privileging some citizens over others. Because of course, some citizens (probably the majority) would benefit from increased immigration, while only some would suffer. Some employers want to hire immigrant labor. Some current citizens have family or friends in foreign countries and would like their family and friends to join them here. These are serious, rational interests. Furthermore, of course, consumers benefit from lower prices as a result of businesses’ ability to hire inexpensive immigrant labor. There are a few occupations – those into which immigrants are disproportionately likely to enter – where wages are slightly depressed as a result of immigration. If you are in one of those occupations, you are worse off because of immigration. But no one else is adversely affected, and almost everyone else in the country is made at least slightly better off.
I am not an economist, so I am not going to spend a lot of time discussing why that is true. Instead, I will rest with these remarks:
- The vast majority of economists agree that immigration helps the economy overall. For more, see the economist consensus page on the site, Caplan’s discussion in The Myth of the Rational Voter (58-9), and Julian Simon’s discussion in The Economic Consequences of Immigration (357-61).
- If you think that the community of economists is wrong about some question of economics, and especially if you think this while being ignorant of their reasons, then almost certainly you’re the one who is wrong.
But now you might say, “Okay, immigration benefits most citizens, and it helps the economy overall, but it’s harmful to some very poor people, and the poor take priority over the rest of society.” Now, I think this view is wrong. I think there are no good arguments for the claim that the poor should take precedence over the rest of society. (For what I think of Rawls’ arguments on this subject, see again my book, The Problem of Political Authority, this time chapter 3.) But let’s say that you still think the poor have to take precedence. Okay. But since immigration is overall beneficial to current citizens – with even larger net benefits if you include the benefits enjoyed by the immigrants themselves – that means that a wealth-redistribution should be possible such that everyone, including the very poor, winds up better off. In other words: the government should be able to just slightly increase taxes on everyone else (including the new immigrants), give the money to the poor, low-skilled workers, and everyone will be better off. There’s no need to keep the immigrants out. For more, see Nathanael Smith’s blog post and DRITI proposal.
III. Can Special Duties Override Other People’s Rights?
Okay, let’s say you haven’t bought any of my arguments so far. Somehow, you still think citizenism gives us a reason to restrict immigration. Let’s say I grant you everything I’ve disputed so far: There is a social contract. And it tells the government to promote our interests in general. The egghead economists are all wrong, and immigration somehow harms the economy overall.
This still doesn’t justify restricting immigration. Why not? Because having special duties to A does not cancel your ordinary duties to B. Let’s say you have special duties to your daughter. You have to provide for her needs in a way that you don’t have to provide for a stranger’s needs. This doesn’t mean that, when you have children, somehow your obligations to everyone else (or everyone to whom you don’t have some special relationship) are canceled. You can’t now abuse strangers to your heart’s content, just because they’re not your daughter. For example: if your daughter is cold, you should buy a jacket for her, before buying one for your neighbor’s daughter. But you may not steal a jacket from your neighbor’s daughter to give it to your own daughter.
Similarly, the state’s special duties to promote its own citizens’ interests, even if we believe there are such duties, do not negate the rights of non-citizens, nor do they mean that the state may abuse foreigners to its heart’s content as long as doing so serves the interests of citizens. For example, the government can not justly make war on another society to capture slaves and give them to its own citizens, even if the current citizens want slaves and would benefit from having them.
Now the chief argument for open borders, at least in my own work on the subject, is that immigration restrictions violate the rights of potential immigrants. Here is a simple statement of the argument:
- Individuals have a prima facie right to be free from harmful coercion.
Comment: Roughly speaking, you can’t use force to impose harms on someone else, without having a good reason. If you do, you’re violating that person’s rights. This seems to me to be about the least controversial rights claim that one could make (and pretty close to the least controversial moral claim in general). - Immigration restrictions are harmful and coercive to potential immigrants.
Comment: Immigration restrictions are not merely polite requests (“we would prefer that you not migrate here”), nor are they mere passive refusals to assist someone. The government specifically hires armed guards to forcibly exclude people from the territory, to forcibly remove people from the territory, and to punish people who assist illegal immigrants. - Therefore, prima facie, immigration restrictions violate the rights of potential immigrants.
I go on from there to explain why the traditional arguments for restriction fail to override the right to be free from harmful coercion. I won’t go into that here. For now, the important point is this: the citizenist view provides no response to my argument against immigration restrictions. The claim that the government has special duties to its citizens does nothing to counter either of the above premises, and it does nothing to explain why the government would be justified in violating the rights of non-citizens, just to secure small benefits for citizens.
We can extend the analogy of the parent-daughter relation a little farther: let’s say that your daughter is planning a trip to the local marketplace to buy some bread. You also know that Starving Marvin is about to go to the same marketplace to buy some bread. Marvin is much poorer and much hungrier than your daughter. Nevertheless, you decide that, because you have special duties to your daughter, it would be a good idea to forcibly stop Marvin from traveling to the marketplace, to prevent him from slightly bidding up the price of bread.
This action would clearly be wrong, notwithstanding your special duties to your daughter. Again, the reason is simply that those special duties do not take away the rights of everyone who isn’t your daughter.
Conclusion
To sum up, here is why the citizenist argument for immigration restriction fails:
- The social contract theory is wrong, so it can’t ground citizenism.
- Even if the social contract theory were true, the state wouldn’t have a general duty to benefit citizens, but only a specific duty to protect citizens from rights violations. This would not include restricting immigration.
- Immigration restrictions are harmful to most citizens, and harmful to the economy overall.
- Even if we give priority to the few citizens who are harmed by immigration, we could still make everyone better off without restricting immigration.
- Immigration restriction is a rights-violation, and special duties to some person or group do not justify one in violating the rights of other people.
Wow, it’s fun to find myself so much in agreement with someone. All this is very similar to my general argument for open borders, but stated with extraordinary clarity. By the way, I just bought your book. I was procrastinating because I thought I might get it for my birthday.
The point where I was closest to dissenting was where you dismissed the social contract theory of government as untenable. However, I don’t really dissent. In Principles of a Free Society, I do argue that a social contract COULD be a legitimate basis for government, in principle, I examine the historicity of the social contract and conclude:
“So while the the concept of a social contract is by no means destitute of historicity, it is doubtful whether any polity in the history of the world, and in particular whether any modern polity, can truly claim to ‘derive its… powers from the consent of the governed.’ And an examination of free-rider problems cast doubt on whether any government every could.” (p. 19)
And yet I still want the social contract to do some work:
“‘Government by the consent of the governed’ turns out to be, after all, not a practical plan, but an unattainable ideal. Yet real governments may be nearer to, or further from, that ideal. The burden of government coercion may be larger or smaller; the degree of consent by citizens, greater or less. And we can make some generalizations about what features of governments position them closer to, or further from, the consensual ideal.” (p. 22)
So while I’m less embarrassed by the social contract theory than you seem to be, and think it has some value, I’m not an exception to your claim that “no living person who works on political authority and thinks that we actually have a valid social contract.”
The other position where I’d resist your argument a little bit is on the economist consensus. The basic theorems from the analysis of free trade can be adapted to show that natives as a whole will benefit from free migration, too; that’s fairly watertight as far as it goes, and even economists unfriendly to immigration like George Borjas tend to buy into that. But the wealth and poverty of nations is still a rather mysterious phenomenon, and there are “institutional” factors which might depend on the composition of the population, such that open borders might reduce “total factor” productivity. Or it might raise it. The point is that there’s room for legitimate worry. Economists know that there are certain biases inherent in their methods, and that sometimes gives them a reason to be wary of their own conclusions. That is why I think most economists, though pro-immigration, don’t support open borders: there is too much uncertainty. These disclaimers don’t eviscerate your point II (though they may qualify it), for it is essentially certain that some citizens benefit from immigration, and quite likely that on balance the benefits would outweigh the costs. But I wouldn’t want to browbeat people into kowtowing to the economist consensus.
Thanks for citing the DRITI proposal, by the way! It’s a fairly simple exercise in policy design, and when I came up with I assumed it wasn’t original because it was so obvious, but I haven’t come across any prior versions of it, so maybe it’s appropriate for me to be the preferred citation here. Gary Becker advocated migration taxes, but the DRITI proposal is subtly different and I think superior. I think it’s useful for the proposal to become a focus of discussions, because it serves to separate out the distributional issues, on the one hand, from issues of both justice and efficiency, on the other. One way to think of Principles of a Free Society is as a somewhat disproportionally sweeping effort to show that DRITI is not only efficient, but also just, or at least more just than the status quo.
My other vague worry was, if you’re going to argue in this fashion, you’re going to leave government with no warrant for exercising power whatsoever, and where will be then? But that, presumably, is what your book is about, so I’ll find out the answer soon enough.
Thanks for your comments, Nathan. Three brief observations:
1. A social contract is a logically possible source of legitimate political authority. We agree on that. But it’s so unlikely that it would ever happen (since it needs unanimous consent) that we might as well forget about it.
2. Yes, the economist consensus point only addresses economic arguments against immigration (“they’re stealing our jobs!”). It doesn’t address cultural arguments. But I think people who assume that every factor that can’t be precisely modeled or that we don’t have enough empirical evidence to assess really supports their side, deserve a bit of brow-beating.
3. Yes, it turns out in the end that no state is legitimate. Oh, sorry for the spoiler. I won’t spoil any more.
Economists are indeed universally confident about the benefits of immigration, in the short term.
But consider why immigrants want to move to the West. Generally, it’s to take advantage of an economy supported by a political architecture of laws and institutions which ensure that rights are protected and enforced. But given that this architecture is dependent on popular political support as well as local norms like civic duty and cooperativeness, shouldn’t governments sometimes be wary of importing a population whose support for and capability of maintaining these norms is uncertain?
Three thoughts on that. One, it’s not clear whether and how immigrants would damage the institutions that, as you say, they come here to benefit from. Native born people are just here by chance; immigrants specifically chose this country to come to, often at great cost. Therefore, it might be that immigrants have a stronger and more serious appreciation of the American system than native born Americans. (If they didn’t like our institutions, why would they come?) Perhaps you mean that immigrants will destroy our institutions by voting for … Democrats? Or just corrupt politicians?
Second thought: if you’re really worried about voting patterns, you can distinguish residency from citizenship. We could grant legal residency to everyone who wants to come, but make citizenship much more demanding. Most would-be immigrants would much prefer that to being entirely excluded.
Third thought: why should we not be at least as concerned — and willing to take equally strong measures — about native born people who are likely to vote badly? We could exclude all poor people from voting, for instance. But maybe you have some sort of citizenist objection to disenfranchising people who are already citizens. So how about we just refuse to allow their children to become citizens?
Regarding your third point, Chris Hendrix did a blog post on this: http://openborders.info/blog/future-citizens-of-all-kinds/
I should probably add, having denied that most economists support open borders, why I do. Of course, that’s the topic of the blog as a whole, but it’s worth taking the opportunity to put it in a nutshell.
First, there’s probably a moral difference here, where I take very seriously both the macro-ethical (so to speak) duty of pursuing the interests of mankind rather than those of the nation, and on the other hand the micro-ethical (so to speak) duty of respecting people’s rights, or as I call them (or at least it’s closely related) submitting to moral side-constraints.
Second, for various reasons I doubt that the problem of degrading the institutions that support prosperity is as serious as many people fear. I think institutions are a bit overrated as a factor in development, though culture is underrated, so maybe that’s a wash. But I don’t think institutions depend all that much on the composition of the mass of the population: the elite is disproportionately important, and they have a lot of staying power if not violently disrupted, even in the face of large demographic changes. Thus, for example, the institutional trajectory of the United States to this day is very heavily influenced by the Puritans at Plymouth Plantation, even though the genetic contribution of those people to the modern American population is surely rather slight. More subtly, immigration can actually select in favor of the types of characters and preferences suitable to a country. And while we may not have a social contract, there are degrees of consent and perceived legitimacy, and immigration ENHANCES these, because immigrants, unlike natives, have indicated by a large positive action their desire to be part of the American polity.
Third, I see large upsides to immigration, especially for the world but for natives too. My view of how the economy works emphasizes the value of variety, the importance of specialization and division of labor, and the reality of aggregate increasing returns. All that is separate from the idea generation which, thanks particularly to Paul Romer, is now the widely accepted explanation of long-run economic growth: but idea generation is a separate and powerful reason to be optimistic about immigration. For one thing, if immigration grows the world economy in the short run, even if it were at the expense of a lot of natives, that would boost innovation from the demand side, making invention more profitable and inducing more of it. On the supply side, not only do bright minds become more productive when they go to places more conducive to creative productivity, but the cross-fertilization of cultures tends to generate new ideas. This is visible in the pattern that immigrants always seem to have been disproportionately entrepreneurial.