One of the biggest challenges in trying to present the case for open borders to those who don’t agree is choosing the right mix of logic, evidence, and appeal to emotion. When people talk about the moral case for open borders, it often seems that what they are referring to is moral logic. That is, they are discussing the logical consequences of certain moral propositions.

In my experience, people are usually not convinced by logic. While they might tend to agree with a statement like “we should not discriminate based on arbitrary factors over which people have no control”, if you extend that principle to conclude that they should afford non-citizens the exact same treatment as citizens they will feel trapped by the logic and seek to find a way out. The logic didn’t address all of their concerns, so it feels like a trick.

However, I do think logic plays a major role in understanding how people feel, and in trying to frame arguments in a way that will make sense to them. With that in mind, here is my candidate for an argument in favor of open borders that attempts to balance these concerns:

Proposition 1: As Americans (or citizens of another wealthy western nation) we benefit from a valuable cultural and institutional heritage.

Proposition 2: We have a duty both to protect this heritage and to share it with as many people as we can.

Proposition 3: One of the most best ways to share our heritage with others is to allow them to live and work within our national borders.

This line of argument explicitly acknowledges the importance national identity. Most Americans identify as Americans, and they think that means something special. I agree.

It also acknowledges that we have a duty to protect our heritage. This means that we need to take seriously the question of whether allowing too many immigrants into the country will undermine what makes the country special. It is okay to admit that at some point, enough unrestricted immigration can have negative consequences. I personally think that the optimal level is probably an order of magnitude or so higher than what we currently have, but trying to protect our national culture and institutions is a legitimate concern.

Finally, the argument puts open borders in a category of other useful things that we can do to share our heritage that a lot of other people agree with, such as providing support for emerging democracies and encouraging forms of economic integration that allow people from poor countries to participate in our economy without moving here. (I am a big fan of the web based work sourcing site Odesk. Look it up if you haven’t heard of it.)

What this argument does not do is try to gain a lot of ground by reasoning about whether we have a right to close our borders, or whether closing them should be considered refusing to help or actively doing harm.  These are interesting philosophical questions, but I don’t think they are effective for making public arguments.

The three propositions are quite general, and there are many details to be specified. For example, what exactly is it about our heritage that is so valuable? In some cases we can measure the impact of institutional differences. For example, there is evidence that countries with a legal system that developed based on English common law experience faster economic growth. Other aspects of our culture are not so easily quantified. How valuable is the widespread expectation that the government will not censor the media?

Another important question is once we accept that we need to protect our national heritage what is the best way to do it? Does it require limiting the number of immigrants to a certain quota? If every citizen were instantly replaced by someone from a different cultural background, our heritage would probably be lost. But this is not really how immigration works. When large numbers of immigrants enter the country it takes time before they begin to occupy the most culturally influential positions in society. That is, our judges, journalists, teachers, congressmen, and artists would be largely the same until the new groups began to assimilate

So I personally don’t think  a quota would be necessary if we implemented some of the keyhole solutions discussed here. A student of mine whose family entered the country illegally from Mexico claims that a good coyote can cost up to $25,000 per head these days (Although the average cost is probably much lower). Charging each immigrant a one time fee of $10,000-$20,000 would spare them the risks associated with crossing illegally and mitigate any strain strain they place on the education and welfare systems. It would also create a more flexible constraint on the number of immigrants that enter the country.

These propositions are not meant to specify a certain policy , but rather as a rhetorical framework for discussing the issues. They are meant as a way to put the arguments for open borders in language that makes more sense to people outside the open borders community. I would be very interested to know whether other advocates of open borders find them acceptable.

Mike is a math teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah where he works with a diverse group of students including many children of undocumented immigrants and refugees from Africa. In addition, he also works as a Judge Advocate in the Air Force Reserve.

Prior to becoming a teacher, Mike was a C-130 pilot in the Air Force. He has a BS in mathematics from Brigham Young University, and MS in Physics from North Carolina State and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Mike writes about education reform, politics, and economics at his blog, www.ergoscribo.com. He became an ardent supporter of open borders after reading the work of development economist Lant Pritchett, who has shown that relaxing border restrictions could be the most effective way of relieving world poverty. Through his work with students, he has also become intimately aware of the tragic circumstances that result from the deportation of immigrant families.

His first post will be published soon.

REMINDER: If you’re interested in blogging for the site in any capacity, please fill out  our potential guest blogger contact form.

I’m a pro-natalist.  I’m in favor of people being born.  Be careful when you think to yourself, “that’s a silly thing to be specifically in favor of; isn’t everyone?”  Because I assure you, not everyone is.  There are plenty of Malthusians out there, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.  There are people who believe in eugenics; people who think the world would honestly be better if we revoked reproduction privileges from those with low IQ’s, criminal histories, certain racial or ethnic backgrounds, genetic defects, etc.  And if the idea of forcibly spaying and neutering everyone with a wheelchair, a below-average IQ, the wrong skin color, or any other factor appalls you – then breathe a sigh of relief: You have a conscience.

Sadly however, this belief is not universal.  I’m not sure it’s even a majority belief (I hope it is, but the cynic in me says that if you really asked all seven billion people, most would come up with a certain class of people that they’d rather not see more of).  But there is a specific category of person, with a specific category of belief that I want to address here.  That is:  People who do not believe that we should limit births based on any factor, but who are restrictionists when it comes to immigration policy.

In a way, birth is a form of immigration.  Someone is moving from the generic “somewhere else” to the here and now.  The place you occupy and call your home is getting a new occupant.  But obviously there are many differences between a newborn in America and an immigrant in America, for example (by no means do I intend to say that these concerns are limited to America – I use that country solely as an example).  The newborn is going to use vastly more social resources.  The newborn is statistically more likely to be a criminal.  The newborn is less likely to join the labor force, and infinitely less likely to do so within the next ten years.  On the other hand, most newborns immediately have a private support network (albeit one that will rely heavily on public services).

Newborns have lots of other differences from immigrants, of course – they look like natives, they sound like natives, and they’ll probably share native cultural beliefs and social norms.  These are all reasons that other natives will like them more, but they’re not reasons why they would be more beneficial to the country than immigrants, so we’re going to ignore those for now.

Other than the instinctual reasons for liking a newborn more than an immigrant, is the only real benefit that a newborn offers over an immigrant as a choice for “new addition to the country’s population” that they have a private support network of mostly self-sufficient people (at least, as self-sufficient as anyone gets in a modern first-world country)?  If that’s the case, it seems like the immigration issue is pretty easy to solve.  If the one and only criteria that potential immigrants needed to meet before coming in was to find a voluntary supporter, it seems like we’d have plenty of immigration!

Let’s do a thought experiment.  Let’s pretend that current citizens of America can invite immigrants in using only the same criteria by which they can have children.  Any two people could invite an immigrant in – and the same two people could invite in as many immigrants as they wanted.  They would not have to be able to support those immigrants, though socially speaking there would be pressure to do so.  If you decided two years later that you didn’t like your immigrant, you couldn’t send him or her back, any more than you can “send back” a baby; though you could in theory put yours up for adoption.  Since immigrants can generally take care of themselves, this seems like less of an issue for immigrants than it does for children, so that’s an extra point in favor of immigrants.  You could be irresponsible and invite too many immigrants in the same way that you can be irresponsible and have too many children; but since immigrants can work and are far less dependent on their caregivers than children are, it seems like this is far less of an issue – score another point for the immigrant.

You don’t need to submit to a background check to have a child, so you wouldn’t need one to invite in an immigrant.  The child obviously doesn’t have a background to check, while the immigrant might – but given the respective crime rates, it seems like it would make more sense to check potential parental backgrounds to weed out potential criminals than to do the same with immigrant backgrounds.  Since we don’t do the former, it’s hard to make a moral case for the latter.

Of course, children can’t vote for at least 18 years, so immigrants wouldn’t be able to, either – fair enough (and as a keyhole solution, this has already been suggested).

For those whose restrictionist attitude stems from the fear that immigrants might eventually “take over” the country due to sheer numbers – well remember, that’s guaranteed with children.  If immigrants were brought into this country by a parental figure, the same as children, you’d have the same opportunity to influence them.  It might even make people of competing political or cultural outlooks compete to have MORE immigrants, for the same reason you want to have more kids in that circumstance:  If you think your culture is so great, you want to pass on that culture to the next generation in larger numbers than the “other people” – whoever they are in your eyes.

So there you have it.  Regardless of what opinions you hold about birth and immigration respectively, there’s very little non-instinctual reason to restrict immigration more than birth, relatively.

Of course, there are those that don’t believe births should be restricted along any categorical lines, but do believe that overall restriction in terms of sheer quantity should happen.  Again, I’m a pro-natalist, so I don’t share this view.  But even if you do hold that view, that view isn’t analogous to the view most people have about immigration.  Most people who you’re likely to meet on the street have one of two opinions on immigration:  Either we should restrict it even more than we do now (even to the point of zero), or we should be increasing “high-skill” immigration while decreasing other kinds.  But statistically speaking, only a tiny fraction of American newborns will grow up to be the kind of people the “high-skill” immigration proponents want.  What’s the native birth rate of engineers compared to the total native birth rate?

But let’s say you actually hold comparable quantity-restriction views on both birth and immigration.  You don’t believe in restricting either by category, but you do believe in strict quantity limits on both.  There are a number of problems with this view.  First – what’s the optimal number?  A quota of any kind means that something other than spontaneous order is determining the number of births and/or immigrants, and that’s therefore pretty much guaranteed to be the wrong number.  Then of course are all the administrative difficulties – how do you parcel out the set number, given that the desired number will be higher?  Who gets to come and who doesn’t?   There’s almost no way to do a quantity restriction without also imposing a categorical one, except for some sort of “first come, first served” method that is very unlikely to be satisfactory.  We need only to look to China to see some of the negative effects of a quantity restriction on birth; like any prohibition of something nearly universally desired, the unintended consequences are severe.

Restrictions on immigration based on quantity have all the same problems as restrictions on birth rates based on quantity, and immigration restrictions based on category appear significantly less moral than birth restrictions based on the same.  Considering that we don’t restrict births in any way in America, it would seem difficult to build a moral or utilitarian case to restrict immigration.

The article below, by me, was published this morning at the Daily GOOD: http://www.good.is/posts/why-erasing-all-the-world-s-borders-would-double-gdp.

Economists have estimated that opening the world’s borders to migration could double world GDP. To get the gist of that number, imagine that your boss walked into your office tomorrow and said, “we’re doubling your salary”—and the same thing happened to everyone else, too.

The rise of modern communications technology has drastically changed the way humans interact with each other. Physical distance matters less than ever. You my dear reader may be seeing this post of mine from 10 minutes away from my apartment or from 12,000 miles away. Indeed the difference in time which you might theoretically be able to first read this is insignificant between those two locations. Compared to times when it took six months to traverse the silk road from Europe to China that is absurd. And this technology is not limited by borders (with some important exceptions, though just like real borders people find ways to sneak around that). Looking at the author list for this site even it’s possible to find people from across the globe writing about open borders. Technology might be beating us to the punch on open borders (for a similar argument that poverty might end before we open the borders see Vipul’s earlier post). So if this is all true does this mean there’s no point to open borders advocacy? Has technology already won the battle for us?

Sadly this post doesn’t end with me cracking open a bottle of champagne and celebrating victory (or maybe just a beer, champagne isn’t really my thing…anyways…).

To start, let’s consider the case for technology obsoleting borders on its own. There is a bit of historical precedence for this actually. As rail travel spread across Europe, most European states decided it was just too much of a hassle to try to control their borders anymore and even went as far as scrapping passports. Technology outpaced the standard border controls, but only to a degree of course. And during World War One border controls and passports made big comebacks. But times are different. Now it’s not just about preventing a person from physically crossing a border, but stopping information.

Today international conference calls can be done online for free. Internet business is big with the internet adding perhaps 5% to the US economy and 8.3% for the United Kingdom. These numbers are increasing and thus reduce the need for physical proximity. One study have even reported that from 2004 to 2008 the percentage of businesses allowing employees to work from home had increased from 11% to 46%. If we aren’t at effectively open borders through technology perhaps we’re getting there.

But now before we get too excited there is a question hanging, if technology is getting so great why are the estimates of economists still that open borders would double world GDP? One might think that the recentness of the internet revolution just hasn’t sunk in yet. Indeed, the internet revolution hasn’t penetrated everywhere yet with several continents having less than half their total population online as of 2012. But even if the internet does penetrate to European or North American levels in these places there is still good evidence that the internet is not enough.

There are a few economic reasons why location still matters and is likely to matter for the foreseeable future. Specifically, non-tradable goods/services, weak local institutions, and place premiums that persist even within countries.

Tradability is the most straight forward of these concepts. Put simply, a non-tradable good or service is one that must be made or performed in close proximity to where it is sold. For instance, gardeners typically can’t tend to a garden too well when they are stuck a thousand miles away from where they are supposed to be working. Another example is a factory. Factory workers generally need to actually be in the factory to add any productivity to the process. Factories may often be built overseas and the goods they produce are often highly tradable, but depending on the industry issues such as proximity to supply or being built-in a positive institutional environment (for instance in countries where rule of law and property rights are respected), factories may have a hard time coming to developing world workers. Many of the low-end services that low-skill immigrants perform fall into this general non-tradable category.  Technology may be gradually obsoleting some of these low skill jobs, but other immigrant-heavy industries find it difficult to replace human workers. As long as that remains true for significant portions of the low skill job market open borders will still be a good way to connect workers and employers.

Another concept is the importance of institutions. For this, a quote from Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s book Why Nations Fail  is instructive (page 42):

Bill Gates, like other legendary figures in the information technology industry (such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos), had immense talent and ambition. But ultimately he responded to incentives. The schooling system in the United States enabled Gates and others like him to acquire a unique set of skills to complement their talents. The economic institutions in the United States enabled these men to start their companies with ease, without facing insurmountable barriers. Those institutions also made the financing of their projects feasible. The US labor market enabled them to hire qualified personnel, and the relatively competitive market environment enabled them to expand their companies and market their products. These entrepreneurs were confident from the beginning that their dream projects could be implemented: they trusted the institutions and the rule of law that these generated and they did not worry about the security of their property rights.

Notably among the group Acemoglu and Robinson use as examples, Sergey Brin was an immigrant taking advantage of institutions outside the country of his birth and childhood. Institutions matter and providing a stable political environment and relatively free market economy is fairly closely linked to a nation’s economic prosperity. Preventing the Sergey Brin’s of the world from coming to a country where they can fully utilize their talents holds back all of us. Even if Sergey had gotten the training and found partners in Russia, the abysmal scores Russia receives on the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, in business, investment, property rights, and corruption particularly, indicate that the conditions there would have killed any attempt to make Google there.

As a short aside, a common fear with open borders is a degradation of these very institutions that attract immigrants in the first place. We’ve covered concerns like these in previous blog posts, so without trying to cover that territory again at too great a length I will go back to Acemoglu and Robinson (this time page 332):

The outcome of political conflict is never certain, and even if in hindsight we see many historical events as inevitable, the path of history is contingent. Nevertheless, once in place, inclusive economic and political institutions tend to create a virtuous cycle, a process of positive feedback, making it more likely that these institutions will persist and even expand.

This certainly appears to be the case with the United States and large-scale immigration in American history has yet to seriously derail those good institutions.

Finally, place premiums seem to persist even within countries with internally open borders and in industries with heavy technology usage. The Gated City by Ryan Avent (though never quite using those terms) tracks this phenomena within the United States. According to Avent, city policies which prevent higher density living arrangements cause high skill workers to be unable to find affordable housing in places like Silicon Valley or New York, causing them to take lower paying jobs and potentially losing the US economy between .25-.5% GDP growth per year. If the technophile industries of Silicon Valley find it advantageous to offer programmers an average of over $100,000 a year, while a programming job in Phoenix, Arizona will only pay $69,000 a year, all within the same country, then there must be something beyond tradability and institutions that makes people be more productive if they congregate in the same physical area. Otherwise smart computer start-ups would leave for Phoenix and save over $30,000 a programmer per year. This could include the ease of setting up in-person meetings with others in the same field or perhaps simply the cultures that tend to form within particular cities. Not to mention that high fixed costs tend to drive people to cluster in hubs and once established stay there for long periods.

And of course there are  realms outside of economics (or maybe not always outside that field). Personal relationships are one such area. However much communication technology advances, most people don’t choose to go for long-distance romantic relationships and those that try tend to break up fairly quickly. And even if technology gives such couples new options couples wanting children still generally have to do that the old-fashioned way. But beyond that even meeting people in the first place can be limited. As of 2012, 20% of relationships start online, which is just another way of saying 80% of them still happen in meat-space. I don’t mean to disparage such relationships of course, only to note that being barred from having physical proximity to loved ones or potential loved ones can be difficult. Even outside of romance, friendships of people close in location to you are still important. Online friendships can spawn fascinating discussions and bring together people of similar interests (for instance I know I’ve only met my fellow bloggers here at open borders online), but there are experiences that are impossible to have with people forcibly separated by thousands of miles. I can’t call up an online friend a thousand miles away to go on a hike on a sunny day or out to a bar to watch a football game together. These may seem like minor issues compared to doubling world GDP, but friends, regardless of which set of lines on a map they happened to have been born in, are vitally important to personal happiness. Sadly we will never know all the amazing romances and friendships the world could have had with open borders. And technology hasn’t fully fixed that problem.

I don’t want this post to come across as being in any way against technology or not understanding how amazing it is. I consider myself a major technophile in fact and would likely go stir crazy without access to the internet or smart phones. The achievements human kind makes on a daily basis, from controlling room temperatures year-round to taking a signal bounced from satellites outer space and making it into a TV show, are nothing short of awe-inspiring. But in the end we can’t just wait for technology to solve the border problem for us. Not to mention that even if the economic case for open borders became less relevant, there would still be the issue of the right to migrate and the egalitarian arguments against global apartheid. Being able to beat technology to the punch, even if technology can effectively obsolete borders, can only be a good thing. There are hundreds of millions of people who want a better life for themselves today, and if technology can’t give it to them, the governmental policies of the world shouldn’t block them from reaching for it themselves.

When I wrote Principles of a Free Society, I believe that I very dimly had in mind Hans-Hermann Hoppe as an intellectual adversary, but for some reason– some stray remarks at the Cato Institute which I over-interpreted, I think– I had the impression that Hoppe was so disreputable that it would be a kind of sin to mention him or read him. Thinking it over now, that’s hardly fair! My views on the Iraq War would, I suppose, make me at least as heretical from a Cato Institute perspective as Hans-Hermann Hoppe for his views on immigration (and homosexuality, but that’s not relevant here). Hoppe seems, like me, to aspire to a thoroughgoing rationalism, and to like Lockean homesteading as an origin for property rights. We have enough in common to provide the basis for an argument. Moreover, what I realize now is that even before I wrote Principles, I had heard a rumor about Hoppe’s argument for migration restrictions, guessed the nature of the argument from that rumor, and wrote Principles, among other things, to refute it. But since my argument against Hoppe is spread out throughout Principles and does not explicitly mention Hoppe, it seems worthwhile to bring Hoppe’s argument and my refutation together in one place. This is my contribution to the debate summarized at our anarcho-capitalist counter-factual page.

First, Hoppe’s argument, from “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem.” Hoppe starts by suggesting, without really arguing for it, that:

People of one ethno-culture tend to live in close proximity to one another and spatially separated and distant from people of another ethno-culture. Whites live among Whites and separate from Asians and Blacks. Italian speakers live among other Italians and separate from English speakers. Christians live among other Christians and separate from Muslims. Catholics live among Catholics and separate from Protestants, etc.

Well, no, they don’t tend to, really, except when the government compels them to. Segregation occurs often in history, but so does integration. And anyway, given that the suggested groupings of people overlap greatly– there are white, Asian, and black Christians; there are white Christians and Muslims and atheists; there are people who speak both Italian and English– the proposed regime of spatial segregation doesn’t seem to make sense (unless the segregation is very fine indeed, e.g., “only Italian-speaking white Catholics in this neighborhood”… but that’s hardly typical). But Hoppe’s next move is what makes his argument distinctive:

Let us take one more step and assume that all property is owned privately and the entire globe is settled. Every piece of land, every house and building, every road, river, and lake, every forest and mountain, and all of the coastline is owned by private owners or firms. No such thing as “public” property or “open frontier” exists. Let us take a look at the problem of migration under this scenario of a “natural order.”

First and foremost, in a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property. Essentially, a person can move only if he is invited by a recipient property owner, and this recipient-owner can revoke his invitation and expel his invitees whenever he deems their continued presence on his property undesirable (in violation of his visitation code).

Given this assumption, the rest of the argument is rather predictable, at least to me. Still, we may as well follow Hoppe a little further. First:

In a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property.

Second, on roads and other transportation:

There will be plenty of movement under this scenario because there are powerful reasons to open access to one’s property, but there are also reasons to restrict or close access. Those who are the most inclusive are the owners of roads, railway stations, harbors, and airports, for example. Interregional movement is their business. Accordingly, their admission standards can be expected to be low, typically requiring no more than the payment of a user fee. However, even they would not follow a completely non-discriminatory admission policy. For instance, they would exclude intoxicated or unruly people and eject all trespassers, beggars, and bums from their property, and they might videotape or otherwise monitor or screen their customers while on their property.

To this we will return. Finally, it is in residential property where Hoppe expects to see the highest degree of segregation:

It is in the residential housing and real estate market where discrimination against and exclusion of ethno-cultural strangers will tend to be most pronounced. For it is in the area of residential as contrasted to commercial property where the human desire to be private, secluded, protected, and undisturbed from external events and intrusions is most pronounced. The value of residential property to its owner depends essentially on its almost total exclusivity. Only family members and occasionally friends are included. And if residential property is located in a neighborhood, this desire for undisturbed possession—peace and privacy—is best accomplished by a high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity (as this lowers transaction costs while simultaneously increasing protection from external disturbances and intrusions). By renting or selling residential property to strangers (and especially to strangers from ethno-culturally distant quarters), heterogeneity is introduced into the neighborhood. Transaction costs tend to increase, and the peculiar peace-and-privacy-security—the freedom from external, foreign intrusions—sought and expected of residential property tends to fall, resulting in lower residential property values.

Many very interesting things to note here. First of all, Hoppe’s scheme must create a strong bias in favor of the right to invite. Second, Hoppe’s scheme justifies not only immigration restrictions but also domestic residential segregation of the kind that existed in the US before the 1960s. I suppose one must give Hoppe credit here both for consistency and for political incorrectness. Hoppe does not presuppose the moral relevance of countries and assume a right to free migration within but not across national boundaries. He explicitly envisions a society of ethno-culturally homogeneous neighborhoods, based on a generalized preference that he seems to regard as an indelible human propensity to stick with one’s own kind. Though Hoppe is much too complacent about this, Robert Putnam’s work probably demands that this view be taken more seriously than political correctness might admit. Hoppe goes on to introduce the state, and argue that the lack of freedom of migration that, he supposes, would prevail in a “natural order” should cross-apply to a society ruled by a state. Even then, the right to invite persists:

If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited).

It’s not clear to me that VDARE restrictionists are right to claim Hoppe as an ally within the libertarian camp. After all, an unlimited right to invite might not look much different from open borders– many US natives would quickly learn to sell their rights to sponsor immigrants to the highest bidder– and limiting the right to invite violates Hoppe’s principles. But I’m not not too interested in how to apply Hoppe’s argument at this stage, because my dissenting argument branches off at the stage in the argument where Hoppe defines the “natural order.”

The starting point for Principles of a Free Society is what I call the habeas corpus, or “you should have the body” principle, which I derive from telos– Huemer would derive roughly the same principle from everyday morality– and which protects a person against arbitrary arrest. From there I launch my main argument against Hoppe’s “natural order”:

Violence may be defined as any violation of the habeas corpus principle, when person A trespasses on the body of person B.  A crudely spatial notion of violence, as an action trespassing on the physical space occupied by someone else’s body, is sufficient to capture most of the actions that are usually and properly considered violent: blows, stabs, pistol shots, seizure and abduction, etc.  But the concept of violence must be extended beyond these simple cases, as is clear if we consider Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado.”  In this story, a secret enemy of one Fortunato lures him into a hollow place and builds a wall of masonry behind him, trapping him.  There is no trespass on the physical space occupied by Fortunato’s body, yet he is deprived of liberty and, in due course, of life, by the deliberate action of another.  It would be absurd to define violence too narrowly to include this situation.

We must recognize, then, that the spatial needs of the body extend beyond the space that it physically occupies at any given time.  Habeas corpus implies some degree of freedom of movement, but how much?  A prison cell is too little.  But we cannot grant to every man a right complete freedom to go wherever his legs will carry him, if for no other reason than that the sustenance of modern human populations requires the practice of agriculture, and crops must not be trampled underfoot.  To the question, “how much freedom of movement does a person have a right to?” the answer “more than a prison cell but less than the whole face of the earth” is a start, but is obviously insufficiently specific.

We may invoke the concept of telos again as a placeholder for further discussion in Chapter 4.  The body cannot, without violence, be spatially confined by the action of another so as to deny it the ability to flourish.  This is vague, but I can propose at least one regime which is not consistent with the principle, namely, a certain kind of libertarian utopia in which all land is privately held.  In this hypothetical society, a person’s neighbors might box him in, denying him the right to leave his land in any direction; or a person might sell his land and not have the right to exist anywhere.  I claim that such a society would violate the habeas corpus principle.  A person “has the body” by natural right; has a right for that body to exist in some place as it necessarily must; has a right to enough freedom of movement to fulfill the body’s needs; and is deprived of these rights if he can be excluded from all bits of land, or compelled to remain in a piece of land arbitrarily small and perhaps inadequate to sustain human life. A regime of private property rights in land cannot justly be made so comprehensive that the basic rights of habeas corpus are violated.

So from the beginning, I rule out a “natural order” such as Hoppe envisions, on the ground that it would violate natural rights. Let me expand on this.

Case 1. What if, in Hoppe’s “natural order,” a certain individual holds quite unpopular views, or perhaps he simply happens to be very ugly, and no one chooses to admit him to their land? Perhaps this individual owns a small plot of land, but can’t sustain life on it. Must he be content to starve?

Case 2. It gets worse. Suppose an individual is actually quite popular, in general, but his immediate neighbors don’t like him. They choose to starve him. He pleads to be allowed to cross the (say) ten feet of land to the estates of friends who will gladly feed and clothe and hire him, but his neighbors ruthlessly refuse. Here we have a curious variation of the Starvin’ Marvin example, for in Hoppe’s “natural order,” a person would seem to be required voluntarily to starve to death rather than violate the property rights of his neighbors, even if they are unarmed. Not only is there no “freedom of migration” across international frontiers; there is no “freedom of migration” to go to the market to buy food even within a single ethno-cultural zone.

Case 3. In Case 2, Starvin’ Marvin seems to have alienated his neighbors, and it seems likely that that’s his own fault. But consider another scenario. Evil Jake wants Marvin dead, because Marvin is a rival of some sort, perhaps in love– Evil Jake’s dream girl is in love with Marvin– or perhaps in business– Marvin is undercutting Evil Jake’s prices– or perhaps Marvin is a better poet or singer. Since we’re envisioning an ethical, Lockean-style “natural order,” however, Evil Jake can’t kill Marvin directly. Instead, being a rich man, Evil Jake buys all the land around Marvin’s homestead, and forbids Marvin to leave. Marvin starves, to the satisfaction of Evil Jake, who has the additional benefit of an untroubled conscience, since in Hoppe’s system of ethics, he did nothing wrong, but scrupulously respected the rules of the natural order.

Case 4. But at least in Case 4, Marvin has the option of behaving ethically, though it means submitting to a miserable death as the penalty for being outflanked in the real estate market. We may just as easily suppose, however, that Marvin, in a few decades on the earth, has never had the good fortune to acquire any land, and has lived for many years on the land of various friends, of whom he has many, who are always happy to be his hosts. Unfortunately, one day, the friend Marvin is living with dies, and his heirs decide they don’t want Marvin around anymore. Unfortunately, the immediate neighbors of his late friend also don’t want Marvin to come onto their property. Poor Marvin can’t avoid trespassing! “Ought implies can” is a principle of most ethical systems, but seemingly not of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s.

While I don’t see how Hoppe could deny these logical possibilities, he seems to feel that they won’t happen. He supposes that the owners of roads will find it in their economic interest to allow fairly free movement, merely charging user fees. He seems to have in mind some sort of competitive market in road access, in which prices would be determined by the impartial and transparent mechanism of the invisible hand. But the nature of space and movement makes this impossible. Competitive markets require many competitors. Often economists talk as if the number of competitors has to be virtually infinite, and even if one is partial to the Bertrand model (in which two competitors suffice to establish perfect competition), the typical lot has only one road link to the rest of the world. So for a private market in road access to be tamely competitive is the last thing we should expect. We should expect rampant price discrimination, and nothing except perhaps private morality would prevent spiteful deals in which profiteering road owners accepted payment in return for settling other people’s old scores by trapping a payer’s foe on his lot, to starve.

What is needed here is my theory of streets. In fact, I think anarcho-capitalists ought to adopt my theory of streets as one of their standard doctrines (though I’m not a self-identified anarcho-capitalist myself). It’s a long-standing embarrassment for libertarians that they have to use government streets. My theory of streets says they have nothing to be embarrassed about: the government may have paved them, but they’re not government property, properly understood. It starts from Lockean homesteading principles, but with this twist: that appropriation through labor, according to Locke, confers the right to use, not to waste, and by using a bit of land as a street, one appropriates transit rights in it, which can’t be violated, but which can’t exclude others from also using it for transit (which would be wasteful). From Principles:

A street is not a slab of pavement.  It is not even a strip of land.  It is a bundle of overlapping non-exclusive transit rights.

A street is not a slab of pavement because it would still be a street if it were unpaved.  If (say) Grant Street used to be covered only with gravel or dirt, it was still Grant Street.  If the city decides to replace the asphalt of Grant Street with charming cobblestones, it will still be Grant Street.

A street is not a strip of land because the land was there before it was a street and may still be there if it ceases to be a street.  If Grant Street used to be a private hunting park, it was not a street.  If Grant Street is abandoned and a forest grows on it and someone starts to use it as a hunting park, it will be the same land, but it will not be a street.

Grant Street consists of a bundle of transit rights, and it continues to exist as long as those transit rights exist, and is destroyed when they are destroyed, and changes to the material substance of the street matter only inasmuch as they affect these rights.  Suppose Rogue Developer Dan puts a wall around Grant Street and starts building structures on it.  If Dan does this without authorization, the rights of local residents to use Grant Street as a street still exist, though Dan is violating them, and we can still call Grant Street a street.  We would complain that Dan has closed off access to a public street—thus bearing witness in our characterization that it is still a street.  But suppose Dan gets the city government to endorse his takeover of Grant Street, and the citizens resign themselves to the usurpation and move out of their Grant Street homes.  In this case, Grant Street has ceased to be a street.

Who owns Grant Street, then?  The city?  No, because the city cannot justly dispose of Grant Street in any way that it sees fit, by, say, selling the street to Developer Dan.  It has to take into account the rights of Grant Street residents.  We can solve the riddle by revisiting and extending the argument of Locke.  The earth is originally common to all mankind, but we can appropriate it by mixing our labor with it.  The residents of Grant Street have mixed their labor with Grant Street by walking or driving on it.  Maybe they even turned it into a street physically by trampling down the natural vegetation that impeded movement.

A person who has transit rights—natural transit rights—in a street does not have the right to exclude others from the street, because their use of the street as a street does not preclude his.  We can appropriate only to use, not to waste, and to exclude others from the street would be to waste it.  He may justly object, however, if someone tries to grow crops or build houses in the street.  He may have a right to object if someone tries to pave and drive cars on a street which he prefers to use as a pedestrian.  This objection is weakened if a sidewalk is provided.  If he and his neighbors were accustomed to play soccer in the street, the objection may be strengthened.  Streets are not public, then, because the government declares them to be.  Their public nature is a side-effect of the natural rights which comprise them.

My theory of streets can serve as a platform from which to critique Hoppe’s conception of the “natural order.” How could Hoppe’s comprehensive property rights regime justly originate? By Lockean homesteading? But is it really just for someone to settle in a well-used thoroughfare and start plowing, getting in everyone’s way? Or will all the land be turned into homesteads before any of it has come to be used as streets? But that can’t be the case, because how will people get to their homesteads without using some of the land for travel? Clearly not. As the property rights regime grew up in the process of settlements, zones of overlapping non-exclusive transit rights, i.e., streets, would naturally grow up in their midst.

Alternatively, my theory of streets could be incorporated into Hoppe’s conception of the “natural order.” He could imagine a society in which all land was either privately owned outright or else had been turned into streets. But such a “natural order” would be characterized by freedom of migration or something close to it, since it leaves everyone including migrants free to roam the streets as they please (though I explicitly argue in Principles, perhaps congenially for Hoppe, that gated communities can be just). In addition to being more defensible starting from a natural rights deontology, my theory of streets also mitigates the economic problem with streets. Streets as zones of non-overlapping transit rights can’t be monopolized and used by private interests for ruthless price discrimination. By the way, while I more or less invented this theory of streets directly out of Locke, it’s been discovered before. The common law has long possessed the concept of an easement. In effect, I conceive streets as easements.

Hoppe is far superior to the vast majority of restrictionists in that he has really thought through the matter, deeply, seriously, and from fundamental principles, and has offered a rational defense of immigration restrictions. It fails, but at least he’s done enough of the epistemic legwork to have a right to his opinions. Most restrictionists exhibit nothing like this degree of intellectual responsibility. The fact that Hoppe’s argument for migration restrictions seems to be just about the best one out there, and it’s still this bad, underlines how powerful the case for open borders is.

I just picked up my copy of the latest edition of The Economist, which had plenty to say about the recent elections in Malaysia (see this story, for instance). I’ve been asked to comment on this from an open borders standpoint — specifically, on how being a Malaysian living overseas has affected my ability to contribute to the political life of my nation. A common concern raised about open borders is that permitting migration more broadly might delay political reform in dysfunctional countries. I think I am well-placed to discuss this: this was the second Malaysian election in my adult life, and also the second I’ve participated in from overseas.

When I was a student during the last Malaysian national elections in 2008, I contributed financially to the causes I support. I also helped write campaign communications material, and I had no issues following the campaign from my university’s New Hampshire campus. Throughout the time I’ve been in the US, I’ve stayed abreast of Malaysian affairs, and for a few years, penned a regular column on Malaysian politics for a popular news website .

It’s actually remarkable how to a significant degree, online news and social media have made it easy to keep one’s thumb on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Sometimes readers would ask me how I knew what people were thinking or feeling back home, and it almost felt cheap to say that I just read blog comments or listened to what people were saying on Facebook. Of course, it also helped that I spent a few weeks at home whenever I had vacation time. This recent election, I similarly helped by donating money to the candidates I supported. Coincidentally, I donated to one of these candidates because another Malaysian currently living and working in Mongolia prodded me to, and offered to match my donation.

But beyond these basic things, which I could have done from Antarctica, I also plugged into the Malaysian diaspora in the US. There aren’t many of us here, but for the past 5 years in a row, I’ve helped organise a conference on Malaysian affairs in the northeast (and advised others as they began to organise similar gatherings in the midwest and west coast) — the Malaysia Forum. I organised and attended demonstrations in Washington, DC and New York City demanding a fairer political process.

I still remember how only a couple days after moving into my apartment near Washington, DC I was preparing a poster saying “Where is MY vote?” — a reference to how Malaysian policy then disenfranchised most citizens living overseas. I don’t think any of us at that demonstration outside the Malaysian embassy in DC less than two years ago expected that by this election, we would have the right to vote. And yet, our struggle came through. We were part of a global movement holding simultaneous rallies, in Kuala Lumpur and across the globe, for free and fair elections in Malaysia. At the same time I demonstrated in Washington, I had friends gathering and marching in London, Paris, Melbourne, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. The global synchronicity of it lent a powerful impetus to the movement; it was inspiring to Malaysians to think that scattered across our planet, there were Malaysian citizens sharing in the same struggle for democracy in our country. This election, I not only voted for the first time in my life at our embassy in Washington, but I also served as an election observer.

There is a concern that under open borders, people would flee dysfunctional countries instead of trying to fix them, this “brain drain” dooming these countries to failure in perpetuity. This concern is definitely applicable to Malaysia, and it’s something Malaysians openly wonder about and discuss all the time. (If you doubt me, come on over to next year’s Malaysia Forum and listen in.) The size of our diaspora perennially raises concerns that bad government policies are driving Malaysians away — which itself puts paid to the suggestion that emigration papers over domestic political problems.

Moreover, it’s not enough to suggest that apathetic Malaysians are disproportionately represented among emigrants as proof that permitting such migration is an issue. After all, there’s a selection bias going on: would the kind of people who leave Malaysia because they don’t care about it start caring about the country if immigration restrictions forced them to stay back? On the flip side, would the kind of people who love Malaysia but decide to leave it for other reasons stop loving their country?

I think these questions speak for themselves. But some further historical evidence unique to the Malaysian context: the overseas Chinese and Indian communities in Malaysia were extremely politically active in their homelands up until World War II. Sun Yat-Sen paid frequent visits to Malaysia to fundraise and organise, and Jawaharlal Nehru toured Malaysia to drum up political awareness. With a modicum of open borders, people were able to travel and so stay in touch with affairs of their respective homelands. Nowadays with the internet, there is absolutely no reason one can’t play an active role in the political life of one’s home, even from afar.

Another curious political event of note: the affiliates of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang / Guomindang) and the Indian Congress Party in Malaysia eventually morphed into the Malaysian Chinese Association and Malaysian Indian Congress. Both went on to fight for Malaysian independence from the British, and remain influential Malaysian political parties today. It is not easy to classify political participation as an either/or thing.

Migration is a socially complex phenomenon. Not all who leave choose to do so permanently. Many return. Some stay. I have met many Malaysians in the US who, for various reasons, have wound up staying here and may wind up dying here. Perhaps their children will grow up as Americans rather than Malaysians (something I personally, at this point in time, can’t conceive of doing as a parent). But they have impressed on me their love for Malaysia despite spending years, if not decades, away from home.

There is no denying that living away from one’s homeland is tough, whether or not you have line of sight to eventually returning home. There are certainly things I could have contributed in this past election had I been home, instead of in the US. But I confess I do not see how forcing me to remain in Malaysia instead of being in the US would have made the political life of my country significantly better off. Neither do I see how forcing the thousands of Malaysians who have left the country to instead stay behind our country’s arbitrary borders would have made things significantly better.

Malaysia may be a unique case because we are a partially democratic country, and so overseas Malaysians have more opportunities to plug into the political struggles of our homeland. But neither pre-WWII China or India were democratic, and yet the Chinese and Indian diasporas stayed looped into the struggles of their respective home countries. One would not refuse refuge to someone fleeing North Korea. The US has open borders for Cubans who can make it to US soil, and Cuban-Americans continue to be vocal about the affairs of their ancestral homeland.

My suggestion is that political involvement primarily depends on how much you care about the issues at hand, not where you are. It might be that where you are affects your ability to hear about the issues, and thus how much you care about them. But that was not much of an excuse when the borders were open enough to let dissidents like Nehru travel, and it certainly isn’t much of an excuse now when we have the internet and Facebook connecting us to far-flung friends and family.

If anything, because of how it promotes exchanges of ideas and commerce, open borders arguably lends greater impetus to far-flung political movements: I earn far more in the US than I could in Malaysia, and can remit my income to Malaysian causes I support. The ideas I learn of in the US are ideas I can translate to a Malaysian context — and similarly I can transmit Malaysian ideas to my US friends and colleagues. Malaysian opposition leaders Anwar Ibrahim (a former Georgetown professor) and Lim Guan Eng (a former Australian student) are fond of quoting American figures like Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr. In a world where ideas are free to roam, it hardly seems right to keep the people behind them in a cage.

The generally accepted idea that the institutions of countries and citizenship have considerable moral relevance has always struck me as bizarre. To me, it seems obvious, on the face of it, that where a person was born, or who a person’s parents are, are arbitrary matters (that said person has no influence over) and therefore cannot be relevant to such evaluative questions as whether that person has a right to rent property or accept a job in location X. (See John Lee’s post on Phillip Cole’s moral argument for open borders, which also relies on this point.) Likewise, where we have come to conventionally draw borders on maps seems to me a matter of historical circumstances that virtually nobody alive today has any responsibility in and that therefore can have little moral relevance in evaluating people’s actions. (While I think some compelling consequentialist arguments can be made along the lines that disrespecting existing borders might dangerously offset an equilibrium, I do not think this kind of argument can take you all that far. More on this in an upcoming post.)

Perhaps most people can at least relate to my prima facie attitude described in the previous paragraph, but I am clearly in a small minority in persisting in such a view in the face of common political discourse. Almost everybody treats the moral relevance of countries and citizenship as a given (often in the form of citizenism).

This renders discussions of the morality of migration restrictions difficult and unpromising for people with views similar to mine, as it seems that those who disagree with me reason from entirely different starting points and have very different ideas about who holds the burden of proof, compared to my views. Consider the last paragraph from a response by Sonic Charmer (aka The Crimson Reach) to Michael Huemer’s guest post on Open Borders:

Let’s just note that in this ridiculous construction, not allowing someone to permanently relocate to the United States has been equated with abusing them to one’s heart’s content. Is this a real argument? I don’t think so. Even if the intended point here were stated in a more sober and less straw-manny way, the problem is that there is simply no Universal Human Right To Immigrate To The United States Of America. Such a thing is, if anything, even more problematic and mythical than the concept of a literal ‘social contract’. But if the professor nevertheless thinks there is such a Universal Human Right, where did it come from? Why didn’t he include his actual argument for its existence in that (already very long) piece?

The idea, as I understand it, is that the onus is on Michael Huemer to establish the existence of a Universal Human Right To Immigrate To The US. (Thomas Sowell expresses apparently the same view here.) This task seems hopeless, as the idea of a “Universal Human Right To Immigrate To The US” seems ridiculous. I agree that it seems ridiculous, but not because I do not think that people are generally within their (moral) rights to move to the US. I also think it would seem ridiculous to posit a Universal Human Right To Ride A Bicycle On A Tuesday, even though people generally are well within their rights to do so. We simply do not normally talk of moral rights to actions with specific, morally irrelevant features.  (Compare this point with the 9th amendment to the US Constitution; HT: Vipul.) Given that I see no good reason for considering countries morally relevant in such matters, I contend that all that is needed is a right to rent property and to accept a job, and that the burden of proof is on restrictionists to establish that the geographical location of the property or of the work environment nullifies this right.

When I say that I see no good reasons to overrule the prima facie moral irrelevance of countries I described above, I suspect that many people will diagnose me with outrageous naiveté and ignorance of strong arguments that “everybody knows” (even if they may not be able to properly articulate those arguments themselves, but then they might defer this task to figures of “obvious authority”). But while this puts me under some social pressure to pretend otherwise, the truth is that no arguments I have heard for the moral relevance of countries have seemed compelling, let alone sufficient to me.

If I were to attempt an Ideological Turing Test (i.e. to argue the position that countries are morally relevant as best I can), I might try a social contract angle, a “fragile political equilibrium” angle, a “collective property” angle, a social capital angle, a “brain drain” angle, a “differences in national IQ and personality factors averages” angle, or a “cultural differences” angle, and perhaps I would not fare much worse than many people who really hold that position – but I would find myself very unconvincing, especially because it seems to me that most of these arguments are compelling only if we’re already assuming that countries are morally relevant. (This is particularly true of the welfare state objection to open borders, as the moral relevance of countries seems essential to justifying a national welfare state as opposed to non-nation-bound welfare programs.)

Since it seems necessary to me to take such a “back to basics” approach, given the persistent disagreement about what the morally relevant starting points are, I hereby issue a bleg: What are the strongest arguments (both in objective terms and in terms of their appeal to the masses) for the moral relevance of countries – particularly concerning such questions as where one may rent property and work? (Not excluding arguments pertaining to one of the “angles” I’ve listed above – I do not claim to have conclusively laid the viability of any of these general lines of argument to rest.)

Afterthought: Although this is isn’t what I primarily have in mind, Vipul’s previous bleg about universalist defenses of citizenism might provide an interesting way of approaching this question, too.

Sebastian works as a freelance translator and studies mathematics at The Open University. He is a citizen of Switzerland and Germany, was born and raised in Luxembourg, has lived in several European countries, and has previously completed a degree in psychology at the Université Paris 8. He has recently migrated from London, UK to Berlin, Germany.

Sebastian’s interests range widely across cognitive science, economics and moral and political philosophy. He has blogged sporadically on these topics at Seb’s Cogblog.

As far back as he can remember, Sebastian has always considered migration restrictions morally unacceptable. More recently, he has been persuaded by the writings of Bryan Caplan that open borders is probably the single most important policy issue of our time. He’s further been inspired by the Open Borders community to engage in personal efforts to try and help change the public perception of migration restrictions. He is particularly interested in exploring the philosophy and the psychology of countries and citizenship, with their typically assumed ramifications. He will also aim to bring a European perspective to our website.

His first post will be published soon.

Plug: If you’re interested in blogging for Open Borders in any capacity, consider filling in our potential guest blogger contact form.

This is the question asked by Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. In particular in an interview with NPR in 2011 he argues:

“Our take on it is really that a modern society has no need for any immigration,” he says. “We don’t actually need immigration. Our land is settled, we’re a post-industrial society, and so … from our perspective, we need to start from zero — like zero-based budgeting — and then say, ‘Are there groups of people whose admission is so compelling that we let them in despite the fact that there’s no need for this sort of thing?’ “

So do we need immigration? Krikorian goes into more detail on his reasoning in his book, The New Case Against Immigration:

A better approach would be to learn from the principle of zero-based budgeting, defined in one dictionary as “a process in government and corporate finance of justifying an overall budget or individual budget items each fiscal year or each review period rather than dealing only with proposed changes from a previous budget.”

So in considering the amount and nature of legal migration, we shouldn’t start from the existing level and work down; instead, we should start from zero immigration and work up. Zero is not where we’ll end, but it must be where we start. From zero we must then consider what categories of immigrant are so important to the national interest that their admission warrants risking the kinds of problems that the rest of this book has outlined.

To tackle this argument we need to consider whether the “needs” of the society are the primary issue at stake here, or even one of significance. This is not to say that society and concerns about it must be discarded, but they may not be particularly relevant even given pessimistic assumptions about the results of large-scale immigration. But first, why should “zero-based” budgeting be our analogy here?

As noted in the above quote, zero-based budgeting means that expenditures must be justified each review period, with the assumption being that all programs are assumed to need zero dollars every review period unless they demonstrate otherwise. This concept is popular in fiscal conservative circles and candidates for office such as Rick Perry have touted their own use of the practice in government. The main advantages of this revolving around the idea of anchoring bias, aka the concept that humans tend to be influenced in estimates of what is correct or should be done by other stimuli that they mentally associate with the question. This can even happen with numbers that are originally used to prime people are completely unrelated to the problem they are asked to solve. For instance, subjects who see a spin on a numbered wheel come up 65 and they are asked what percentage of UN countries are African have a median guess of about 45% while subjects who see a spin of 10 have a median guess of 25%. Zero-based budgeting advocates argue that we are being anchored to think of current expenditure as “normal” and therefore our estimates of what good spending levels are will not change much from year to year. Krikorian is adopting this to argue that our immigration debate has a similar problem, with the current number of immigrants being used as a baseline and mainstream proposal focusing on raising or lowering that number rather than rationally considering what the right number of immigrants to let in is.

To that point I actually agree with him. Ideally our focus should not be based on “this is what happened last year so let’s make adjustments off that,” but on what will produce the most benefit to the most people while preserving the most human freedom possible. A status quo bias can be helpful in many instances, particularly when a situation is generally good or the original arguments for the status quo were strong. In market processes for instance, given that markets tend towards equilibrium and this equilibrium as a general rule this tends to be efficient according to the first welfare theorem of economics support for the status quo usually makes sense. The status quo of immigration however was originally based on less than ideal reasoning to say the least. Not to mention how political incentives go wrong with issues of rational irrationality arising easily in politics. This includes a particular bias against foreigners found in Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter. Also while the status quo may seem good in the developed world, its hard to say the status quo is good for the hundreds of millions living on less than $1.25 a day. Of course, Krikorian and I may agree that the status quo is wrong, but we come from opposite angles. So let’s return to this problem of using zero-based immigration restrictions based upon national “need.”

Using the term “need” is problematic in the developed world, almost everyone in that part of the world lives hugely above the level needed to survive. For instance, depending upon levels of activity, humans can survive on as little as 600 calories per day. For income levels, hundreds of millions of people survive on less than $1.25 per day (and yes that is in Purchasing Power Parity). If an individual adopted the idea of only living on what s/he needed, then effectively the entire economy of the developed and most of the developing world would have to be cut. Furthermore, the mores of much of the American Southeast (often called the Bible Belt for its tendencies towards religious conservatism) would likely be offended by a zero-based budgeting of clothing every summer. When cities may see average daily temperatures over 26 degrees Celsius or over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, arguably the amount of clothes actually needed in such conditions approaches zero.

But what about countries? Do countries “need” any immigrants? Well what exactly do countries need? For stability purposes the answer seems to be not much. North Korea has managed to maintain the same governmental regime for six decades despite having the least open society and one of the poorest economies on Earth. They would not have to cut very much on a “need” basis. Perhaps though Krikorian would argue that he simply means “need” for the current status of most developed societies. To which, even if true, I would argue “So what? We can always do better.” Anchoring still happens even in zero-based budgeting, only rather than being anchored by the number of immigrants he is being anchored by the current state of society. If there’s a choice between having a world with a lot of wealth, or a world with twice as much wealth that is also more widely spread among people, why should we choose the first?

We use a “zero” baseline for things which are bad or burdens. Ideally the amount of times you get upset in a day is zero, but special circumstances override that at times. However, the fact that a bad outcome can occur due to something is not sufficient to say we should ideally want “zero” of it and only add other amounts as absolutely needed. Take driving for instance. The bad outcome of an accident can occur while driving, indeed this is serious enough that it is the tenth highest cause of death world wide. And yet does that mean we should all move to areas with greater mass transit? Should we abandon seeing friends and family in person because we would have to drive to get there? Driving is not an absolute necessity most of the time we do it either because we don’t absolutely have to go where we are trying to get to or because a change in our choice of home could bring us close to mass transit. But driving makes life so much easier and better for us all that few people would really consider adopting “zero-based driving” goals. And given the extent of potential advantages to freer immigration, not to mention the success of previous free immigration systems and the low quality of the arguments that brought them down (a subject I hope to hit upon in more detail in future posts), the argument that immigration is on net likely to be a bad thing seems even more threadbare than a driving example.

Finally, there are values that we should have a presumption against violating. These include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which are harmed when people can’t move to homes of their own choosing. Life is a lot harder when you are stuck with a terrible place premium. Liberty is tough to come by in countries that actively try to quash it. And how better to pursue happiness than by trying to find places to live that suit who you are? If these are things worth promoting in the world then perhaps our anchoring should be based upon not violating them unless we have strong reasons to do so. There may be particular reasons to keep particular immigrants out (to help prevent the spread of dangerous infectious diseases for instance), but the point is a person entering a country should be presumed acceptable to allow in until proven otherwise. Thus if we’re going to change how we think about the immigration debate our thinking shouldn’t begin with “are there any good reasons to let any immigrants in?” but “are there any good reasons to keep any immigrant out?”

The article about us by Shaun Raviv for The Atlantic (April 26, 2013) brought a lot of media attention our way. Our readership, Facebook likes, and Twitter follows all seem to have roughly doubled since Shaun’s piece was published, and much of our external coverage has been in the aftermath of Shaun’s piece.

In light of the increased traffic and attention to the site, we are looking for more people who might be interested in blogging (guest-blogging, occasional blogging, or regular blogging) for our site.

If you’re interested, please fill in the potential guest blogger contact form. It’s called a “potential guest blogger contact form” in light of the fact that we expect most respondents to be interested in writing one-off guest posts or series of posts rather than taking on a commitment to write for the site on an ongoing basis. However, if you express interest and there is sufficient congruence between you and the site, we might work out an arrangement for you to be on occasional or even a regular blogger.

Well, not quite. But a better lifting of the global Rawlsian veil there never was. Citing a study by The Economist, the Washington Post published this map of the best countries in the world to be born in today (the bluer the better):

The summary of the results is worth reading, but there were a couple money quotes:

Even Portugal and Spain, for all their very real troubles, score highly. A child born today is likely to have a better life, according to the data, in Poland or Greece — yes, Greece — than in rising economic giants such as Brazil, Turkey or China.

…

Though countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam are projected to show astounding economic growth over the next generation, they are poor today. This map is a reminder that being born into a poor society, even one that offers opportunities for new wealth, can still mean life-long challenges.

…

So, if you’re a Westerner fretting about American decline or European collapse, then if nothing else, know that your children have still lucked into one of the best deals in history: being born in the right place at the right time.

Being born in the right place at the right time counts for a lot. There’s nothing ironclad that makes the amount of people being born in Portugal or Greece or Australia or the US today the right amount. If I took ten babies from Bangladesh and dropped them off in Germany tomorrow with forged German citizenship papers, in what conceivable way could their presence harm anyone there, growing up as German as can be? Yes, there is in principle some limit to how many people a country can have, and coming up against that constraint is a plausible reason to enforce immigration restrictions. But adopting restrictions without bothering to prove such a limit has been reached is nothing more than creating a new aristocracy.

Putting aside difficult-to-quantify social factors for now, from a purely economic standpoint, the global aristocracy of birthplace is immensely inefficient. How inefficient? The most conservative estimate is that true open borders would make humankind 67% richer. The most aggressive estimate suggests it would make us 150% richer. We’re talking doubling world GDP, folks. Even if you make allowance for social frictions necessitating some immigration restrictions, there is absolutely no rational basis for believing the economically rational thing to do is to, as a general rule, only have people live and work in the country of their birth.

Much of what I am today, I owe to my parents and my country, and to my creator who made me who I am. But I also owe an immense amount to studying and working in the United States, which literally offered me opportunities no other country could give me. I was lucky enough to be born in circumstances that could get me to the US. How many billion others can say the same?

It’s one thing to punish someone because if you don’t, they will harm you. That is at least prima facie plausible. But it’s another thing to punish someone purely for an accident of birth out of their control. I had no choice in where I was born. Neither did you. Let’s be glad we were born in pretty good circumstances (because if you’re able to read this, you’re almost certainly one of the luckiest people alive). But let’s not use birth as a reason to deny those less fortunate than us some of the same opportunities you and I had.

Political philosopher Jason Brennan recently gave an interesting interview to 3:AM Magazine, focusing primarily on the ethics of voting and political participation. He has some interesting comments on libertarianism and liberalism as well, and this is where the interview becomes relevant to open borders, for Brennan makes this comment (I have made some formatting changes and added emphasis):

I think equality misses the point of social justice. The point isn’t to make people more equal. It’s to make sure first everyone has enough, and then that everyone has more. With that in mind, I find it bizarre that so many people focus on the plight of the least well-off in rich societies, and yet ignore the issue of immigration.

From my point of view, if you do not advocate open immigration, any claim to be concerned about social justice or the well being of the poor is mere pretense. When economists estimate the welfare losses from immigration restrictions, they tend to conclude that eliminating immigration restrictions would double world GDP. The poorest immigrants would see the largest gains. The families and friends they leave behind would see large gains.

Immigration restrictions expose the worlds’ poor to exploitation. If you have an economic system where everything can be globalised, except poor labour, then you make the world’s poor sitting ducks for exploitation. They can’t go where labour is scarce to get a good deal. They are forced to wait for capital to come find them and give them a bad deal. It’s not just that these restrictions are inefficient. Immigration restrictions impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

I do not think I could have said it any better myself. The conclusions in that final paragraph epitomise my personal journey to full support for open borders.

You can argue that open borders impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on many people as well. But strong claims require strong evidence. The evidence of the oppression of closed borders is staring us in the face. Every person who jumps a wall, swims a river, paddles an ocean, or dodges bullets in search of a better life is telling us just how much open borders is worth to them as an individual, and can be worth to us as a human race.

The economic evidence demanding open borders is compelling. But coupled with the fundamental immorality of oppressing the most vulnerable people on the face of the earth, there is absolutely no way to stomach the status quo. Closed borders are not just another example of governmental inefficiency: they are a graphic illustration of the evil things that humans can do to other people, and of the capacity we have for self-deception.

You can argue that now is not the right time to end immigration restrictions. That we’re not ready. That greater immigration levels bring all kinds of harms which we either absolutely cannot address, or simply cannot find the resources to address. All fair points; I might even agree with you on some of these (I am particularly sympathetic to the argument that a sudden influx of immigrants undermines a strong sense of community).

But these fair points only militate for gradually opening the borders. They demand experimentation with keyhole solutions — policies that mitigate the risks of opening the borders. We have a tendency to think that the status quo of closed borders is desirable. But if current immigration levels are desirable at all (a very dubious proposition), that is only because keeping them this low is a necessary evil — not a positive good. Brennan puts it so well that I can’t help but quote him again for emphasis:

If you have an economic system where everything can be globalised, except poor labour, then you make the world’s poor sitting ducks for exploitation. They can’t go where labour is scarce to get a good deal. They are forced to wait for capital to come find them and give them a bad deal. It’s not just that these restrictions are inefficient. Immigration restrictions impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

If we have to impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world — if we have to shoot Starving Marvin in the face for the greater good — let’s at least be honest about it. And let’s be absolutely sure that such barbarism for the sake of saving civilisation really is necessary — that we’ve optimised the cruelty of our immigration regimes. The feasibility of open borders may be an open question. But as long as people are dying because governments refuse to give them a legal way to move in search of a better life, the onus is on us to examine the immigration policies enforced in our name. If we must close our borders, close them only as much as we need to, and no more. Fundamental morality demands it.

A task for the industrious, or perhaps for us here at Open Borders, only we would need a lot of help: write a history of borders. When did the concept of a border appear? How has it evolved? What did borders mean at different times in history? My/Bryan Caplan’s/Steve Camarota’s Huffington Post TV interview last week (also see here and here) featured this exchange:

STEVE CAMAROTA: Well right, I mean, obviously, the fraction of the American people or even public officials who think we don’t have a right to control our borders and regulate our borders and control who comes in is trivially small, it’s a marginalized position. From that perspective, but in academia, and among a lot of the groups that pressure for high levels of immigration, this is a kind of mainstream perspective, that people have a right to come into our country. The only way you could do that would be to push it down the throats of the American people. All societies, all sovereign states throughout all history have always had the idea that they can regulate who comes into their society–

NATHAN SMITH (interrupting): Well, that’s not really accurate, but–

Here’s what I would like to know, and am not enough of a historian to say for sure: is Steve Camarota more like 70% wrong, or more like 90% wrong, setting to one side the issue of armed invasion? Unfortunately, “setting to one side the issue of armed invasion” is not so easy, because Camarota and other restrictionists tend to try to confuse the obviously different issues of how one deals with hostile armies intending to kill and plunder by superior strength, and peaceful migrants asking nothing but to be left alone or to be allowed to offer their wares or their skills. Of course, if the mistake has been made often before, Camarota’s claim would still be true. I’m pretty sure it’s not generally true, but just how often past societies have dealt out to peaceful migrants treatment appropriate to armed invaders would be an interesting historical question to answer. Again, has the right to emigrate, or the right to invite, been widely recognized? What of hospitality, the obligation of hosts to guests? What is the history of that? What made a person a guest? I’ve been reading The Odyssey, and one of the most persistent moral themes in it is hospitality. The good characters are invariably distinguished by their kindness to guests, not simply invited guests by any means but even and especially wayfarers, wanderers and beggars such as Odysseus is in most of the places he goes throughout most of the epic. The bad characters are marked, above all, by their harshness and violence against the same. Was this peculiar to the Greeks or is it universal? Walls have occasionally been built: the Great Wall of China, or Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, but of course they are more often not built. How have borders been guarded? How often have they been unguarded? How often have they been undefined? When they are defined and guarded, what kind of traffic has been stopped, and what allowed through? And in the shadowy background of all this, perhaps never very well-defined even to the actors in history let alone in written records that can be discovered later, what ideas about borders existed in people’s minds? To what extent did they feel that they, or their rulers, had a right to control who entered and who exited the territory associated with this or that polity? What motives were appropriate for such regulation, and what were the limits of it?

The project would require a lot of assistance from historians, but from other specialists, too, for historians tend to be good with documents and dates but can’t be relied on to think through the issues carefully and abstractly. Historical studies often help people to escape the ideological parochialism of their own times, but in a patchy and idiosyncratic fashion. Social science abstractions such as the concepts of economics can blind their adherents in certain ways, but can also enable them to overleap the narrow certainties of a particular time or country or class. I suspect that the result would be quite useful to the open borders cause, because it would reveal that something like open borders– not precisely in the sense advocated by myself or the other bloggers here, of course, but still– has been the norm in human history, while the Passport Age (1914-present, roughly speaking) is an aberration. But if it did turn out that the Passport Age is less distinctive than I thought, that probably wouldn’t affect my support for open borders much, nor, if open borders were the historic norm, would that necessarily force the restrictionists could back down. They could argue that immigration restrictionism (it’s too bad the phrase world apartheid sounds polemical: it seems like a more cogent and specific description of today’s migration regime) is a novel invention indeed, but a beneficent one. But, advocacy impact aside, I’d simply like to know.

UPDATE: More resources: a quick summary post by Vipul, my devastating takedown of the claim that Rome fell because of open immigration (that one’s worth reading!), this post, my post on metics in ancient Greece, and my long Old Testament post. Also see our page on the “alien invasion” metaphor; Vipul’s post on why immigration was freer in the 19th century, and Bryan Caplan on “The Golden Age of Immigration.”

I recently finished Michele Wucker’s Lockout, a 2006 book advocating a liberal US immigration policy. Superficially, it’s overly similar to Jason Riley’s Let Them In; both co-blogger Vipul and I find that mainstream pro-immigration US literature suffers from the pitfall of focusing too much on the US (well, this is a pitfall from an open borders standpoint), and being anchored too much to the status quo. However, compared to Riley, Wucker is much more solutions-focused — and from the solutions she proposes, I would actually suggest she was grappling with the early embryos of all those ideas which eventually led to the formation of this Open Borders blog.

Riley says he wrote his book to rebut mainstream anti-immigration arguments in the US, but Wucker goes one step further to propose a number of changes to US immigration policy. The first 10 chapters of Wucker are incredibly similar to Riley, but the 11th chapter is breath of fresh air. Some of Wucker’s proposals:

1. Legal residency for current unauthorised immigrants in the US
2. A guest worker programme or other visa system allowing more people to work legally in the US
3. Stricter immigration enforcement against those working without permission from the authorities
4. Penalties for employers of unauthorised immigrants
5. Immigration processing fees (taxes?) levied on immigrants to support cultural integration programmes and jobs for natives
6. Devolve substantial portions of immigration rule-making from Congress to government agencies, and have those agencies streamline the existing process further
7. Establish a special cabinet-level Immigration department, to ensure a single person and agency are solely accountable for US immigration policy
8. Consciously promote global development, both through conventional development policies and through liberal immigration policy, to reduce wage gaps between poor and rich countries, and thus reduce the impetus for immigration
9. Reduce the quota for visas granted to adult siblings of US citizens

Most of these are what we at Open Borders: The Case call keyhole solutions — policies that mitigate the risks of migration. They might do this by ensuring that some of the gains from migration go to natives, such as through the immigration levies which Wucker proposes. Or they might do this by managing the inflow of immigrants using some transparent rules to ensure that a country’s institutions are not overwhelmed by sudden, unexpected influxes (which, at least on paper, is what a streamlined bureaucracy would be able to do).

At the same time, there are some things which open borders advocates would probably part ways with Wucker on. Wucker’s strong belief that employers should be punished for hiring unauthorised immigrants seems sincere, and not just a sop to the restrictionist crowd. I think she finds it incredibly unjust that employers can illegally discriminate against these immigrants because of their unauthorised status. She seems to hint that she would prefer the reverse of the current US system (presently the immigrant bears all of the risk in taking up employment, and the employer takes none) — which I suppose is more compatible with an open borders viewpoint. It sounds like she might not be opposed to programmatic, ongoing “amnesties” which some countries have done, allowing unauthorised immigrants to regularise their status even after entering/overstaying without following the standard immigration rules.

Wucker seems incredibly cognisant (at least relative to most participants in mainstream immigration debates) of the terrible suffering that closed borders inflict on immigrants and prospective immigrants. Because of this, I don’t doubt her sincerity in advocating a guest worker programme or something similar to ensure those who seek honest work in the US can come. Putting this in context, when she wrote, most mainstream pro-immigration activists in the US were rejecting any guest worker programme as a form of legalised slavery. Instead, Wucker explored some bold proposals for immigration reform that dovetail incredibly well with open borders and open borders-like keyhole solutions:

The solution to [the dilemmas of immigration policy] is not to dictate what immigrant workers should do but to tailor a menu of options that lets each worker’s individual circumstances guide his or her decision…we could require [high-skilled] immigrants who decide to stay in America longer than ten years to pay a premium; some of that money could be redirected to the immigrant’s homeland and/or to to job training for U.S. workers.

Similarly…lower-skilled immigrants could pay a fee if they decide to stay after their guest worker status ran out….Another possibility could be to ask guest workers or their employers to pay a deposit to be held in an escrow account; if the worker decided to stay in America, the money would be forfeited to a development bank for use in the home country.

Wucker explicitly says that immigration policy should form part of a development strategy that will close the income gap between rich and poor worlds:

Paradoxically, in the long run, the best way to slow desperate immigration is to let people come here, build their skills, and then take those skills back to their homelands. Also paradoxically, the best way for people to help their homelands is to adapt as fully as possible to American society, for this is the key to succeeding here. By encouraging people to study here and go back and forth freely, we can encourage brain circulation and the creation of industries that will provide jobs in migrant-sending countries and markets for U.S. goods.

This development focus I find incredibly unusual for a mainstream immigration policy book. Wucker wrote in 2006, before economists Lant Pritchett and Michael Clemens fully fleshed out the concept of the place premium, showing how closed borders artificially create wage gaps that result in some people earning 6 cents (adjusted for purchasing power) doing work in their home countries, for which the equivalent wage in the US would be 1 dollar. Clemens and Pritchett would go on to argue that such wage gaps, as high as 94%, have never existed between any jurisdictions that permit freedom of movement. Following from this, the labour market convergence of open borders would end the worst poverty in the world and double world GDP. It amazes me that Wucker would take this angle in 2006, before development economists had even gotten around to begin digging into quantifying how badly closed borders is holding back the world economy, and the economies of our poorest countries.

Finally, one last remarkable thing is how antsy Wucker is about conceding much ground to restrictionists. She makes the usual sops to restrictionism, such as stricter internal labour market enforcement, and reducing the number of visas for citizens’ siblings, and…that’s it. Unlike other mainstream liberalisation advocates, she doesn’t plump for a border fence, or neglect the all-important need to reform the US’s broken visa system. It’s quite clear she wants more immigrants, because morality and good economics demand this, and she’s not afraid to say it. She says she rejects open borders, but literally in the same breath insists her only concession to restrictionists will be reducing the visa quota for citizens’ siblings.

From an open borders standpoint, Wucker’s book is not particularly useful or illuminating. In a sense, because of the work of Clemens and Pritchett, Wucker’s Lockout is now substantially outdated. But it is for that reason that I find Wucker so interesting: she was advocating open borders-style keyhole solutions, using the same stylised arguments as open borders advocates, years ahead of us.

I assume that other open borders supporters cringed, as I did, when it was reported that the suspects in the Boston bombings were immigrants. For some people, the Boston atrocity appears to have reinforced fears that immigrants could be terrorists.  A man interviewed in a Philadelphia suburb said, “’I’m a little more of an extremist now after what happened in Boston… I think we should just stop letting people in.’” Even maintaining current immigration levels or instituting small liberalizations of American immigration policy may be threatened by what happened in Boston and similar immigrant-connected terrorism, let alone their negative impact on the push for open borders.

Concerns about the connection between immigrants and terrorism involve Muslim immigrants. The Boston suspects were Muslims and may have been inspired by religious extremism to carry out the attacks. The Bipartisan Policy Center reports that the U.S. has “a domestic terrorist problem involving immigrant and indigenous Muslims as well as converts to Islam.” ((9/10/10, Bipartisan Policy Center, Assessing the Terrorist Threat), page 31) Even some open borders advocates seem uncertain if an open borders policy should apply to Muslim immigrants. In the site’s background page on terrorism, Vipul paraphrases a view (not necessarily his own): “[F]or those who believe that Islamic immigration to the United States poses a unique threat, this may be a reason to maintain present restrictions on immigration from Islamic countries and self-identified Muslims from other countries.”  Muslim immigration would increase with open borders, and some of these additional immigrants could become terrorists. (see also here and here).

However, especially after situations like Boston (and there have been others), open borders supporters should explain how open borders could actually help protect the U.S. from terrorism and that open borders should be available to all individual immigrants, regardless of religion, so long as they pose no terrorist threat. Vipul has collected some of these arguments at the link above.  My vision of open borders and that of a number of other supporters does involve keeping out potential terrorists through security screenings at the border.  So one argument notes that, unlike our current restrictionist policy which devotes considerable resources and focus on keeping out unauthorized immigrants seeking to work in the U.S., resources under an open borders policy could be focused on screening out terrorists.  Another argument is that the free movement of people between countries could lead to the spreading of ideas contrary to those which inspire terrorism; immigrants who move between the U.S. or other western countries and their native countries would share values such as individual rights, tolerance, and democracy with their compatriots who remain in the native countries.  A third argument is that if terrorism grows out of weak economies in native countries, the free movement of people from those countries and the resulting economic benefit to those countries (through remittances and immigrants returning to their native country to establish new businesses) could help prevent terrorism.

There is another reason open borders could help combat terrorism.  Kevin Johnson, author of Opening the Floodgates, notes that “carefully crafted immigration enforcement is less likely to frighten immigrant communities—the very communities whose assistance is essential if the United States truly seeks to successfully fight terrorism.” (page 35)   Without the fear of being the targets of immigration enforcement, immigrants would be more likely to cooperate with authorities in identifying individuals who are potential terrorists in the U.S. and assist with efforts against terrorist groups abroad.  This would fit with the government’s strategy to gain the cooperation of Muslims in the U.S. in addressing terrorism.  Quintan Wiktorowicz, a national security staff member in the White House, notes in a discussion on an administration plan to fight terrorism in the U.S. that “Muslim communities and Muslims in the United States are not the problem, they are the solution. And that’s the message we plan to take to those particular communities in addressing at least al-Qaida inspired radicalization of violent extremism…”

For the effort abroad, Nathan Smith suggests that “emigrants from Islamic countries could provide a valuable resource for the intelligence services of the West in their fight against Islamic terrorism.”  Open borders would presumably increase the number of immigrants from countries that have been sources of terrorism against the U.S., such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen.  Some of these immigrants could provide the cultural and language skills which would bolster our intelligence resources and help America stay safe from future attacks.  Indeed, our intelligence agencies have often lacked agents who could infiltrate groups that threaten the U.S. (In an article in the Atlantic Monthly in the summer of 2001, Reuel Marc Gereht quoted a former CIA operative as saying “‘The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist…’” (pages 38-42, July/August 2001))

In addition to articulating the potential benefits of open borders to stopping terrorism, open borders advocates must emphasize that most Muslims are peaceful and should be allowed to immigrate.  Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, warns “we should not fall into the trap of thinking that Muslims are a uniform and separate community whose identity is wholly defined by their religion, still less an inevitably hostile or violent one.” (page 304) He notes that Muslims come from many different countries, each with their own traditions, and, like other religious groups, some are religious, some not.  “There are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims and Muslims who reject their faith.” (page 304)  In addition, “only a small minority of Muslims are fundamentalist,” and only a tiny number of fundamentalists are terrorists. (page 305)  There are over 2.5  million Muslims living in the U.S., about two thirds of whom are immigrants, but very few are involved in terrorism.  The Bipartisan Policy Center reports that in 2009 “at least 43 American citizens or residents aligned with Sunni militant groups or their ideology were charged or convicted of terrorism crimes in the U.S. or elsewhere, the highest number in any year since 9/11.” (Page 5 of this report ) Mr. Legrain explains that “the threat of Islamic terrorism  is a reason for increased vigilance, surveillance and scrutiny; it is not reason for limiting immigration.”

Nathan Smith has noted that when dramatic events occur, such as an act of terrorism by immigrants or a plane crash, people often overestimate the frequency of such events, a phenomenon called “availability bias.”  This mental overreaction to “extremely unrepresentative events” makes people attribute more importance to the events than they deserve.  This dynamic suggests that open borders supporters have a lot of work to do convincing the public that most Muslims who want to immigrate pose no threat and that open borders may actually help in the fight against terrorism.

This post was originally published on the Cato-at-Liberty blog here and is republished with the permission of the author.

In the Washington Post today, Jim DeMint and Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation invoke the free-market pantheon in arguing their anti-immigration stance: “The economist Milton Friedman warned that the United States cannot have open borders and an extensive welfare state.”

They’re halfway right about that. What Friedman actually said was that immigration is “a good thing for the United States…so long as it’s illegal.” He meant that open immigration is highly beneficial to the economy, provided those productive but inexpensive laborers do not have access to welfare. Friedman later wrote that, “There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state.” Friedman’s problem was with the welfare state, not immigration. His remarks are fundamentally at odds with the position Heritage is trying to argue.

It’s not the first time that I’ve questioned the free-market credentials of my friends at Heritage lately, and that’s making me sad.

On Monday, Heritage released a new study entitled “The Fiscal Cost of unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer” by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, PhD. I criticized an earlier version of this report in 2007, arguing that their methodology was so flawed that one cannot take their report’s conclusions seriously. Unfortunately, their updated version differs little from their earlier one.

I’m joined in this view by a host of prominent free-marketeers. Jim Pethokoukis at AEI, Doug Holtz-Eakin at American Action Forum, Tim Kane at the Hudson Institute, and others have all denounced the fundamentals of the Heritage report.

The new Heritage report is still depressingly static, leading to a massive underestimation of the economic benefits of immigration and diminishing estimated tax revenue. It explicitly refuses to consider the GDP growth and economic productivity gains from immigration reform—factors that increase native-born American incomes. An overlooked flaw is that the study doesn’t even score the specific immigration reform proposal in the Senate. Its flawed methodology and lack of relevancy to the current immigration reform proposal relegate this study to irrelevancy.

Even worse, the Heritage study recommends a “solution” to the fiscal problems it supposedly finds. It suggests:

Because the majority of unlawful immigrants come to the U.S. for jobs, serious enforcement of the ban on hiring unlawful labor would substan­tially reduce the employment of unlawful aliens and encourage many to leave the U.S. Reducing the number of unlawful immigrants in the nation and limiting the future flow of unlawful immigrants would also reduce future costs to the taxpayer.

Professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda of UCLA wrote a paper for Cato last year where he employed a dynamic model called the GMig2 to study comprehensive immigration reform’s impact on the U.S. economy. He found that immigration reform would increase U.S. GDP by $1.5 trillion in the ten years after enactment.

Professor Hinojosa-Ojeda then ran a simulation examining the economic impact of the policy favored by Heritage: the removal or exit of all unauthorized immigrants. The economic result would be a $2.6 trillion decrease in estimated GDP growth over the next decade. That confirms the common-sense observation that removing workers, consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs from America’s economy will make us poorer.

Would decreasing economic growth by $2.6 trillion over the next ten years have a negative impact on the fiscal condition of the U.S.? You betcha.

Do the authors consider the fiscal impact of their preferred immigration policy? Nope.

For those of us who “grew up” on the fine policy analysis long produced by Heritage, the immigration report is a supreme disappointment. No one has done more than Heritage to promote the importance of dynamic scoring, which is critical to understanding the true effects of government activity on the marketplace. For that organization to have seemingly abandoned its core principles for this important debate is a stinging blow to those of us who crave an honest, data-driven debate on the fiscal merits of policy.

A position long held by Steve Sailer is that citizenism is “ the least destructive and most uplifting form of allegiance humanly possible on an effective scale.” Long term readers of this blog might guess that many of the bloggers here would tend to disagree. But here Sailer argues that of our options, we aren’t going to get better than citizenism.

My starting point in analyzing policies is: “What is in the best overall interests of the current citizens of the United States?”

In contrast, so many others think in terms of: “What is in the best interest of my: identity group / race / ethnicity / religion / bank account / class / ideology / clique / gender / sexual orientation / party / and/or personal feelings of moral superiority?”

Given the options he presents, I might be hard pressed to say that citizenism is any worse than those options and it is clearly superior to many of them. “Personal feelings of moral superiority” for instance seems to devolve simply into straight egoism. Meanwhile the other options have problems of either arbitrariness or stifling of diverse ideas. But is universalism, namely the idea that all humans should carry equal moral weight to each other, truly not possible on “an effective scale”?

There is perhaps some evidence in support of this from history. Most humans have used various forms of smaller group moralities through history. Wars and revolutions have been fought on issues of class, race, religion, ideology, and even arguably feelings of moral superiority. A large-scale respect for universalism may have prevented, or at least destroyed the initial rationales (ex. slavery), for many and perhaps all of these wars. Humanity’s failure to broadly adopt universalism may be taken as a bad sign for that philosophy’s viability. Even modern psychological experiments show it is easy to divide humans into competing groups. However, just because something has not yet happened does not mean it cannot happen in the future.

Take democracy for instance. Slightly over a century ago almost no countries could be called democracies by modern standards of universal suffrage. Meanwhile a century later, by some measures a majority of the countries in the world can be considered democracies (also in the previous link). This is clearly a massive change. There is even change on human morals. For millennia the practice of human slavery was common and (at least in historical written records) almost entirely unchallenged. But starting in the 19th century, major countries began banning the practice of slavery. This trend has continued until the last country on Earth officially (though perhaps not in practice) banned slavery in 1981. Human moral evolution is not only possible, we’ve seen it happen in remarkably short time frames (for more examples of changing moral evolution see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature).

Citizenism itself is an example of this trend. Sailer himself sees this as a selling point in the above article. Not that long ago, the idea of loyalty to as broad a group as a nation was almost unheard of. Peasants in Early Modern Europe tended to care more about their village and maybe their religious group (which most often manifested itself in attacks on or demonization of those outside their faith). Basic ideas of nationalism only began taking hold in the 18th century. Citizenism, in this regard is already a break from “natural” ways humans tend to group themselves. Indeed, the best guess of the maximum number of meaningful relations we can have is limited to 150 people. Any moral consideration outside of that group must be considered arbitrary or a social construct given how human brains work. Even historical means of dividing people are clearly social constructs with little basis in natural or necessary grouping. Racism for instance has often been a poor proxy for any kind of actual genetic divides. Hispanics for instance are not a separate racial category on any kind of genetic level, yet have often been lumped together in American discourses (such as the Sailer article I initially linked). Furthermore, geneticists have argued that there is more variation between humans of the same race than between racial groupings.

The same construct problems hold for religions and ideologies (do we consider Sunnis and Shiites one group because they are both fundamentally Islamic or different because of the interpretations? Are Trotskyists and Stalinists both Marxists or importantly different groups? The answers depend on the context). And finally couldn’t we get around the citizenism block on weighing all humans equally on moral concerns by simply declaring everyone on the planet a citizen of country X?

Sailer both admits and in fact praises that the definitions of citizenship are just as arbitrary as those of race, religion, and ideology (if not more so). Prior to the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution large numbers of African-Americans didn’t count as citizens of the country they were born in. Citizenship is a quality that had been expanded and shrunk innumerable times. And if a theoretical situation where the legal definition of citizenship for a given country becomes “every human on Earth” could happen, why not skip the formality?

Perhaps if everyone acted like citizenists though then through the magic of an invisible hand-like force the result would be ideal to universalists. Even if this is true however, an even more sure way to achieve universalist outcomes should be to have everyone hold universalist morals. If citizenism and universalism are both unnatural moral systems for humans, then why should one be harder to embrace than the other? Even if an external enemy is needed for unity, plenty of options abound. Perhaps a struggle against a natural world trying to kill us, the potential for space aliens, or maybe even just making up some fictional group through a type of “noble lie.” Uniting around a common enemy is an often ugly phenomena though and is usually best avoided (a process I would think would be made easier with universalist ethics).

I can’t claim everyone, or perhaps even a majority of people are truly universalist in their moral philosophies. Not even at the level of putting that 150 person strong group of friends and family first and then all other humans equally. But that is no excuse. Humans have invented innumerable different ways to give moral consideration to large groups. And if some humans can find solidarity in abstract and arbitrary groupings such as nations or states, then I hold out hope that we can in fact do so for the abstract idea of humanity. This belief doesn’t have to be linked to a belief in the expanding circle of morality, but if the circle can expand would expanding in the direction of including all of humanity be so bad? The limited number of people willing to extend moral considerations beyond the people of their own states have done some amazing work already. If it is possible for groups such as that to draw on universalist morality then I count that as both humanly possible and on an effective scale. And if universalism is possible, then why would anyone want to settle for citizenism?

Malaysia is going to the polls on May 5th, and for the first time in perhaps living memory, there is a real chance that the ruling Barisan Nasional (National Front) will not be returned to power. BN is currently the longest-ruling political party in any of the world’s democracies, and its leaders will not be happy about losing their power and privilege should the election fail to go their way. Unsurprisingly, it turns out they have resorted to the easiest way out: importing foreigners, registering them as voters, and paying them to vote.

To be fair, the only evidence that has emerged thus far is that the Prime Minister’s office has been arranging an unusual number of charter flights for voters. It’s clear that these are meant for people to vote — the government has denied official involvement with these charter flights, claiming that friends of the party have paid to ensure their supporters are able to vote. It remains to be seen whether foreigners will turn up in large numbers to vote on May 5th, and what sort of papers they will have.

In my opinion, the relevance of this to open borders as far as policy goes is absolutely null. No sensible democratic government that plays by the rules would do such a thing as this. BN is only trying this because the party and the state in Malaysia are so unhealthily intertwined. I am no Islamist, nor am I a socialist, but in this election I voted for the Islamic party to represent me in Parliament and a nominally socialist party to represent me in my state legislature. I and even a Malaysian libertarian friend donated money to a particularly vocal socialist candidate. The current government of Malaysia doesn’t stand for anything other than its own corrupt self-interest, and kicking it out to put us on the road to a two-party democracy is the only realistic choice.

In any case, I’m not aware of any open borders advocate who favours immediate naturalisation of immigrants. If anything, we tend to urge a disentangling of the relationship between citizenship and residency. If you want to give foreigners a way to naturalise, that’s up to your country. But it would be a good idea to follow the rules, which the Malaysian government is blatantly not doing: an ongoing Royal Commission is currently investigating allegations of past illegal citizenship grants in the state of Sabah. And all evidence released so far strongly points to the government’s culpability.

However I do think discussing this story is relevant to open borders, in the sense that it illustrates some real problems standing in the way of open borders as a societal and policy reality. The reasoned and sensible thing to do in response to this evidence of election-rigging would be to demand an investigation and establish a process to ensure voters’ documents are in order. Fortunately, such a process does exist, and opposition parties are able to appoint their own agents to monitor the polling and counting processes.

But quite a number of people have gone further and embraced outright xenophobia in the guise of protecting Malaysian citizens and Malaysian democracy. I have seen people urging Malaysians not to give foreign workers Sunday the 5th off, lest any of these foreigners vote. I have a friend who personally saw people, without provocation, verbally assaulting foreigners at the airport. Banners have been erected warning foreigners attempting to vote illegally that if they are caught, they will be reported to the police — and “While waiting for police arrival, your safety is not guaranteed.”

Growing up as an ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, it has always grated on me that the government sees me as something of a second-class citizen. Chinese and Indians have often been told by those in power: “If you don’t like it, go back home” — as if Malaysia isn’t our home. And now, support for the ruling party has collapsed as a new generation of voters don’t feel ethnic Chinese and Indians are any different from other Malaysian citizens. That banner hinting at lynchings of illegal voters was signed by a group calling themselves Kami Anak Bangsa Malaysia — We are Children of the Malaysian Nation (“Bangsa Malaysia” implying a demand of full equality for Malaysian citizens regardless of race).

I am all for protecting the democratic process — which yes, means ensuring that only citizens can vote. But violent extrajudicial lynchings can only mar the democratic process. And I find it hard to believe that this sentiment isn’t driven at least in part by simple anti-foreign prejudice — not when I’ve never seen threats of physical violence against other illegal voters (most of whom in the past have been Malaysians, whose votes were bought outright by the ruling party). Not when the same people bemoaning being told to “go back to China” are now hurling ethnic slurs at Bangladeshis and telling them “go back to Bangla”. As one of my friends put it: “did someone really just try to tell me that a group of dark skinned people have no right to be in a Malaysian airport?”

We’ve previously noted at Open Borders the odd finding that Malaysians are perhaps the country most opposed to open borders in the world. But my personal observation has been that Malaysians in general are actually very tolerant of immigrants and happy to have them working with or for us. Even the anti-foreigner venom I’ve seen in this election has focused purely on the issue of voting rights. Immigration is not a hot-button issue in Malaysia for the masses — the cost of living, political corruption, and administrative ability are the issues this election is being fought on. Although I’ve been disappointed at how quickly people have resorted to racial epithets ostensibly in the name of defending democracy, I’ve also been inspired at how many Malaysians I’ve seen have been quick to embrace the spirit of human equality that demands both a fair democratic process and open borders. In closing, here is one note I’ve seen making the rounds on social media, authored by one Nathalie Kee:

In the midst of increasing evidence that BN is using foreign workers to win the elections, let us remember that a Bangladeshi on the streets of Masjid Jamek does not equate to the demise of democracy. A man from Myanmar, lining up on polling day, is not the real one to blame, although he does have to take some flak. These two men know nothing about BN, PR and their respective ideals and have been played into the hands of corrupt individuals, probably promised things that they would have otherwise gotten by working for two months. We welcome the Indonesian, Burmese, Filipino and Bangladeshi brothers and sisters, as long as they respect the laws of this land.

I can’t abide the demise of a fair and open political process in my country. But neither can I abide closing our borders for the sake of satisfying anti-foreign prejudice. And neither do I have to for the sake of democracy. Open borders is not about letting governments “elect a new people” to maintain their stranglehold on power. Open borders is about welcoming all our brothers and sisters of the human race who respect the laws of our land.

I define “open borders between the US and Canada” as meaning that US and Canadian citizens are free to enter the other country not just for short-term visits but for long-term visits and can settle in the other country to live, work, marry, or do other stuff, without needing to go through any immigration bureaucracy. Border checkpoints may still exist. One might define open borders more expansively to include all permanent residents of either country. As co-blogger John Lee noted in this post, the US-Canada border is not completely open in this sense: while citizens and even permanent residents can move freely between the countries for short-term visits, they still need to go through a bureaucratic (and uncertain) process in order to take up a job or settle long-term.

My two bleg questions:

• If the United States had a nationwide referendum among citizens (with simple nationwide vote-counting, unlike the complicated electoral college system used for presidential elections) on whether the US should have open borders with Canada, would the referendum pass, and by what margin? Feel free to provide probability distributions, and if necessary, indicate sensitivity to framing, timing, and contextual factors that affect the outcome. Note that “pass” here is based on a majority of those who vote, not based on a majority of the entire citizenry.
• If Canada had an equivalent nationwide referendum, would it pass? Again feel free to provide probability distributions, and if necessary, indicate sensitivity to framing, timing, and contextual factors that affect the outcome. Note that “pass” here is based on a majority of those who vote, not based on a majority of the entire citizenry.

UPDATE: A friend on Facebook had pointed me a while back to Annexation movements of Canada.

Two objections to open borders are that under open borders (1) recipient countries are likely to experience an increase in crime and (2) natives, since they are on average richer than the new comers, are likely to bear the full brunt of crime. The two objections are not necessarily related: one can think of a scenario whereby the crime rate falls following open borders but the residual crime is disproportionately borne by natives. This post does not confront the first objection, namely that open borders might lead to an increase in crime, because others on this site have done so. In addition, I have speculated in a previous post that the increase in crime that immediately followed the collapse of apartheid in South Africa (to all intents and purposes an “open borders event”) was due to the fact that background checks were never performed on the “new comers” to isolate those with criminal records. (In that post, I also noted that it was impossible to perform such checks in South Africa’s case without upsetting an already delicate situation). My intention in this post is to confront the second objection, namely that natives are likely to bear the brunt of any crime that takes place under open borders. I will do so by appealing to South Africa’s post apartheid experience.

The dominant narrative on South Africa is that crime increased and has continued to increase in the post apartheid period and whites have largely been the victims of the crime wave. I took on the first part of this narrative in this post and showed that it was largely false — homicide rates (the most reliable measure of crime) have been declining every year since 1995 (apartheid officially ended in 1994). As a matter of fact, homicide rates are 50% lower today than they were in 1995. The second part of the crime narrative has a common sense appeal: whites are disproportionately the victims of crime because the average white South African is many times richer than the average black South African making him/her an attractive target for criminals. Official confirmation of this narrative seemed to have arrived when in 2009 Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) granted Brandon Huntley, a white South African living in Canada, refugee status on the basis that “[Huntley] would stand out like a ‘sore thumb’ due to his color in any part of [South Africa]“. Huntley ”reported being the victim of several assaults by black South Africans. He alleged that those assaults were racially motivated, and stated that he did not seek police or state protection because the authorities [were] unwilling or unable to help white South Africans…The [IRB] found [Huntley] credible and accepted his evidence with regard to the attacks. One of [Huntley's] witnesses, Ms. Kaplan, whose brother was victimized by black South Africans, also testified that the police [were] corrupt and [do] not help white South Africans, and that a genocide is occurring against white South Africans” (source). The ruling by the IRB sparked off a series of heated debates in South Africa with some seeing the decision as vindication of their long-held suspicions and others condemning it as unfounded. This prompted James Myburgh, the editor of Politicsweb, a popular local news and opinion website, to analyze several rounds of national victimization surveys whereupon he found that “whites were somewhat more likely to fall victim to crime than other race groups”. Myburgh’s conclusions were regarded as the final verdict on the matter by many since national victimization surveys were nationally representative and were conducted by Statistics South Africa, the Institute for Security Studies and the Human Sciences Research Council, bodies widely regarded as credible. The matter did not rest there, however. In December 2009, Gavin Silber and Nathan Geffen published an article in SA Crime Quarterly arguing that national victimization surveys (or NVSs) were not the best tool to use in answering the crime victimization question because they relied heavily on people’s opinions. Silber and Geffen advanced the following reasons [footnotes omitted]:

Firstly, the very concept of crime or criminality can be relatively subjective, as indeed is the case with ‘victimhood’. Some respondents to NVSs classify the threat of violence as a criminal act, while others might only classify its use as criminal. In addition, the distinction between perpetrator and victim can also be somewhat blurred in cases such as assault.

Secondly, there is strong evidence showing that reported victimization levels tend to increase with education, which is obviously (and particularly in South Africa) linked to income. A study in the United States showed that people with university degrees recalled three times as many assaults as those with a high school education. It is conceivable that over-exposure to a particular crime category amongst certain NVS respondents (in this case people with little education) may result in lesser infringements – such as assault – not qualifying as ‘criminal’. This has also been observed in studies illustrating how various developed cities/countries have produced higher victimization rates than poorer countries with higher levels of recorded crime.

Thirdly, reporting of property-related and violent crime tends to differ significantly, based on various circumstances. When a given sample is questioned on exposure to violent interpersonal crimes such as assault and sexual abuse (particularly when it involves a non-stranger), the results are likely to reflect a significant underreporting of actual exposure, due to a reluctance to report sexual abuse, child abuse, general assault and domestic violence.  Moreover, there might be differences in the way poor and relatively wealthy respondents perceive property-related crime. Relatively wealthy people have more items of value, and are able to afford insurance, which requires reporting such crimes to the authorities. This might mean they are more likely to be conscious of, or remember, thefts they have experienced in the period covered by the NVS.

They proposed an alternative method that looked at trends in deaths from non-natural causes, and in particular homicide rates. Such an approach yielded a different set of conclusions to those arrived at by Myburgh. For instance [footnotes omitted]:

In 2008/2009 18,148 people in South Africa were murdered. This amounts to 37.3 people per 100,000, or just under 50 per day. The evidence we have examined indicates that the victims are disproportionately african and coloured working class people.  We examined Statistics South Africa mortality data to determine the breakdown of murders by race. Our analysis is inconclusive but it indicates that victims are disproportionately africans and coloureds.

More compelling data come from the Medical Research Council (MRC). In an investigation into female homicide rates in South Africa in 2004, the MRC used national mortuary data to determine that 2.8 of every 100,000 white women die as a result of murder, whereas 8.9 africans and 18.3 coloureds meet the same fate. This shows that, at least for women, Myburgh is very likely wrong [...] Black women are disproportionately murdered.

Another recent study by the Centre for The Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) analysed homicide rates in high-risk areas in Kwazulu-Natal, Western Cape, and Gauteng, using a representative sample of police dockets. Of the sample 85% of homicide victims were black, 9% were coloured, 5% asian and 1% of victims were white.

Silber and Geffen also looked at mortality reports produced by Statistics South Africa going all the way to the year 2000 and arrived at similar conclusions to those reported above.

So using an approach that counts the actual victims of crime shows that, contra Myburgh, the burden of crime in post-apartheid South Africa has largely been borne by the country’s non-white population.

The above notwithstanding, it is still quite possible that the homicide rate of whites has gone up since 1994 even though whites bear a lesser burden of crime when compared to other groups. Unfortunately, race specific homicide data were not collected prior to 1994 making it difficult for us to  work out and compare victimization rates for whites before and after apartheid. But the information that exists currently suggests that homicide rates for whites have come down or at the very least stayed the same since 1994. For instance, South Africa’s homicide rate began rising in the mid-1950s and continued on this upward trend, with an additional 5,000 homicides per decade, until 1994 (see the figure on page 10 of this document). And this happened during the period when the definition of South Africa excluded the homelands where most blacks (who were the majority of the population) lived suggesting that the increase in homicide rates over this period must have been largely borne by the citizens of South Africa as it was then defined. This piece of evidence coupled with the fact that homicides rates for the country as a whole have fallen by 50% after 1995 suggests that the homicide rate for whites must have declined alongside the country’s homicide rate or at the very least stayed the same since 1994.

Or perhaps certain types of victimization have increased since 1994 even though whites as a group are less vulnerable to crime when compared to whites before 1994 or when compared to other racial groups in contemporary South Africa. The typical case that is usually cited to illustrate this concern are the widely publicized attacks on white farmers. However, even here the current evidence seems to suggest that white South African farmers and their families are no more likely to fall victim to murder than the typical South African citizen. It is however important to point out that there is currently not a systematic and reliable way of collecting data on attacks on white farmers so the best analyses rely on data triangulations and assumptions implying that there is bound to be some dispersion in the conclusions. But be this as it may, all reasonable analysts of this story agree that there is currently no evidence to suggest that there is a genocide of white South African farmers, contrary to what some groups are claiming. Further, all experts agree that these attacks are not racially motivated nor do they have a political angle to them. According to a researcher who has had first-hand experience in investigating farm attacks, “most farm murders were criminal acts committed with a material motive behind them“.

What implications, if any, might this have for the open borders discussion since I have argued elsewhere that the fall of apartheid was an open borders event? Firstly, South Africa’s experience shows that crime rates do not necessarily rise following open borders — in South Africa’s case, the rate of crime has fallen in each year since 1995. And secondly, it is not clear-cut that the burden of crime will always be borne by natives following open borders — in South Africa’s case, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the victims of crime have overwhelmingly been the black (and to some extent, the coloured) population. In any case, open borders would present a way out for people such as Brandon Huntley who believed they were in danger of victimization. And under open borders, people like Huntley would not have to prove their case.

The specter of crime does not, in my mind, constitute sufficient grounds to overturn the presumption in favor of open borders — South Africa’s experience, with zero background checks, shows that crime is much more a concern for the new comers than it is for the natives. And I think it is possible to reduce the possibility of crime to a minimum by relying on background checks among other options. The alternative of consigning poor people to countries where they are perpetually the victims of crime, and to say nothing of poverty, is much worse.

A year ago, co-blogger Vipul briefly reviewed Mark Krikorian’s The New Case Against Immigration and Jason Riley’s Let Them In. I have not yet read Krikorian’s book, but I have finished Riley’s. Overall, I second Vipul’s sentiment that despite the radical book cover (the book’s full title is Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders), Riley’s book is incredibly weak because:

1. It is overly focused on the US (I cannot think of a special reason why the US should be the only or first country to open its borders)
2. It is overly focused on citizenist and territorialist arguments for immigration (while I think one can make a case for open borders using a citizenist or even nationalist worldview with appropriate moral side-constraints, the book does a poor job of confronting the inherently unethical tensions of these philosophies when they are used to justify closed borders)
3. It really does not consider more than briefly the tremendous economic harm or moral injustice created by closed borders (Riley trots out the usual arguments about how immigrants benefit the US economy, but there is no reference to the true size of the closed borders problem — when closed borders is halving world GDP, this is a glaring weakness, although to be fair to Riley, I don’t think these estimates were available when he wrote this)

I don’t want to sound overly harsh; I actually would recommend Riley’s book if someone has already exhausted the most basic open borders literature. So if you’ve finished Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come (I would say that if you can only read one book about open borders, you need to make it Pritchett’s), maybe consider reading Let Them In. The main selling points for Riley:

1. He comprehensively covers all the problems with current US immigration policy (its injustice from even citizenist and territorialist standpoints, its economic inefficiency, etc.)
2. He does an excellent job of laying out the history of US anti-immigration activism (it will probably be news to many that Benjamin Franklin was complaining almost 250 years ago that low-quality German immigrants were refusing to assimilate and destroying the US)
3. He uncovers some interesting historical facts about US immigration policy which really need to be widely known (for instance, he reveals that the problem of Mexican “illegal immigrants” in the US was virtually non-existent prior to the mid-20th century, because many immigration laws simply didn’t apply to Western hemisphere nationals until 1965 onwards)

In his conclusion, Riley states:

My primary goal in writing this book was to offer a rebuttal to some of the more common anti-immigrant arguments that I’ve come across while covering the issue as a Wall Street Journal editorialist.

Once I read this, I understood why Vipul and I felt the book had oversold itself as a case for open borders. Riley’s true intention was never to make such a broad case in this book. (In fact, Vipul goes as far as to characterise Riley as a political moderate — this is true of the book’s tone, but from its content, I would say Riley probably is pretty close to the liberal extreme on immigration.) If you’re looking for some good rebuttals to common mainstream anti-immigration US-specific arguments, I highly recommend Let Them In. But if you’re looking for the case for open borders, I would without hesitation point you to Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come.

The Economist recently ran an article about the Lebanese diaspora and its entrepreneurial bent. There are some interesting factoids in there I wasn’t aware of. Take the size of the diaspora for example:

More people of Lebanese origin live outside Lebanon than in it (perhaps 15m-20m, compared with 4.3m).

I am not sure what proponents of closed borders would have preferred to do about the Lebanese in the past century or so of human history. It is not quite enough to simply say “Let them alone in Lebanon,” when restrictionists quite clearly want to enact active policies to keep immigrants, Lebanese or otherwise, away. Given some Australian experiences with racial rioting, one can contend that there are restrictionists who would personally use physical force and abuse against the Lebanese.

But as the article notes, for all the “takers” in the Lebanese diaspora, there are plenty of makers (some of whom I did not realise were of Lebanese descent):

Carlos Slim, a Lebanese-Mexican telecoms tycoon, is the richest man in the world. Carlos Ghosn, a French-Lebanese-Brazilian, is the boss of both Renault (a French carmaker) and Nissan (a Japanese one). Nick Hayek, a Swiss-Lebanese, runs Swatch, the biggest maker of Swiss watches.

I am not sure if there are any panel or longitudinal studies which have been done on the Lebanese immigrant population anywhere, but it would be interesting to see the statistics. It would be especially interesting to see if they are bearers of “political externalities” or otherwise import arguably negative cultural/institutional aspects of their homeland. After all, Lebanon the state has not been faring the brightest:

In the past century and a half, waves of Lebanese have left for the Americas and west Africa. Lebanon’s long civil war prompted many more to pack. …the market is tiny. Lebanon’s GDP is about $42 billion, less than Rhode Island’s. Second, it is unstable. Conflict with Israel in 2006 temporarily shut down many of Ms Sfeir’s restaurants; the takeover of parts of Beirut by Hizbullah militants in 2008 disrupted them once more. … As if that were not enough, the Lebanese government chokes businesses with red tape. On average it takes 219 days to obtain a construction permit—assuming nothing goes wrong—and 721 days to enforce a contract in a Lebanese court, according to the World Bank. Patronage is pervasive and the internet is sluggish.

Gee, sounds like letting the Lebanese into my country would be a pretty bad idea, unless I happen to have worse institutions than they do. But the one meaningful statistic about Lebanese immigrant performance which The Economist cites is the Lebanese-American median household income of $67,000 (which is well above the median household income in the US; a rough approximation of that would be about $50,000, depending on how you slice it/round it).

To be explicit, a key assumption I often see in restrictionist arguments is that immigrants will import the “bad institutions” or “bad culture” of their homeland. True, sophisticated advocates of closed borders make more subtle versions of this argument, or avoid it altogether in favour of more defensible ones that barely bear it any resemblance (such as risk of technological slowdown). But it is this argument that often pops up as a reason to justify closed borders: people who are kept out get their just deserts because:

1. Their country’s bad institutions are their personal fault
2. They will inflict institutional harm on an ostensible superior country by virtue of simply living or working there

The Lebanese case is a concrete counter-example. How is the individual Lebanese seeking a better life outside his or her country personally responsible for any, let alone all of the following?

1. The Lebanese civil war (and all its future repercussions for the state of the Lebanese socioeconomic environment)
2. The small Lebanese market
3. The Lebanese conflict with Israel
4. The Hizballah insurgency
5. Lebanese red tape

Perhaps via some roundabout way one can find a way to blame the typical Lebanese for some or all of these: in some sense, Lebanon has a participatory or democratic form of government, and so surely the individual Lebanese voter must bear some blame. On this basis, I suppose the rest of us trying to avoid getting sucked into horrible geopolitical conflicts, government bailouts of automobile manufacturers, or legislative gridlock should be doing our darndest to restrict immigration from the US then.

(As a sidenote, one can argue that the real reason Lebanon collapsed was because it permitted Palestinian and other insurgents to cross its borders, thus directly leading to the civil war, Hizballah insurgency, and conflict with Israel — i.e. loose Lebanese immigration policy created this problem. But as far as I know, no advocate of open borders endorses government inaction in the face of invaders bearing arms and ill intent. This seems to me akin to tarring a free trade advocate with the accusation that she supports unrestricted trade in assault rifles and nuclear weapons.)

The story of the Lebanese people and their diaspora is clear: open borders makes the lives of immigrants better. And by creating a global network, they make people in their country of origin better off too — and that’s assuming zero remittances, which is an unrealistic assumption. There may be good reasons for restrictionists to advocate keeping immigrants like the Lebanese out — but these good reasons need to be more clearly specified than some ridiculous assignation of blame to immigrants for the situation they are in. And restrictionists need to quantify just what’s being lost from potentially keeping out the next Carlos Ghosn, or the next immigrant demographic that actually raises the average household income.

I’m intensely ambivalent about the new book by Paul Collier, Exodus, that’s scheduled to come out in October of this year. Of course, I don’t know exactly what’s in it. But I know the author: Collier is a respected development economist and author of The Bottom Billion, one of the best books on the world’s poorest people and the causes of the world’s direst poverty. And Amazon provides a preview of the contents of Exodus.

More than ever before, those in the poorest countries-the bottom billion-feel the lure of greater opportunities beyond their borders. Indeed, the scale of migration driven by international inequality is so massive that it could make nations as we know them obsolete.

In Exodus, world-renowned economist and bestselling author Paul Collier lays out the effects of encouraging or restricting migration in the interests of both sending and receiving societies. Drawing on original research and numerous case studies, Collier explores this volatile issue from three unique perspectives: the migrants themselves, the people they leave behind, and the host societies where they relocate. As Collier shows, those who migrate from the poorest countries, primarily though not exclusive the young, tend to be the best educated and most energetic in their cultures. And while migrants often benefit economically, the larger impacts of mass migrations remain unsettling. The danger is that both host countries and sending societies may lose their national identities– an outcome that Collier suggests would be disastrous as national identity is a powerful force for equity. Collier asserts that migration must be restricted to ensure that it helps those who remain in sending countries and also benefits host societies that make the investment on which migrant gains rely.

Sharply written and brilliantly clarifying, Exodus offers a provocative analysis on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Interestingly, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution linked to the Amazon page and apparently quoted it, except with slightly different words:

…bestselling author Paul Collier makes a powerful case for the ethical legitimacy of restricting migration in the interests of both sending and receiving societies… [the rest is the same]

I don’t know where Cowen got the text he quoted, which makes the book sound a little more restrictionist than the book description that actually appears at Amazon. Will Collier “make a powerful case for the ethical legitimacy of” migration restrictions, I wonder? Or not? Still, the Amazon book description still says that “Collier asserts that migration must be restricted to ensure that it helps those who remain in sending countries and also benefits host societies,” etc.

Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here, but it does seem to matter whether Collier is simply arguing that it would be in poor countries’ interest to restrict certain kinds of migration, and lazily advising this as good economic policy without inquiring into whether it’s ethically legitimate or not, or whether Collier is actually going to try to defend the ethical proposition that it is licit for countries to cage their citizens inside and not let them leave. If he is going to argue that, he is, I think, breaking somewhat new ground. Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Soviet restrictions on their citizens’ right to travel abroad or emigrate were long recognized as a violation of fundamental human rights. The Berlin Wall was built for the purpose of violating East German citizens’ right to emigrate. I don’t know as much about this as I would like to, but other than North Korea, how many states today attempt to prohibit emigration? Certainly a lot of people lack the right to emigrate de facto because nowhere will accept them, and this is one of the systemic abuses that open borders advocates want to overcome; but how many states curtail the right to emigrate per se? Or is Collier simply going to argue that other countries should cage citizens of poor countries at home so as to promote the development of their homelands, thus backing into the curtailment of the right to emigrate without attacking it head-on?

Certainly I can see that countries would not want “the best educated and most energetic in their cultures” to leave. What I can’t see is how they have a right to keep them at home by force if they want to leave. Do countries own their citizens like slaves? What might be justifiable is for countries to require citizens to agree not to migrate as a condition for the governments of those countries, say, financing higher education. Thus, if a country has a scarcity of medical doctors, and it offered to pay for some bright young persons’ medical educations in return for their binding commitment not to emigrate, that seems very hard to enforce, but probably not unjust. 

What exactly is wrong with countries restricting the right to emigrate? The objection is essentially parallel to the objection to slavery. It violates human rights. It takes away a person’s ability to choose their own adventure in life, to pursue their dreams and goals, to write their own story. Moreover, it is highly inequitable. Being born in Haiti instead of Hawaii would be a misfortune even if there were no migration restrictions. Rich countries’ immigration restrictions make that misfortune far worse, albeit the elite are often able to get through the barrier. Emigration restrictions would cage them, too. They would add a new dimension to the misfortune of being born in a poor country, even if you were born rich, talented, and well-connected in a poor country.

Moreover, the idea that “the best educated and most energetic in their cultures” should be locked into those cultures by force poisons the very idea of a culture. From many foreign travels and interactions with people from all over the world, I get the strong impression that many people outside the United States (it’s not so common here) identify as much with global culture as with the national cultures with which the accident of birth, reinforced by law and geography, would lump them. That may have been their choice– they find a global culture more interesting and attractive– or “their” culture’s choice– they may be minorities of one kind or another and their culture doesn’t regard them as members of it, whatever they might do to try to earn membership of it– but in any case to be imprisoned in their home countries would really be a kind of exile from the foreign, cosmopolitan, or global cultures with which they really sympathize and in which they really feel at home. Does it serve the interests of their countries thus to imprison them? Quite possibly, but that it’s cruel and wrong seems too obvious to be denied or doubted. The idea of forcing a person to be a member of a culture that they want to leave is ugly, too, because it could and in a sense even should make people resent their the cultures of their native lands, which are thus being protected through the violation of their rights. I like the idea of a person being fond of their culture, liking the cuisine, the songs, the language, the place names, the stories– remembering them fondly, feeling a grow of affection on hearing a rumor of his native land. Can he still feel that way if his native land is the main thing holding him back? If he can’t achieve his dreams as a great composer or a great programmer or a great restaurateur because he’s being forced to stay at home and preserve that culture, won’t he come to hate it? Culture exists for the sake of man, not man for the sake of culture. If culture is made the end and man the means, it is a tyranny, and it is right for him to rebel against it and destroy it.

Concerning the question of whether “national identity is a powerful force for equity,” what is meant by equity? I’m inclined to agree that national identity is a force for equity among co-nationals. But does that really matter? Isn’t it as human beings that we should desire the welfare of others? This comes back to the question of citizenism, much discussed here, though I suspect Collier is not so much a citizenist, in the sense that he only pursues the welfare of his fellow citizens, as someone with a complex social welfare function that places considerable weight on people who inhabit the same country having similar levels of income or wealth. But why would you do that?

I’m not aware of any evidence that national identity is a powerful force for global equity– on the contrary! This brilliant video by Hans Rosling stops in 1948 to make the point that in that year global inequality in health and wealth seems to have been near a kind of historic peak, though in income and wealth it must have gotten worse in the decades following, as the West enjoyed the halcyon days of the post-World War II era, while India stagnated and sub-Saharan Africa saw per capita incomes fall. By contrast, the period since 1980 has been an era of globalization and, at the same time and probably in part for that reason, an era of declining global inequality, even as inequality has increased in most rich countries and especially in the US. My reading of history is that nationalism is a force for equality within nations but for much greater global inequality. I’ll be surprised if Collier contests that. The evidence seems too strong, and not disprovable by “case studies.”

That said, I have written in defense of the nation-state, and I do see dangers in the loss of national identity. In particular, I think national identity facilitates democracy (which in turn reinforces national identity) because people’s concern for their fellow nationals makes them vote in what they perceive as “the public interest,” defined in national terms, and democracy, for all its faults, imposes genuine accountability on political leaders.

But nationalism just isn’t right enough for buttressing it to be a proper goal of an idealist’s efforts. Religion may serve to illustrate the point. Many nations have a common religion which is central to their national identity. The spread of other religions undermines national identity in such cases. If our priority is to preserve national identity, we should desire for Irish to remain Catholic and Indians to remain Hindu. But this conclusion can’t be tolerated. Religion is about truth, and truth does not differ depending on a person’s nationality. If Catholicism is true, we should desire that Indians, too, convert to it; if not, that Irish should cease to believe in it. History is another case. Different nations tend to have different ways of looking at history. For example, the Irish tend to view English rule as unjust and a calamity for their country. If many Irish came to believe that English rule was justly established and beneficial, that would jeopardize Irish national identity. But national identity is not a factor that can legitimately be considered in deciding what one wishes for people to believe about history; again, truth is the criterion. If English rule was just and beneficent, the Irish ought to believe this even if it undermines their national identity. If the alleged “Armenian genocide” was really a genocide, Turks ought to accept that, even if it undermines their national identity; or if not, Armenians should stop alleging it, even if it undermines their national identity. And so forth. The same goes for philosophy: if English philosophers hit on a lot of truth while German philosophers penned mainly dangerous errors, then we should wish on German students of philosophy a strong Anglophilia, and not celebrate revivals of Hegel or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche in Germany on the ground that this reaffirms German national identity; truth must be the criterion. In literature, music, and other arts, the truth criterion isn’t quite as easy to apply, but still, we should not wish for Americans to read only American novelists if Russian novelists are better, still less for a country without much literature of its own, such as Azerbaijan or Malawi, to be cut off from the far better writings that the rest of the world has produced. National identity has little or no legitimacy in questions of what a person ought to believe, and only a little more in the question of what a person ought to read or admire in the arts. Nationalist biases have been the source of a great deal of evil in history. Much of the war, civil violence, and totalitarianism in the 20th century have arisen from nationalist biases and ideologies. Hitler, notably, had a nationalistic victim complex, widely shared among the German people, which is why he was able to win their support; and he is only most egregious example. Nationalism has become more benign since then, but that is because it has been ideologically eviscerated, and partially but increasingly subordinated to universalist values, and we should not try to reverse that process.

Now, if it is not acceptable to chain people into their native countries, and if shoring up national identity is not morally legitimate and probably isn’t possible anyway in the age of the internet, what should we do about brain drain, which seems to be (but we’ll see) Collier’s biggest concern? I hadn’t thought too much about that issue in a while, because my impression was that the research didn’t really support it as a major problem. But Collier is a good research economist, and from the stance he’s taking and the promise of original research, my guess is that he’ll show brain drain is a problem, after all. If so, open borders is actually a good solution to this problem, and especially my DRITI scheme. Open borders can help with the brain drain problem because it would mean rich countries would stop discriminating in favor of the high-skilled, and let in all different kinds of immigrants. Also, if a deficit of well-educated and highly-skilled people is a problem in poor countries, they ought to be eager to import such people from rich countries. Perhaps not many well-educated, highly-skilled people would want to relocate to poor countries, but a few would, and every little bit helps, and an emerging global norm of open borders, so that would-be emigrants from rich countries start to assume that they can probably go and work wherever they want to, would greatly help spur such migration. DRITI mandatory savings accounts, withdrawable in a migrant’s home countries and forfeitable in return for citizenship, would encourage some migrants to return home, not only with new skills and contacts and experiences and opinions, but with capital, too. It’s no accident, by the way, that DRITI has this feature. I developed the DRITI scheme as a means of maximizing the development impact of open borders, and I specifically had brain drain in mind.

Open borders under the DRITI scheme might even shore up national identity, in a good way. People don’t necessarily become less patriotic for being more cosmopolitan. Sometimes seeing the world helps them to appreciate better the peculiar virtues of the place they’re from. Sometimes the resident foreigner is a greater partisan of the place he has chosen to live than the native who was merely born there. Sometimes travelers, tourists, and immigrants awaken people to just what is special about the place they live, what sets them apart from the whole world, what is worth coming to see, what makes it worth coming to stay. But that’s a minor detail. We shouldn’t merely try to turn the clock back. We should also be on the lookout for new forms of community and identity that might do more net good in the world than nationalism has done.

Bryan Caplan, Steven Camarota (of CIS) and I were interviewed at the Huffington Post this morning (http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/open-borders-immigration-poverty/517aa4a078c90a08c500032e). Talking head was never a career ambition of mine, and I don’t consider myself particularly gifted at extempore public speaking, but if it can help, I’ll do it. Comments are welcome as always, but in this case, I’d be particularly interested in tips on how to make the case to a different audience than the readership of Open Borders: The Case. From the point of view of the average viewer, are there elephants in the room that I’ve left unaddressed? Am I gratuitously opening up big new vulnerabilities for my own side? Am I missing easy ways to score points with the median viewer?

Full-fledged open borders seems far off to the point of being utopian, but there are several principles/programs short of open borders that might be easier to achieve, and which would bring some of the benefits of full-fledged open borders while bringing it closer. These are a few:

1. The right to invite (see here). People benefit by being able to invite others, and this is something they might demand more of from their governments. It exists with fiance visas and family reunification visas. California growers lobby for the right to invite guest workers into the country. What if professional women agitated for the right to import maids and baby-sitters? What if the elderly agitated for the right to import drivers? Zuckerberg’s immigration advocacy group might be thought of as agitating for the right to invite high-tech workers on H1-B visas. An unlimited right to invite would be almost the same thing as open borders, but even if, say, every US citizen could sponsor a couple of guest visas per year, that would loosen things up a lot.

2. The right to emigrate. Rich countries should feel a lot guiltier than they do about the fact that their immigration policies make them complicit in some of the world’s worst regimes by not giving people a way out. If the world took human rights seriously, one of our top priorities would have to be the worldwide establishment of a right to emigrate, if one’s home country provides very inadequate freedoms or economic opportunities. That is, rich countries would seek to make sure that everyone had somewhere half-decent that they could go. IMPALA may help with this, by making it possible to quantify the extent to which probably billions of people are imprisoned in destitute and/or unfree countries today. The pursuit of a global right to emigrate might involve using aid money to incentivize some countries to become haven or refuge countries, while other rich countries did their part by providing this aid money. By the way, this needn’t be done out of altruism. It might be in the geopolitical interests of the United States or Europe to ensure that Russian young men of an age to serve in the army have some place to run away to, or to facilitate the voluntary depopulation of Iran. Emigres might even provide a useful pool of volunteers for a Foreign Legion eager to liberate Iran with American guns and air support, but without American boots on the ground.

3. The rights of the “larger body.” I picked up the phrase “larger body” from C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves; it means that the experience of being an incarnate being extend beyond the actual organism under our control to include many objects of our natural loves, including wives, husbands, children, parents, brothers, sisters, pets and other animals, and friends. US immigration policy, which to some extent accommodates family reunification motives, gives some de facto recognition to the rights of the larger body, but what is missing is a definite legal and moral doctrine that the state cannot justly separate families or close friends, and must accommodate the needs of this important aspect of human nature. This falls short of open borders since, of course, not every aspiring immigrant is part of the “larger body” of any US citizen. It is different from the “right to invite,” above, because I mean by the right to invite, not a fundamental human right, but a positive right which governments would establish to please or pander to citizens rather than from a sense of inexorable duty.

4. Citizens’ right to interact with, hire, sell to, rent apartments to, illegal immigrants. When citizens have to check the papers of potential employees, contractors, tenants, customers, or whatever, that’s inconvenient, and also a little scary, since presumably some punishment awaits if they make a mistake. The defense of a small businessman’s right to hire without verifying papers, or better yet without papers at all, or the landlord’s right to lease a house without papers, would ease the way for immigration, too. For that matter, I would insist that the state acts unjustly if it refuses to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, because its authority to police the roads can properly be exercised as a means to the safety of motorists and pedestrians, which is not jeopardized by an illegal immigrant as such being on the road, but, on the contrary, is jeopardized when illegal immigrants can’t get driver’s licenses and so, if they feel it necessary to take the risk or driving for economic or personal reasons anyway, will be under particular temptations to hit-and-run if they get in an accident. If an illegal immigrant hits a pedestrian, then runs instead of helping, because if he helps he’s afraid he’ll be deported and never see his family again, and the pedestrian dies, the illegal immigrant is probably to blame, but the state is certainly culpable in the pedestrian’s death for gross negligence in its duty justly to police the streets. Establishing this principle would help the open borders cause.

5. International migration negotiations. On the analogy of international trade negotiations, meaning that one state agrees to admit the citizens of another state in return for like privilege being granted to its own citizens. For example, what if the US and the EU made an agreement whereby Europeans could migrate to the US and work freely, and Americans could do the same in Europe. I would anticipate large gains on both sides, as Americans would benefit culturally from access to Europe’s treasury of ancient, beautiful cities, while Europeans would benefit economically from access to America’s relatively more prosperous and dynamic economy. The politics of such a deal would be very different from those of allowing mass immigration from developing countries. Once the precedent was set, it could spread.

This morning, Shaun Raviv published an article about open borders in The Atlantic, one of the finest magazines in the world, entitled “If People Could Immigrate Anywhere, Would Poverty Be Eliminated?” Atlantic readers: welcome. If you want to give us money to support the cause, sorry, you can’t. As far as I know, we don’t have an infrastructure for that. What you can do is comment on our posts. We love to get thoughtful, high-quality comments, so as to see what kind of impression our arguments make on outsiders. We adapt what we write about considerably in response to thoughtful criticism. In particular, see here, here, and here. We’re good listeners here. We’re Socratic and inquisitive.

Here’s Shaun’s description of Open Borders: The Case.

Vipul Naik is the face, or at least the voice, of open borders on the Internet. In March 2012, he launched  Open Borders: The Case, a website dedicated to the idea. Naik, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, is striving for “a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances.” Naik and his two primary co-writers, Nathan Smith and John Lee, parse research into    immigration impacts, answering claims by those they call “restrictionists”–people who argue against open borders–and deconstructing writings on migration    by economists, politicians, journalists, and philosophers.

My favorite part:

In 2008, Clemens and his frequent co-writer, Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, came up with a new statistic called “income per natural.” Their goal was to show “the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides.” They found that large percentages of people from Haiti, Mexico, and India who live above international poverty lines don’t actually reside in their home countries. “For example, among Haitians who live either in the United States or Haiti and live on more than $10 per day–about a third of the U.S. ‘poverty’ line–four out of five live in the United States,” Clemens wrote. “Emigration from Haiti, as a force for Haitians’ poverty reduction, may be at least as important as any economic change that has occurred within Haiti.”

Getting this kind of coverage makes me think again about a question that’s sometimes come to us: What can I do to help? For example, Bryan Caplan blegged: “Suppose you wanted to spend your charitable dollars to increase the total number of people who migrate from the Third World to the First World.  What approach would give you the biggest bang for your buck?  Are any specific countries, organizations, or loopholes especially promising?”

A rather staid, cautious answer is that you might be able to join the list of sponsors of the IMPALA data project. They didn’t ask me to solicit money for them and I don’t even know whether they’d accept it, but I assume a large project like theirs would have things to do with financial support, and we could definitely use better data on migration policies around the world. If you want to learn about trade policy, you can go the WITS database hosted by the World Bank, and get very detailed information about volumes of trade around the world, broken down into very specific categories, as well as about tariff rates and other restrictions. There is nothing close to that for immigration law, but the IMPALA data, when available, should help. See this talk for more about IMPALA’s data project.

IMPALA is not agitating for open borders, of course. But as I argued a while back, good indices measuring the openness of all the world’s borders could be quite useful for advocacy:

Once constructed, these indices could serve several purposes. First, they could have a “naming and shaming” role, identifying the world’s most closed countries, while issuing surprising congratulations to countries that have probably been more permissive all along. I suspect people in the West would be surprised to see how well Russia would score. Second, they could be an input to research, e.g., establishing with statistical significance the link between policy openness and entrepreneurial vitality. Third, they could be a guide to business decisions, e.g., “Let’s establish the new plant in Georgia… Yeah, I know they don’t have all the specialists we need, but the Open Borders Index says that Georgia is the #1 right-to-invite country in the world.” Fourth, they could inform the decisions of prospective immigrants, e.g., “I really want to get an education and then move out of Sudan, but where could I go? Hmm, the Philippines is welcoming to sojourners…” Fifth, they could become an input to development-aid decisions, e.g., “Namibia deserves a lot of aid, they’re very open to migration.” Sixth, they could suggest the outlines of deals between governments, e.g., “Why are you so unwelcoming to our citizens?” “Well, why are you so unwelcoming to our citizens?” “Let’s make a deal…” Seventh, the periodic issuing of reports would give the media and bloggers something to write about, raising the profile of the immigration issue.

You could also donate to the Cato Institute. Whether they have ways to channel donations to immigration work specifically, if you don’t support the libertarian agenda in general, I’m not sure. I think Cato does pretty much support open borders, but if you read their position statement…

The overriding impact of immigrants is to strengthen and enrich American culture, increase the total output of the economy, and raise the standard of living of American citizens. Immigrants are advantageous to the United States for several reasons: (1) Since they are willing to take a chance in a new land, they are self-selected on the basis on motivation, risk taking, work ethic, and other attributes beneficial to a nation. (2) They tend to come to the United States during their prime working years (the average age is 28), and they contribute to the workforce and make huge net contributions to old-age entitlement programs, primarily Social Security. (3) Immigrants tend to fill niches in the labor market where demand is highest relative to supply, complementing rather than directly competing with American workers. (4) Many immigrants arrive with extremely high skill levels, and virtually all, regardless of skill level, bring a strong desire to work. (5) Their children tend to reach high levels of achievement in American schools and in society at large.

… the focus is more on making the narrow case that more immigration is in the US national interest, not so much on open borders is the right approach for the world as a whole.

Another very good option is to support Jose Antonio Vargas’s “Define American” project. Neither Vargas nor his organization have come out (so to speak) in favor of open borders, to the regret of Bryan Caplan. But I see Vargas as a civil disobedience leader– “A Face for the Faceless,” as I wrote last year in The American– and by driving home certain indispensable lessons about human rights, he tends to heighten the contradictions of immigration restrictionism in a society that wants to see itself as just, humane, and free. (See also my post on Why Jose Antonio Vargas Matters.)

Now for some subversive suggestions.

As an open borders advocate I love undocumented immigration. I’d rather that all immigration be legalized, but if governments outlaw it, I want to see those laws evaded, undermined, disdained, rendered ineffectual, thwarted, unraveled, marginalized, overcome, overwhelmed, etc. So I worry a bit about the increases in border security that tend to be announced and included in comprehensive immigration reform bills, since while I think they won’t work, I’m not sure. For example, if as Charles Krauthammer advocates, the US builds a fence along the Mexico-US border, how will undocumented immigrants get in? Tunnel under it? Fly over it in small planes? Go around it through the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico, in boats? Climb over it with ladders? Probably so, but possibly those would all turn out to be too difficult. There’s some risk that physical enforcement would work.

One method of undocumented immigration is via shipping container. This has been done, but as far as I know, it is rare, because it is easier to get through the Mexican border, particularly for Mexicans, but to some extent for people from other countries who can get into Mexico more easily than directly into the US. Migration by shipping container should not be too expensive, in principle– water transport is very cheap– and a shipping container isn’t such a cramped space, but I suspect the main problem must be feces. If you’re stuck in a 40-foot by 10-foot container for two weeks, how do you make it not stink abominably? There might be room for a clever entrepreneur to design and mass-manufacture a nifty pseudo-container, with a chemical toilet in an airtight bathroom with two doors to keep the air in, room for genuine cargo in front in case the inspectors take a peek, a cot to sleep on and a good battery or small generator, so you can take a crash course in English during a couple of weeks at sea in a container, and maybe a week or so on trains or trucks before you’re dropped off at an inland destination where no one would think to look for you, and some US-based participant in the migration-assistance network would open the container and welcome you to your new country. With enough volume, costs could probably brought down to reasonably low levels.

Also useful would be some means of facilitating necessary domestic transactions for the undocumented. For example, if you can figure out a good way to set up a labor contracting business with a minimal footprint, to help people hire maids or plumbers or whatever without having to ask for Social Security numbers, that might be helpful. I wish I could be more specific, but I don’t have any personal experience with illegal activity. I personally believe in never telling any lies, so I won’t advise anyone to try these illegal methods of serving the open borders cause unless you can manage it without ever uttering a single falsehood. Silence is OK, though.

UPDATE: How could I forget to link to Vipul’s thorough discussion of “possibilities for philanthropy [in the cause of] open borders?”

I don’t often think of Saudi Arabia as a country I’d particularly like to migrate to, which is why I’ve always found it surprising how popular Saudi Arabia is in polling data on migration. For instance, a recent Gallup poll put Saudi Arabia as the 5th-most desired destination migration country in the world, projecting that 29 million people would permanently settle in Saudi Arabia if they could.

My initial reaction was to surmise that perhaps Saudi Arabia’s status as a cultural or religious beacon in the Muslim and/or Arab worlds accounts for this. It’s also worth noting that millions of Muslims from around the world descend on Saudi Arabia for the Muslim haj or umrah every year. It’s not difficult to imagine that some of them might want to retire and die in the land of their prophet, or just fall in love with the country from their visit there.

However, some recent news from the BBC has made me rethink this hypothesis a little: apparently Saudi Arabia is copying the US and Israel in constructing a 1,800km long border wall that will seal it off from Yemen. Unlike the US, Saudi Arabia actually has legitimate reasons to fear that terrorists will cross the border here: a destabilising situation in Yemen has reportedly allowed al-Qaeda to thrive there. But according to the BBC, security is not the whole story:

Border security has dramatically worsened in the aftermath of the revolution, as thousands of illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and gun runners try to slip from impoverished Yemen into Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s richest countries, Lt al-Ahmari told the BBC’s Frank Gardner.

Five Saudi border guards had recently been killed along the border in shoot-outs with well-armed smugglers, he added.

The first part of the fence has already been built on the coast, slowing down – but not stopping – the tide of illegal immigrants.

It seems a bit disturbing to me to characterise economic migrants or refugees fleeing war and terrorism in the same boat with “drug smugglers and gun runners”. If all they have in common is that they’ve crossed an arbitrary line in the map, what purpose does this serve? Are we now to classify high school students and cyberterrorists in the same bucket because they both violate intellectual property laws with their online activity?

The “one of the world’s richest countries” certainly gives one pause at the suggestion that security against terrorism is all there is to this. There are plenty of rich oil-producing countries in the Middle East — so it does puzzle me that, say, the United Arab Emirates don’t pop up as much in Gallup’s polling. But perhaps the reason Saudi Arabia is popular with prospective unauthorised immigrants is because of its long land borders which can be easily crossed. Saudi Arabia also has an extensive guest worker programme which I suppose further spreads word of the economic opportunities there.

I am curious to find out more about immigration to Saudi Arabia. There are plenty of questions which come to mind:

1. What accounts for its unusual popularity on the list of prospective immigrant destinations? All the other countries which top the list are developed Western democracies.

2. What kinds of immigration programmes does Saudi Arabia have? They recently gave unauthorised immigrants a 3-month amnesty to either leave or regularise their status, but otherwise it is unclear to me how their programmes operate, though I do know that they have millions of guest workers.
3. What is the status of unauthorised immigration in Saudi Arabia? If it is true that 10% of the 2 million annual pilgrims overstay their visas each year, there could be millions working and residing without permission in Saudi Arabia (indeed, it looks like some have settled there permanently).
4. How does Saudi Arabia handle permanent residency versus nationality? Has it successfully decoupled the two concepts? Some anecdotal evidence suggests that perhaps it has. Some might term this a keyhole solution. Although I am not happy about the idea of someone spending their entire life in a country and yet being unable to claim citizenship there, if Saudi Arabia does easily grant residency while more tightly controlling citizenship, this is actually much more civilised and moral than the alternative in much of the “civilised world,” which is to deny most human beings both residency and citizenship.

I am not sure whether the Yemeni border wall is justified. But whether it is or not, it is sad to think that those fleeing war, oppression, or economic collapse will be the ones who suffer the most. Drug smugglers and gun runners have the resources to find another way in or out. Regular people don’t have those resources. In principle, under international law, the borders are open for refugees. But in practice, it’s a different story. It is sad to think that there are millions of innocent people, who through no fault of their own, will remain trapped in a country wracked with conflict, having nowhere to go.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a respected US academic and former bureaucrat in the field of international studies, recently authored an interesting piece highlighting an unconventional 2-state solution for Israel and Palestine:

“Two-state condominialism” is as visionary as the name is clunky. The core idea is that Israelis and Palestinians would be citizens of two separate states and thus would identify with two separate political authorities. Palestine would be defined as a state of the Palestinian people, and Israel as a Jewish state. Under “condominialism,” however, both Palestinians and Jews “would be granted the right to settle anywhere within the territory of either of the two states, the two states thus forming a single, binational settlement community.”

…Palestinians “would have the right to settle anywhere within Israel just as Jews would have the right to settle anywhere within the territory of the Palestinian state. Regardless of which of the two states they lived in, all Palestinians would be citizens of the Palestinian state, all Jews citizens of Israel.” Each state would have the authority and the obligation to provide for the economic, cultural, religious, and welfare needs of its citizens living in the other state’s territory.

…

Condominialism recognizes the reality of the deep interconnectedness of Israeli settlers in the West Bank with the rest of Israel – through roads, water supplies, electricity grids, administrative structures, and economic relationships (just as Israeli and Palestinian parts of Jerusalem are interdependent). Instead of trying to separate and recreate all of these structures and relationships, it makes far more sense to build on them in ways that benefit both states’ peoples and economies. And, in a world in which many citizens spend an increasing proportion of their time in virtual space, de facto condominialism is already happening.

As ideas go, I’ve seen worse. I like this a lot. In fact, I like this enough to the point that I would like to know: what’s keeping the rest of the world from trying this out? In many parts of the world, the forms of “deep interconnectedness” Slaughter describes already exist in total defiance of arbitrary, human-defined borders. In fact, I am a bit surprised she almost seems to gloss over the human relationships and communities that constitute the most important interconnectedness here.

To take an example I’m familiar with, it matters little to a Malaysian living in East Malaysia on the island of Borneo where the technical border is. Not when he and his family have been living and moving across the land long before any international border sprung up separating Malaysia and Indonesia. Across the South China Sea in West Malaysia, Malaysians who live in the north are permitted to cross our border with Thailand without passports or visas, a governmental nod to our deep interconnectedness. Stories like these can be found across the world, including in the southern US, where people still recall how, before paranoia post-9/11 set in, communities divided by a border paid it no heed, their lives bonded together by social and economic ties that matter far more than arbitrary lines drawn on a map.

And to her credit, Slaughter closes by obliquely pointing to the relevance of open borders outside the Middle East:

In the 1950’s, after four decades of war across Europe, the idea of a European Union in which member states’ citizens could live and work freely across national borders while retaining their political allegiance and cultural identity seemed equally far-fetched. (Indeed, the name of the political process by which the EU was to be constructed, “neo-functionalism,” was every bit as abstract and cumbersome as “two-state condominialism.”) Yet French and German statesmen summoned the vision and the will to launch a bold experiment, one that has evolved into a single economy of 500 million people.

The EU has proven that on a fairly large scale, open borders work. (I am not too sure about the feasibility of a single currency, though.) To the extent that open borders in the EU have been detrimental, they have been addressable by keyhole solutions (such as transparent, clearly-defined temporary restrictions on immigrant flows to allow societal adjustment). And to the extent that they have been harmful in spite of keyhole solutions, it is absolutely clear that most, if not all, predictions of catastrophe have not come to pass.

Borders may be arbitrary, but we don’t need to abolish them to have open borders. Indeed, Slaughter says: “To make this work, the borders of each state would first have to be defined – presumably on the basis of the 1967 borders, with mutually agreed territorial swaps.” Borders define the area of a state’s sovereign jurisdiction. But they don’t define the human relationships that form the warp and weave of everyday life. Fundamental morality and economics agree: we need open borders.

From Singapore’s Success: Engineering Economic Growth, by Henry Ghesquiere:

Like other countries, Singapore controls the income of foreign labor. Here, too, economic growth has benefited from openness. Augmenting the domestic labor supply is an integral part of the country’s overall development strategy.

Foreign manpower made a key contribution to Singapore’s economic growth. By 1970, full employment had been achieved and Singapore began to attract temporary foreign workers, then accounting for 3.2 percent of the labor force. Their number grew rapidly, reaching 7.4 percent of the workforce by 1980. By 2000, foreign workers made up an estimated 29 percent of Singapore’s labor force– 5 percent higher-skilled or professionals on an “employment pass” and 24 percent lower-skilled holders of a “work permit.” Expatriates filled half of the 600,000 new jobs that were created during the 1990s, with the other half filled by the domestic labor force. The upward trend has continued since.

Foreign workers now play a key role in Singapore’s economy. Low-income earners, mainly from the Philippines and Indonesia assist in households and with elderly care, while road and construction workers hail from all over South and East Asia. Professionals and highly skilled workers are being courted through an aggressive open-door policy to attract global talent. Foreigners on temporary work permits and employment passes are expected to leave at the expiry of their term, unless renewed. There are procedures to keep the lower skilled as a revolving pool on fixed employment terms to prevent them from establishing roots. Jail penalties await landlords and employers who house or employ illegal immigrants. Foreign labor and the Singaporean economy have become intertwined in mutual dependence.

In this area as well, Singapore relies on the price mechanism as a policy instrument to manage the total inflow and skill level of expatriate labor. Under the foreign work permit system, employers pay a levy to the government budget that differs according to the skill level of workers and sector of activity. Permits are renewable every two years. Levies are raised if demand from employers is strong. Levies are lower or nil for better-skilled workers. This differentiation has encouraged construction firms to invest in training their workers and to introduce labor-saving techniques. One consequence of improved skill levels is increased competition: during the downturn in 1998, some local employees were retrenched while stronger performing foreigners kept their jobs, unlike in 1985. Also, the inflow of one important category of less-skilled workers may have indirectly contributed to higher productivity. The increase in female labor force participation from 29 percent in 1970 to 53 percent in 1999 has provided more than 228,000 additional workers over the past three decades. This includes 130,000 maids, allowing many families to have a second income-earner. The government explains the beneficial impact of the foreign presence, even though such a policy has led to some concerns among Singaporeans about future job prospects and more intense competition for housing.

Of course, I don’t approve of all of this. In particular, to jail landlords and employers who house or employ illegal immigrants is a  violation of human rights. That said, it may be more tenable for a city to adopt such measures– jail is indefensible, but fines might be tolerable– than for a country to do so, since congestion and local externalities perhaps give people a more legitimate stake in their immediate physical neighbors than any citizen of a large territorial state has in anyone’s residence, or not, somewhere in the territory, including perhaps in wild and uninhabited parts of it.

Most impressive is the statistic: 29% of the labor force is foreign (as of, I think, 2007). This share is a little less than twice as high as the 16.6% in the US. To get to the Singaporean level, the US would need to let in about 30 million more immigrants. Singapore is wealth worth emulating, considering that Singapore is about 20% richer than the United States (per capita). Moreover, Singapore seems to be maintaining rapid rates of GDP growth even since they’ve overtaken the United States and supposedly should be bumping up against the “economic frontier.”

UPDATE: By the way, the idea that foreign nannies and maids could free high-skilled women from housework and childcare and facilitate their entry into the labor force is particularly interesting. The feminist case for open borders?

There seems to be a widespread sense that while immigration can benefit immigrants, it hurts natives because immigrants grab a share of the pie. This argument is invalid as regards private goods and public goods, but it may be valid for nonexcludable but rival goods.

Economists distinguish private goods from public goods by two criteria: (a) rivalry, and (b) excludability. Private goods are rival and excludable. Public goods are nonrival and nonexcludable. At least, that’s what economists do when they’re being rigorous. There’s a frustrating tendency to stretch the concept of a public good from the narrow niche in which it is most proper and to which the theory of public goods– for example, the idea that you sum demand curves for private goods horizontally and demand curves for public goods vertically– properly applies, and use the word in a loose populist fashion to include lots of stuff that governments in fact provide even though it’s rival and/or excludable. Most obviously, here: public education. If economists had more logical rigor and theoretical integrity, they would proclaim with one voice that public education is not a public good, because classroom seats are rival– only one student can sit in a seat at a time; teachers can only grade one homework assignment at a time– and excludable– it’s perfectly feasible, though not permitted by current law but that’s irrelevant in principle, not to let a student into the classroom. But since that’s too politically incorrect, they usually say, with a shade of embarrassment, that, well, yes, education must be a public good, although it’s not an “impure” public good, since… well, since it doesn’t really meet the criteria for being a public good, at all. (At most, it has positive externalities.) I won’t say that education isn’t a public good, since everyone muddle-headedly insists that it is and I don’t feel I have a right to redefine the phrase public goods to be consistent with the theory. But I would advocate limiting the use of the term to exclude education.

While private and public goods get the most attention, the two criteria clearly imply, not merely a dichotomy, but a four-way typology, as shown in the table below:

There would be many grey areas here even if what ought to be the clear case of education were definitely reclassified as a private good. We don’t exclude people from the park; but could we? Could we do it at reasonable cost? The park is usually non-rival, but perhaps on a brilliant bright Saturday when winter suddenly melts into spring, it is so crowded with picnickers that one can’t find a place on the grass, and the park becomes rival. Emergency room care is technically excludable: one could leave people who don’t have insurance or cash bleeding outside the doors. But it’s not legally excludable, since 1986, and perhaps it’s not morally excludable somehow, if we think a doctor has a moral obligation to help someone in desperate need in his field of vision even if they can’t pay. (I’m much less sure that that’s true, than that it’s wrong to exclude peaceful people from US territory by force.)

Now, the comparative advantage argument suffices to show that natives will collectively benefit from immigration to the extent that only private goods are at stake, and in a sort of rough, approximate fashion, migration taxes and transfers to natives should be able to make open borders Pareto-improving with respect to private goods. Basically, just by coming into the country, immigrants don’t acquire access to any of the private goods natives previously possessed. Natives’ exclusive claims to their private goods aren’t affected.

As for public goods, while immigrants can’t be prevented from enjoying them, this is not a downside to immigration, because public goods are, by definition, nonrival. The fact that immigrants are enjoying them doesn’t reduce natives’ ability to enjoy them, at all. Even if immigrants make zero contribution to the public goods of their host country, natives have no grounds for objecting to their presence, because the natives still enjoy just as much of the public good as they did before. More likely, immigrants will make at least a small, possibly a large, contribution to the host country’s public goods. In that case, natives are strictly better off.

Nonrival but excludable (or partially excludable) goods are important because they include designs, ideas, blueprints, technologies, whatever you want to call them. Migrants won’t reduce the supply of those. Well, unless open borders has a negative effect on the progress of the global economic frontier, but that’s a topic for another post.

The category of goods for which the nativists’ “smaller-share-of-the-pie-for-us” notion might be valid is for goods that are nonexcludable yet rival. Parking spaces may serve as an example, for although exclusion is sometimes possible– parking meters, gates and tickets in parking garages– it’s costly to regulate street parking, so to hold down transactions costs it might sometimes be best to treat parking as nonexcludable. If parking is nonexcludable, newcomers to a city may lower the quality of life for existing residents, by crowding the streets with cars and making it hard to find a parking space.

How many nonexcludable but rival goods are there? We treat public education as one, though in principle it need not be. Likewise emergency room care. The streets themselves are treated as nonexcludable (and probably exclusion would be infeasible and/or would violate rights in many cases) and might be rival in some respects, e.g., if you’re using the street for a rally of shouting protesters, I can’t very well use it to play serene classical music. Do storefronts have a nonexcludable but rival character for window shoppers on a crowded day? Does the random interaction of people with strangers on the street somehow have the character of a nonexcludable, rival good?

In the US, California is every restrictionist’s (and fair-minded skeptic’s) example of how badly things can go wrong if you mismanage immigration policy. I have not yet seen someone cite country-level evidence of poor immigration policy’s impacts: given that Italy and Spain have given multiple amnesties to unauthorised immigrants over the last 3 decades, and the current state of their economies, this seems surprising. Does anyone know of a comprehensive analysis that looks at jurisdictions outside the US?

To be clear, I often see specific references to how life in California is now terrible because of illegal immigration. Commonly-cited examples are the problem of the state government’s debt, a dysfunctional state government, soaring crime rates, deteriorating levels of social trust, a collapsing public school system, the high level of unemployment…I could continue on. I often see references made to California as the ultimate end-state for any jurisdiction that permits a large amount of illegal immigration, and would like to understand if this conclusion has been validated or supported by analyses that look at other jurisdictions with large amounts of illegal immigration. A previous post considered this question in the context of comparisons between the US states, but for this post, I’m interested in international comparisons.

I’m fine with somewhat unsophisticated stabs at this analysis: breadth can be just as important as depth, and given the rather poor state of knowledge about the ultimate impacts of high levels of immigration, any research or analysis can prove valuable. My understanding is that France and Germany both have ongoing processes for unauthorised immigrants to regularise their status, and considering the widespread use of discrete amnesties in other European countries’ immigration policies, it would be interesting to see if there are any different impacts, and what people’s thoughts are on the impact of either option has been relative to a counterfactual where these European countries did not regularise any unauthorised immigrants whatsoever.

The US has only implemented one amnesty of note, in 1986. In Europe, amnesties are much more common. Poland for example announced in 2011 its third amnesty since 2003 (though to be fair, Poland has much fewer unauthorised immigrants than the US). Surely there has been some study of the impacts of these amnesties, or even some informal comparison that correlates the number of unauthorised immigrants to various socioeconomic indicators at the country level. And I’m only really somewhat aware of amnesty policies in Europe: I’m not even sure what arrangements, if any, exist in other continents.

And going beyond amnesty, large numbers of unauthorised immigrants exist in various countries. The number of unauthorised immigrants could similarly be correlated to various indicators, as informal analyses in the US often do with California. If we rank countries by the percentage of their population that is present without legal authorisation, how would that compare to the ranking of countries by GDP per capita, or public debt per capita, or rankings in international educational aptitude surveys like PISA or TIMMS? What about ranking countries by the number of previously unauthorised immigrants whose legal status has since been regularised? Here are two charts (from link #3 at the end of this post) which rank EU countries:

A quick glance suggests that some of the worse-performing Eurozone economies have been much likelier to offer larger-scale regularisations. However I’m not sure what to make of Germany and France coming in right behind four of the PIIGS on this scale, or of Germany and France topping the list when it comes to mechanism-based (i.e. ongoing) regularisations. Moreover within the PIIGS it also seems quite clear that Italy and Spain are performing better than Greece (I am not sure where Portugal stands). So the correlation, if there is one, does not appear to be that strong.

(Something else that may be food for thought: according to the source for these charts, France once insisted that the EU adopt a continent-wide ban on mass regularisations of the “amnesty” type currently being discussed in the US. This idea was dropped because Spain vetoed it. It would be fascinating to learn what’s driving the different approaches here.)

If anyone knows of material that might be pertinent to the issues I’ve raised here, I would love to hear about it in the comments of this post. We can compile a compendium and document it on an Open Borders page about illegal immigration, and/or the regularisation of unauthorised immigrants. This compendium would be a useful reference for future discussions and blog posts on this site.

I’ll start by listing out some documents I’ve been able to find, and will add to this list as people post in the comments:

1. Why Countries Continue to Consider Regularization, Amanda Levinson (2005) — a good summary of how different countries approach regularisation/amnesty, and where volumes stood as of 2005
2. Regularisation programmes in France, Amanda Levinson (2005) — a good summary of the French approach, but no contextualisation with respect to how it compares to elsewhere
3. Regularizations in the European Union, Kate Brick (2011) — probably comes closest to what I’ve been looking for, has excellent comparisons of different countries’ approaches to regularisation

I’m not a political junkie (anymore) and I try to follow all the feints and counter-offers and posturing and whatnot that comprises so much of political discourse, but at this point the momentum for immigration reform in Washington seems really to be bearing fruit. A deal has been made. The New York Times celebrates:

Huge news from the scorched desert of immigration reform: germination!

At last there is a bill, the product of a bipartisan group of senators who have been working on it for months, that promises at least the hope of citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. It is complicated, full of mechanisms and formulas meant to tackle border security, the allocation of visas, methods of employment verification and the much-debated citizenship path…

There will be much to chew on in coming weeks, but it is worth a moment to marvel at the bill’s mere existence, and at the delicate balancing of competing interests that coaxed this broad set of compromises into being…

The bill gets around the “amnesty” stalemate by turning the undocumented into Registered Provisional Immigrants — not citizens or green-card holders, but not illegal, either. They will wait in that anteroom for a decade at least before they can get green cards. But they will also work, and travel freely. The importance of legalizing them, erasing the crippling fear of deportation, cannot be overstated.

Yes! Deportation is a particular disgraceful feature of the American polity, and it will be a tremendous moral relief to have it, if not permanently and generally abolished, at least abolished for most of the millions who live under the threat of it now. The Times deplores the length and difficulty of the path to citizenship:

That said, a decade-plus path is too long and expensive. The fees and penalties stack up: $500 to apply for the first six years of legal status, $500 to renew, then a $1,000 fine. If the goal is to get people on the books and the economy moving, then shackling them for years to fees and debt makes no sense.

The means of ejection from the legalization path, too, cannot be arbitrary and unjust — people should not be disqualified for minor crimes or failure to meet unfair work requirements. It should not take superhuman strength and rectitude, plus luck and lots of money, for an immigrant to march the 10 years to a green card.

Here I’m ambivalent, except about the “means of ejection” sentence. You can’t justly deport someone just because they don’t want a job, and to deport someone for, say, a speeding ticket, is a violation of just proportionality. My sympathies lie with a relatively short and easy path to citizenship. But reason tells me that if your goal is an immigration regime that is simultaneously incentive-compatible and humane, you can’t make the path to citizenship easy. And $500 here and $1,000 there are nothing compared to the income gains that immigrants to the US typically enjoy, though I’d prefer to see money extracted from immigrants in the form of taxes attached to earnings rather than as lump-sum fines and fees, so we can raise more revenue from those doing relatively well while mitigating the hardship we cause for the poorest immigrants.

Naturally, I agree with the Times in deploring this:

The first part of the bill is a dreary reassertion of the doctrine that an insufficiently militarized border is the source of all our immigration problems — as if inefficiencies in the labor market and the ill effects of unjust laws can be fixed with more drones and fences. It throws $6.5 billion over 10 years at the southern border, and envisions the creation of a commission of border governors telling the Homeland Security Department how to spend more billions on “manpower, technology and infrastructure.”

In Matt Yglesias’s summary, titled “Gang of Eight Proposes a Quick Hop to Amnesty Plus a Long Road to Citizenship,” he touches on this:

Something to be said here is that if everything in this bill in terms of border security and W-visas works as planned we’re going to end up with fewer immigrants coming into the country than we did during the pre-crash years.

What are W visas? Yglesias explained in a previous post:

• Recipients would be allowed to petition for permanent status after completing their term.
• Recipients are allowed to switch jobs while in the United States.
• There will be at most 20,000 W visas in the first year, 35,000 in the second year, 55,000 in the third, and 75,000 in the fourth.
• Starting in the fifth year, the number of W visas will be capped at 200,000, but the actual number will be determined by a new Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Conditions based on labor market conditions.
• In terms of allocating the visas, priority will be given to occupations experiencing certified shortages as per the BILMC.
• If labor market conditions are weak, there could be as few as 20,000 W visas in any given year.
• Importantly permissible wages for W visa holders will be set to try to ensure no negative impact on U.S.-born workers in the same occupational category, which is a fairly tight constraint. Wages will be the greater of the actual wage level paid by the employer to individuals with similar levels of experience or the “prevailing wage” for the occupational category in question.

If W visas are a substitute for illegal immigration, the cap of 200,000 would be considerably lower than the 700,000+ per year that were coming in between 1995 and 2005. That’s bad, but hopefully irrelevant, if, as I suspect and hope will be the case, border enforcement can’t stop inflows of highly motivated immigrants, and they’ll soon find ways to get in in numbers comparable to the past, given that (a) the economy is likely to revive soon, and (b) amnesty will create the expectation of future amnesties. Maybe also (c) legalization will allow current undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and move into more formal jobs/economic niches, and the ones they leave behind will attract new undocumented immigrants.

Here’s Yglesias’s characterization of the deal as a whole

At a family reunion in Alaska in August 2007, during a beautiful hike to a place called Exit Glacier, several strands of thought I had been mulling over came together and exploded in my mind. I was in a state of intense intellectual excitement. Without diminishing my enjoyment of the company and the beautiful scenery, I felt an urgent need to be somewhere else, namely, sitting in front of a stack of papers, scribbling equations. David Warsh’s book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations had clarified for me the bottleneck that economic theory was in– that theory relied on a notion of “equilibrium” to close models which presupposed constant returns– and I saw the way out of it– implement market equilibrium by the interactions of agents in a computer memory instead of by solving systems of equations. Equations, and especially mathematical optimization, still had its place, for agents’ methods of maximizing utility subject to a budget constraint would be lifted lock, stock, and barrel from traditional methods… though more modifications were needed, as I learned the hard way. My first attempt (as a graduate student that fall) involved 90+ pages of code and was a complete fiasco. I got no results at all. Desperate after a failed presentation (though Professor Rob Axtell, sympathetic to my Herculean if futile efforts, asked for my code for an excuse to give me an A-), I went home and read Joseph Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development for inspiration. After an enormous amount of work, many rethinkings and failures, I succeeded, yielding a dissertation, Complexity, Competition and Growth (free version here), and helping me to land an academic job at Fresno Pacific University. So far, frustratingly, I haven’t managed to get what my dissertation chair called “a breakthrough” (I agree) into the academic journals, for whom, I suppose, the piece is intimidatingly eccentric and complex (and perhaps arrogant in its sweeping claims, though I can’t really scale them back much). Here’s my latest attempt, entitled “The Aggregate Production with Endogenous Division of Labor,” submitted last week to the Journal of Economic Growth.

This is connected with open borders because it is a theory of increasing returns and therefore of how economic activity tends to concentrate itself. Surely this is one of the most obvious facts about the economy. Economic activity is concentrated spatially: we call those places cities. Economic activity is concentrated temporally: we call the working day. Some theories of economic booms and busts– “coordination failure” models– see them, essentially, as a tendency for economic activity to concentrate itself in time, but I wouldn’t stress that too much. Of course, economic activity is concentrated in certain countries, too. We call those developed or rich countries; those where economic activity is not concentrated we call developing or poor countries. Certainly, the principle that makes people concentrate in cities is not the only principle at work in determining the wealth and poverty of nations. But it probably is one of the principles. In “Geography and Economic Development,” Sachs, Mellinger, and Gallup (1999) make a strong case that geography does much to determine the development, and one of the ways in which it does this is that it places landlocked places, places far from coasts and with poor access to the sea, at a disadvantage, because they can’t plug into networks of international trade.

Imagine what would happen if economic activity has a tendency to concentrate itself but people are not allowed to concentrate themselves. In the places where economic activity is concentrated, the ratio of economic activity to population will be high, and people will be rich. In the places where economic activity is not concentrated, the ratio will be low, and people will be poor. Of course, it’s never as simple as that. Economic activity can’t usually concentrate itself without people concentrating themselves to some extent. But it seems to be true that massive inequality tends to arise when mobility is restricted and people are not allowed to go where the jobs are, or where the high wages are.

Why does economic activity tend to concentrate itself? Adam Smith understood. The first three chapters of The Wealth of Nations are titled:

I. Of the Division of Labor, which begins by asserting that “the greatest improvement*17 in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.”
II. Of the Principle which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labor [namely, the human propensity to truck, barter and exchange]
III. That the Division of Labor is Limited by the Extent of the Market

When people live in close proximity, they can specialize more, and trade with more specialists. There are all sorts of jobs, and all sorts of services, which one can do, or hire, in New York City, that one can’t do, or hire, in a small town. Cuisine and culture are the most obvious, because here the consumer observes the benefits directly. Foodies and theater fans will fare much better in Manhattan than in Muncie, Indiana. But the same holds in business. If you want to run a think tank, there are big advantages to doing it in DC, where the pool of specialists is deep and rich, and you can find someone with experience privatizing electricity generation or someone who knows a lot about factional infighting in Tajikistan. A friend of mine worked as a professional trumpet player in Chicago, and made a decent living. Now, for the sake of his wife’s job, he lives in a small town in Maine. You can’t make a living by trumpet gigs there. Of course, what business there is might be easier to catch, because the competition is slight, too. But that means that if you want to hire a professional trumpet player, for an Easter service, say, or a wedding, it won’t be easy. It’s not just a matter of urban vs. rural or city vs. small town. I live in a medium-sized city, Fresno. The eating’s OK, but it has far fewer vegetarian options than DC. Classical music concerts take place every month or so, maybe. There’s a continuum, with the abundance of specialized jobs and the availability of specialized services steadily increasing as the city grows. More than that, cities themselves specialize, with LA specializing in movies, Houston in energy, Seattle in airplanes, Detroit in cars, Palo Alto in information technology, New York in finance and culture, Boston in higher education, Washington, DC, in politics and government.

Of course, there’s a downside to concentration, too. People may suffer from one another’s negative externalities– smog, car noise, light pollution, crime– but more importantly, the free goods of nature become scarcer. If you want to live on a large plot of land, that’s exorbitantly expensive in Manhattan. That said, Central Park is available to all, and I’ve often noticed that if you want to take a nice walk and enjoy greenery, it’s sometimes easy to do this in big cities, with their verdant parkland, than in the countryside, with its agriculture and fences. But the free goods of nature are also inputs to production, and for production processes wherein the free goods of nature are important, economic activity has to spread itself out through rural areas. Farming, in particular, has to be spread out over vast expanses of rural territory. Farmers need services– grocery stores, auto dealers, schools, hospitals– so other economic activities, besides farming itself, follow them. Tourists seek beautiful natural scenery, and economic activity follows them, too. Then there’s logging, and drilling for oil and gas, etc. The free goods of nature draw people to rural areas, small towns locate near them, big towns locate near small towns. Meanwhile, when large-scale economic activities don’t particularly depend on the free goods of nature, but also have relatively few synergies with other large-scale economic activities, it may not make sense to locate them in the same city, driving up land prices and giving rise to the usual negative externalities of urban life without important economic complementarities to offset these costs. All these reasons explain why we don’t all concentrate ourselves in one enormous city.

By the way, feel free to challenge me on this, but I think it’s fair to say that neoclassical economics, the mainstream paradigm in economics today, is largely blind to all this. To see why, think about a standard supply-and-demand chart, the central concept of neoclassical economics. Demand slopes down. Fine so far. Supply slopes up. Why? Because marginal costs rise when you produce more? Do they? It seems more typical, if anything, for prices to fall when suppliers can produce in bulk. In that case, however, it doesn’t make sense to view suppliers as “competitive” “price takers.” But neoclassical economics must impose price-taking, because it predicts what will happen in markets by solving a system of equations for the “market-clearing” price that equilibrates supply and demand. Without that device, it doesn’t know how to close a model. Of course, neoclassical economists know that economic activity tends to concentrate itself, and most of them probably understand clearly enough why, namely the benefits of specialization and trade. But when making formal models, they habitually write down production functions with constant returns to scale, thus ruling out an important role for specialization, trade, and the division of labor, and making the existence of cities suddenly mysterious. That was the challenge I set out to tackle.

In the latest iteration of my simulation-based economic modeling, I report a lot of results, but it’s hard to know the best way to elucidate their significance to lay readers, or for that matter to professional economists, who are in some ways in a better position to understand what my model does, but in some ways, not. In some ways, well-trained professional economists may even be at a disadvantage because they have to unlearn certain habits, such as looking for market-clearing prices and “interior solutions” and shunning “corner solutions,” increasing returns, and chaotic, imperfect competition. My work is very close in spirit to Adam Smith and the classical tradition, but from the neoclassical point of view it is definitely “heterodox.” Indeed, if I ever manage to publish versions of these results in both the academic journals and the popular press, it will be interesting to see whether professional economists or lay readers are more receptive. At any rate, the results of one simulation run are shown in the chart below:

Each point in the chart represents a simulation run, with the shape of the point roughly indicating total GDP. The curves represent “isoquants” derived from the production function I estimated from the data. This estimate involved regressing log GDP against log capital and log labor, which yielded the following:

where Y is income, K is total capital, and N is total labor. What matters here is not the precise values of the coefficient and exponents, which would vary randomly depending on the technological specifications, but the high degree of increasing returns that the production function exhibits. If such a production function describes the US economy, a doubling of the labor supply with no influx of new capital would only reduce per capita income of all residents slightly. In the model, capital’s share of income exhibits no tendency to be equal to the aggregate elasticity of capital. Returns on capital and entrepreneurial profits together generally comprised a little over half of income in the simulation, with the rest going to labor. When society’s capital stock increased, the return on capital fell, consistent with the neoclassical prediction, except much less precipitously. A tenfold increase in the capital stock would reduce the return on capital by less than half. Meanwhile, holding the capital stock constant, an increase in labor, holding the capital stock constant, tends to raise the return on capital almost in proportion to the increase in labor, while the effect on the wage of labor, though it is usually negative, is mild.

How is this possible? Because population growth leads to the introduction of new goods, the intensification of patterns of specialization and trade. If the lessons from this model cross-apply to the US economy, under open borders we would see the big cities get even bigger, and even richer in the variety of goods and services they have to offer, while many small towns would grow into big cities, and new towns would spring up– so there would be no shortage of small town life for those who prefer it, but there would be a wider variety of urban life available to city-lovers, including some cities bigger than any available now. (Not that new cities would be founded to surpass New York. Rather, New York itself would surpass what it is now, while other cities would become what New York was.) Wages wouldn’t fall much if at all for low-skilled workers. They might find new niches. Owners of other factors– land, capital, entrepreneurship– would enjoy new opportunities and rising incomes. Specialized jobs that don’t exist now would appear. Specialized jobs that currently exist only in, say, New York, would appear in other places. Foreigners would benefit too, not only from access to “public goods” or “institutions,” but from being able to plug into America’s complex division of labor. New patterns of specialization might emerge at the level of cities, with some cities becoming global rather than merely national hubs for this or that industry.

You can make a strong case for open borders from the standpoint of neoclassical economics. The case for open borders is largely the same as the case for free trade, except that instead of trading with people living abroad you trade with people from abroad now resident in your own country, likely in goods and services that, for whatever reason, can’t be traded internationally. But endogenous division of labor strengthens the case for both free trade and open borders.

I hope this becomes law and all…

Report: Senate immigration plan sets deportation timeframe

The bipartisan Senate immigration plan would deport immigrants who illegally entered the U.S. after 2011, a Senate aide told Reuters on Friday.

The plan would give most of the approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants a way to stay in the U.S. and eventually seek citizenship — but those who entered the country since the beginning of 2012 would have to leave, according to the staffer.

“People need to have been in the country long enough to have put down some roots. If you just got here and are illegal, then you can’t stay,” the aide said.

The bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators is working out the final details of a broad-ranging immigration reform bill, with hopes to unveil it on Tuesday so the Judiciary Committee can begin to examine it on Wednesday. Sources say major policy differences have been ironed out.

“I don’t see, looking forward the next few days, any major barrier in the way,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has led the immigration talks, said earlier this week.

Negotiators had hoped to unveil the legislation this week, but it slipped down the Senate agenda following Wednesday’s announcement of a deal on gun violence legislation.

The bill would increase border security, give unauthorized citizens permanent legal status and offer some a pathway to citizenship after 13 years, increase the number of high-skilled visas and create a guest-worker program for low-skilled immigrants. Both business and labor coalitions have been involved in the negotiations and are still on board.

… but it still leaves large, seemingly unanswerable questions about implementation and justice. First, the 2011 date is clearly arbitrary. No one could claim it was OK to immigrate with documents before 2011 but wrong thereafter. Second, how do you check whether people arrived in 2011 and after? Of course, everyone will have a strong incentive to say they arrived sooner. Third, the same compelling reasons of humanity and commonsense which motivate this amnesty will obviously still be around to motivate future amnesties. Indeed, an amnesty now (sorry for the politically incorrect terminology) will only further undermine the strange 20th-century national socialist notion that it’s somehow morally acceptable to seize by force a person who has done no one any harm, rip them out of their family and community, and ship them off to some country they don’t want to go to just because they happen to have been born there and weren’t issue some document by a consular official with whom none of the parties concerned (friends, relatives, landlords, etc.) are even acquainted. Fourth, because this amnesty will surely create greater expectations of future amnesties, it will increase the incentives for more people to come in anticipation of future amnesties. I’m all in favor of that. I support the amnesty as a means of incentivizing the next wave of undocumented immigration, as much as out of humanity and decent hospitality towards those who have arrived already. But at the end of the day, the norms and values and behaviors and assumptions of a decent society just cannot be reconciled with the practical aspect of migration restrictionism, and amnesty won’t solve the problem, but will only heighten the contradictions.

I suppose it’s great news that Mark Zuckerberg is organizing a lobbying group to support immigration reform, as he announces here (see also our past coverage). But at the end of the day, I don’t think there’s actually a good economic rationale for the “high skill only” approach that the tech sector seems to prefer, and I’m ambivalent about its getting more money and a high-profile endorsement. Let’s take a look at the case Zuckerberg makes:

Earlier this year I started teaching a class on entrepreneurship at an after-school program in my community… One day I asked my students what they thought about going to college. One of my top aspiring entrepreneurs told me he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to go to college because he’s undocumented. His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memories of living anywhere else.

These students are smart and hardworking, and they should be part of our future.

Fair enough. But why should only the “smart and hardworking” students be part of our future? The principles of comparative advantage imply that there are gains from trade with all sorts of people, not just “smart and hardworking” ones. Immigrants who are sort of dumb and/or a bit lazy can also gain by coming here, and we can gain by hiring them, renting them accommodations, selling goods to them, maybe even marrying them (e.g., if we have no other marital options, or if in addition to being sort of dumb and/or a bit lazy, they’re beautiful and nice). Meritocracy has its place, but is there really a good reason for the mere right to reside in the US to be allocated in a meritocratic fashion? And even if you want to discriminate in favor of the “smart and hardworking,” how?

This is, after all, the American story. My great-grandparents came through Ellis Island. My grandfathers were a mailman and a police officer. My parents are doctors. I started a company. None of this could have happened without a welcoming immigration policy, a great education system and the world’s leading scientific community that created the Internet.

Today’s students should have the same opportunities — but our current system blocks them.

Good. But remember that Ellis Island accepted almost everyone, not just the “smart and hardworking.”

We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.

The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. Many of these resources were zero-sum and controlled by companies. If someone else had an oil field, then you did not. There were only so many oil fields, and only so much wealth could be created from them.

Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone. Unlike oil fields, someone else knowing something doesn’t prevent you from knowing it, too. In fact, the more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become, and the better off everyone in our nation can be.

This can change everything. In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country. A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation.

One could say that our immigration policy is unfit for any age, or rather that it’s just immoral in itself, and the particular historical epoch we live in has nothing to do with it. Zuckerberg doesn’t say that. Instead, he says that our immigration policy is unfit for today’s world. What does he mean by that? I think he’s partly alluding to the absurdity of a person who has lived in no other country being kicked out, as he highlighted a few paragraphs before. We think of our age as more civilized, as advancing in the recognition of human rights. Such cruel and arbitrary behavior on the part of the state is more intolerable because it is odder than in the past. But he’s also, apparently, arguing that the nature of the economy has changed in such a way as to render… migration restrictions?… migration restrictions on “smart and hardworking” people?… less suitable than they were in the past.

I fail to grasp the argument. Yes, knowledge has public goods properties that oil fields, or for that matter factories, don’t. That’s a difference. If high-skilled immigrants allow Silicon Valley to create better software quicker, the zero marginal cost of reproducing that software can make the benefits from the better software especially widespread and unambiguous. On the other hand, software invented in one place can be moved around the world instantly. Why is it important that the high-skill workers be here? In fact, it does seem to be important, and Zuckerberg probably has unique insights as to why that is. (I wonder if he’d let Michael Clemens interview him? That might be a cheap way to help the cause…) But location isn’t not important for workers in the oil sector. On the contrary, if the oil sector couldn’t recruit the workers they need to exploit an oil field, it would seem even more essential to their productivity for those workers to be able to immigrate than it is for the sector. At a more basic level, the principles of comparative advantage are quite independent of the special properties of the knowledge economy.

Perhaps the difference Zuckerberg sees is between a “diminishing returns to each factor” and “everyone earns their marginal product” economy, where an influx of workers will reduce wages even if it raises natives’ incomes overall, and an economy where the creation of public knowledge goods is more important, and there are large economies of scale. Possibly, though the economics of this proposition are not clear to me, the knowledge economy somehow eliminates the usual negative impact of immigration on returns to specific factors. And I suppose we can’t expect Zuckerberg to understand how auctions, tariffs and taxes, or more specifically the DRITI plan, could hold natives (roughly) harmless.

To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people. We need to train and attract the best. We need those middle-school students to be tomorrow’s leaders.

Given all this, why do we kick out the more than 40 percent of math and science graduate students who are not U.S. citizens after educating them? Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return? Why don’t we let entrepreneurs move here when they have what it takes to start companies that will create even more jobs?

Why do we need to “lead the world in this new economy?” There’s a citizenist twist in the argument here, which runs counter to economic good sense. Now Zuckerberg is the one who thinks we’re in a zero-sum game, competing with other countries to attract talent. But if knowledge is a public good, as he seemed to be arguing before, we shouldn’t really care where the high-skilled workers are doing their technologizing. Once created, the ideas spread worldwide. We actually shouldn’t want them to be here, per se; we should want them to be wherever they are most productive. Now, Zuckerberg could argue, and probably would if challenged, that high-skilled workers would be more productive in the United States– after all, that’s why they want to come, or (for the math and science graduates) stay. Fine. But I find the nationalistic framing of this point to be off-putting and fallacious. It might also lead Zuckerberg to misallocate his lobbying resources. If it’s the common good of mankind he’s after, and perhaps even if he’s just trying to help Americans, he ought to try to open the world’s borders generally, not to help America win some competition for talent. (And if he’s just pursuing the interests of Facebook in recruiting good staff, well, can’t Facebook outsource coding/software design/whatever?)

Also, while the claim that it’s particularly stupid to kick out math and science graduates after educating them is plausible, to automatically give visas to math and science graduates from US universities but not to everyone creates strange incentives. In effect, it allows universities to print visas, which will have a high economic value, even if the universities don’t really do any educating. Professors as consular officials. It might be better than the status quo, but it’s a strange and surely inefficient way of doing things.

We need a new approach, including:

●Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security…

Sigh. I hate it how immigration reformers who are generally on the right side always feel the need to insert disclaimers of this sort. I don’t think it’s just that I disagree with the disclaimer, or even that it gives hostages to the other side, since “effective border security” can be defined as stringently as you please and made unattainable. What offends me is the epistemological irresponsibility of it. How does Mark Zuckerberg know, or why does he think he knows, that we need “effective border security?” What harm is done by a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand, people slipping across the border without documents every year? Does Zuckerberg think he has an answer to that question, or is he just being an unreflective normal American with unreflected normal prejudices in favor of absolutist sovereign state power? If only he would have said, “whether we need more effective border security, 0r for that matter whether we need to secure the border at all, is beyond the scope of this article, though doubtless there are plausible arguments that we do”! The honesty of such a statement would be so refreshing, in contrast with the usual humbug about securing the borders.

… allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born…

[More investment in basic science and STEM education are also advocated.]

That’s why I am proud to announce FWD.us, a new organization founded by leaders of our nation’s technology community to focus on these issues and advocate a bipartisan policy agenda to build the knowledge economy the United States needs to ensure more jobs, innovation and investment.

My overall reaction is that Zuckerberg is unsurprisingly, but still in a way disappointingly, focused on the narrow interests of the tech sector, and doesn’t appreciate the broader logic of the immigration issue, still less the vast benefits that freedom of migration can yield for mankind. But the charge of self-interest must be qualified in two ways.

First, if more high-skill immigration is in the perceived interests of the tech sector, I don’t think this is because they foresee greater profits so much as because they can do more. Some time back, Vipul asked “Why are academia and Silicon Valley pro-immigration?” My rough-and-ready guess, slightly different from Vipul’s, is simply that academics and Silicon Valley types aren’t thinking about their own self-interest, but instead have internalized the goals of their professions, the pursuit of truth and the advancement of technology, respectively, and that they support immigration because they think the pursuit of truth and the advancement of technology would be served thereby. As a boss in the tech sector, Zuckerberg might have an interest in recruitment that diverges from the interests of his employees, but I doubt that’s important here. And the tech sector generates such marvelous positive spillovers for the economy and society that Zuckerberg may, plausibly though exaggeratedly, identify the interests of his sector with those of the entire economy. He wants to do more of what he does best, and he thinks it will benefit the whole world, and he’s more or less right, and now he’s lobbying to be able to recruit immigrants to help him do that, which is all well and good except that it doesn’t necessarily lead to the wisest immigration policy.

Second, inasmuch as Zuckerberg and other tech entrepreneurs, and even rank-and-file programmers and software developers and whatnot, tend to range from upper-class to super-wealthy, it might be in their interest to advocate the importation, not (only) of fellow programmers and tech wizards, but of numerous personal servants and drivers and the like to serve their daily needs. That– but I’m speculating here– probably never occurred to them. They’re not greedy enough to perceive that aspect of their self-interest. They’re too egalitarian, too democratic, too much normal Americans.

On Monday, I blogged about Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration reform group, which had not been launched. The group was launched yesterday (Thursday, April 11, 2013), and most of the details were as expected in my previous blog post. The group is called FWD.us and has an eponymous website. The roster of supporters on the website reads like a who’s who of the tech industry Here are links to some news and commentary items related to the group that were published at and after launch:

• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Immigration and the knowledge economy, a Washington Post op-ed about the planned group.
• Zuckerberg And A Team Of Tech All-Stars Launch Political Advocacy Group FWD.us by Josh Constine for TechCrunch.
• Zuckerberg Launches A Tech Lobby, But What Will It Do Differently? by Gregory Ferenstein for TechCrunch.
• Looking back to predict what FWD.us means for tech and immigration by Alexander Furnas for the Sunlight Foundation website.
• Why I have issues with Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us by Om Malik for GigaOm.

Here’s a quote from Zuckerberg’s op-ed that reveals his vision for the immigration-related agenda of the group, and just how far it is from an open borders vision:

Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.

Some of the reactions from different people whom I’ve discussed this with include (note that some of the reactions are mutually contradictory, indicating the diversity of people I’ve discussed this with):

• Zuckerberg’s op-ed is boilerplate text, i.e., it reveals nothing specific, and could be widely re-used for any future direction of the group.
• Zuckerberg’s use of an overtly citizenist framing for the group’s ambitions is interesting, though not necessarily uplifting. The competitive angle to Zuckerberg’s citizenism is even more unfortunate, though he does pay lip service to migration not necessarily being a zero sum game.
• Zuckerberg’s selectivity — attract the most talented and hardest-working people — suggests either a degree of selectivity even higher than that found in the modern immigration regime in the United States, or a serious degree of delusion regarding just how many potential migrants could be the “most talented” and/or the “hardest-working people.”
• Zuckerberg’s putting securing the borders at the top of his agenda is puzzling.
• Zuckerberg’s focus on a path to citizenship suggests a territorialist focus, which does not seem to resonate well with the open borders message. It’s not in conflict with complete open borders, but could conflict with some keyhole solutions such as guest worker programs.

Hopefully, we’ll publish more on this group and on other related initiatives as we get more information.

UPDATE: Here is a more detailed post from Nathan with his criticisms of Zuckerberg.

From Peter Ackroyd’s lyrically beautiful history of Venice, entitled Venice, Pure City:

Venice has been construed as a great ship upon the sea… The ship was once, for the early settlers, a place of refuge. The ship of Venice was, from the beginning, a haven for exiles and wanderers. It was an open city, readily assimilating all those who came within its borders. One 15th-century traveler noted that “most of the people are foreigners,” and in the following century, a Venetian recorded that “apart from the patricians and the citizens, all the rest are foreigners and very few are Venetians.” He was referring principally to the shopkeepers and artisans. In 1611, an English diplomat, Sir Dudley Carlton, described Venice as a “microcosmos,” rather than city. It was created in the fashion of orbis [the world], rather than of urbis [city]. And so it has remained for the rest of its history. There were French and Slav, Greek and Fleming, Jew and German, Oriental and Spaniard, as well as assorted citizens from the mainland of Italy. Certain streets were named after them. All the countries of Europe and of the Levant were represented. It was something that all travelers noted as if quite suddenly they had come upon the tower of Babel in St. Mark’s Square.

No other port in the world held so many strange peoples. In many 19th-century paintings, the gabardine of the Jewish merchants, the scarlet caps of the Greeks, and the turbans and robes of the Turks, are seen jostling among the more severe costumes and tophats of the Venetian gentlemen. It might be said that the Venetians fashioned their own identity in perpetual contrast to those whom they protected. The Germans were granted their own miniature Germany in a complex known as the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, at Rialto, which contained two halls for dining and 80 separate rooms. The merchants were supervised and monitored by the government, but it was said that “they love the city of Venice more than their native land.” In the sixteenth century the Flemish settled in large numbers. The Greeks had their own quarter, with their own church dedicated to the Orthodox faith. After the fall of Constantinople in 1204, and the abandonment of that city to the Turks in 1453, there was a further flow of Byzantine Greeks– among them soldiers, mariners, artists and intellectuals looking for patrons. The Armenians and the Albanians had their own districts. Eventually an Armenian monastery was established on the island of S. Lazzaro, where Byron travelled to learn the Armenian language as a way of exercising his mind among the more sensual pleasures of Venice. There was a colony of Turkish merchants, established as the Fondaco dei Turchi, where a school for the teaching of Arabic was maintained. So Venice was the setting for a thriving cosmopolitan life. It was not altruism or generosity that occasioned this inviting embrace. Venice could not have survived without its immigrants. Some of them were raised to the rank of citizens; some of them intermarried with the indigenous people.

They were not all, of course, well protected. Many thousands of poor immigrants were cramped into cheap housing, sharing the corners of rooms with others of the same race or nationality. Many of them came as refugees from Balkan wars, or from impossible poverty; some of them were escaping the plague. They congregated in the poorer parishes and by the sixteenth century, as a result of the influx, Venice had become the most densely populated city in Italy. The immigrants also provided cheap labor for the city, and were even employed in the galleys of the Venetian warships. They did the work that the Venetians themselves preferred to avoid.

In the fourteenth century the Italian poet, Petrarch, celebrated Venice as the “sole shelter in our days of liberty, justice, and peace, the sole refuge of the good.” As a port, the city attracted such epithets as “shelter” and “refuge.” They were natural images. Pietro Aretino, himself an exile from Rome who had found safe haven in Venice, put it another way. In an address to the doge in 1527 he declared that “Venice embraces those whom all others shun. She raises those whom others lower. She affords a welcome to those who are persecuted elsewhere.” There were, after all, refugees who travelled to Venice for reasons other than commercial. There was a toleration in this open city that was unknown in other regions. That is why it became, from the eighteenth century forward, a resting place for what Henry James called “the deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored.” The deposed were a particular speciality of Venice. Many of the dethroned princes of Europe made their way here. At one time in 1737 there were five dispossessed monarchs living in the city, one of them being the young Charles Edward Stuart.

It was also a haven for those broken of spirit, for wanderers, and for exiles. Venice became the home of the dispossessed and the deracinated. Its watery and melancholy nature suited those who were acquainted with sorrow. It became a haven for those who were uncertain of their origin or of their true identity and for those, perhaps, who might have wished to escape from them. It was like a mother, endlessly accessible and accommodating. It was a womb of safety. The people were known for their placability and civility. Venice was a city of transit, where you might easily be lost among the press, a city on the frontier between different worlds, where those who did not “fit in” to their native habitat were graciously accepted… There came here, too, swindlers and fraudsters of every description; there were failed financiers and statesmen, shamed women and soldiers of fortune, alchemists and quacks. The rootless were attracted to the city without roots.

Venice was also a frontier between different faiths, Catholic and Orthodoxy, Islam and Christianity. So it attracted religious reformers of every description. A secret synod of Anabaptists was established here in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the German community harboured many Lutherans among its number. Venice always kept its distance from Rome, and protected the independence of its Church from the depredations of the pope; so it became, in theory, an arena for religious renovation. There was even a time when the English government believed the republic to be ready to join forces with the Reformation. In that, of course, it proved to be wholly mistaken.

If you had failed, then Venice was a good place for you to forget your failure. Here you were in a literal sense insulated from the outer world, so that its scorn or simple inattention could no longer wound you. Venice represented an escape from modernity in all its forms. And, like any port, it offered anonymity. If you were an exile in Venice you could lose your identity; or, rather, you could acquire another identity entirely in relation to the floating city. You, too, could become fluid and elusive. Tell me who I am. But not who I was.

We need cities like Venice today.

There is a 19-year-old Filipino citizen who has literally lived her entire life in Singapore who, as of this writing, risks being kicked out of the only country she has ever called home:

Nadirah was born out of wedlock in Singapore and given a Filipino citizenship, as her mother was a Filipino. Along with her five siblings, two other siblings are also non-citizens while the other three siblings were given citizenship as her parents got officially married in Philippine before they were born.

…

As Nadirah graduates from ITE, she will soon be asked to return to Philippine once her student visa expires in a month’s time. To be relying on relatives whom she never spoken to for years and a country where she has no memory of, the situation looks utmost depressing for this young lady with a uncertain future.

Nadirah’s situation reminds me all too much of the “DREAMers” of the US –young people who are present in the US without lawful immigration status who have spent most, if not all, of their lives as law-abiding members of US society. The immigration laws of Singapore ought to give people like her relief: there’s an argument to be made that even if she doesn’t deserve citizenship, she certainly ought to be able to reside in the only country she’s ever called home.

But we ought to look beyond the specific issue of young people whose paper nationality does not match the nationality written on their hearts. There are plenty of older people who, whether or not they feel a sense of national belonging to another country, are productive and harmonious members of that country’s society.

My mother may provide a useful illustration: she is a Filipino citizen who resided in Malaysia with our family for several years on a renewable 1-year “social visit pass”: the Malaysian immigration authorities maintained this legal fiction that she was making a “social visit” to my father for an extended period of time. While this is certainly more favourable than how other immigration legal regimes treat families, it also meant my mother had no legal standing to work in the country (despite possessing a post-graduate degree in a STEM field) and risked deportation or being barred entry for fairly arbitrary reasons.

A real risk my family faced was that if my father died, there would be no legal fiction for her to remain on a “social visit” and force her to return to the Philippines (where she has not lived for decades). Moreover, the restrictions of the pass forced my parents to spend multiple working days every year processing the necessary red tape to renew my mother’s visa (a luxury which many less-educated, working-class families probably can’t afford), and deterred my mother from leaving the country (on one occasion, a bureaucratic error in her visa meant that she risked being unable to re-enter the country if she left, even for a brief visit — so she simply did not visit any friends or family in neighbouring Southeast Asian countries until the next year, when her visa was renewed and the error corrected).

In principle, my family could have obtained permanent residency for my mother. In practice, the immigration bureaucracy seemed content not to bother itself with her application. It’s going on 15 years since her application was first filed, and every single time we’ve checked on its status, we’ve been told: “Wait for a letter from us.” The last time my father visited a Malaysian immigration office to discuss this, he saw a white woman berating a civil servant. She had apparently married a Malaysian who had since died, which is probably why she was there at the office that day. She was shouting at the government clerk in fluent, well-accented Malay: “I have been living in this country for longer than you have been alive!”

(Of course, there’s always a story that can top any story you think of. If we are speaking of immigrants’ pulling rank based on seniority, I can only imagine what a Mr. Padilla, who had lived in the US for over 4 decades and fought for it in the Vietnam War, had to say when he received his deportation order.)

The way we think about immigration law assumes citizens must, more or less, live in the country of their nationality. If they live or develop ties elsewhere, they need to prioritise their loyalties and naturalise as necessary. The permanent residency systems of most countries assume that those holding permanent residency will eventually naturalise: I have heard of one Malaysian holding permanent residency in the UK who calls both the UK and Malaysia home being frustrated at the UK border when its immigration officers demand to know why she wants to come in (“because it’s my home!”).

Yet there is no reason to bind citizenship and residency together: even in the status quo we can simply define citizenship as membership in a polity, and residency as the right to reside there and submit to that polity’s laws. Perhaps Nadirah wouldn’t be satisfied without citizenship — she might have grounds for this, since it sounds like she has always thought of herself as a Singaporean. But she and her Singaporean friends and family would still find this arrangement a whole lot more palatable than the alternative, which is to expel her as a non-resident to a country that is just as foreign to her as it is to Lee Kuan Yew.

The very fact that some of Nadirah’s siblings are Singaporean citizens and some are not speaks volumes about the arbitrariness and ridiculousness of how immigration law treats human beings: the entire lives of people, and the communities they are embedded in, hinge on some pieces of paper. Whether it’s a birth certificate (God bless those lucky people whose foreign parents were rich enough to give birth to them in the US and entitle them to American citizenship) or a marriage certificate (which gave some of Nadirah’s siblings the legal imprimatur that she lacks), it serves as an entirely arbitrary division between people who, for all other intents and purposes, are identical.

If immigration policy prevents people who call a place their home — a home that their community recognises as theirs — from actually living in that home, then as a moral matter, immigration policy is wrong. Plain and simple. We recognise the moral truth of platitudes like “Home is where the heart is.” We may sing paeans to the importance of community and how that defines the space we call home. But when home is on the line for members of our communities who, by an accident of birth, don’t have the legal right to live in their own home, do we have the moral courage to change the laws which make a mockery of the concepts of home, family, and community?

Three major justifications for the welfare state, distinct but related, are (1) social welfare functions may be increased by redistribution (see my previous post on “the conservative social welfare function,”) (2) the welfare state serves as a form of social insurance against the ill chances of life, and most impertinently ambitiously (3) welfare and aid to the poor generally may be a public good via its effect on the utility functions of people who are at least mildly altruistic. Jonathan Gruber’s Public Finance and Public Policy, 3rd ed. offers the following defense of argument (3), stopping at argument (1) along the way:

Why is the government involved in the business of redistributing income?… If society cares equally about the utility of all its members, then social welfare may be maximized by redistributing from high-income individuals (for whom the marginal utility cost of losing a dollar is low) to low-income individuals (for whom the marginal utility gain of getting a dollar is high). Arguments for redistribution are even stronger if society cares in particular about low-income persons, a philosophy embodied in the Rawlsian social welfare function…

The private sector, however, is unlikely to provide such income redistribution, since redistribution faces the same free-rider problems encountered in private provision of other public goods. The consumption of the poor is a public good: I would like the poor to consume more, but I would prefer if others provide them the means of doing so, since I would then get the benefits of seeing the poor consume more but not bear the costs of their increased consumption. If everyone feels this way, then there will be too little private redistribution because everyone will be relying on others to contribute… There may be a role for a government in solving this free-rider problem by taxing its citizens to provide public redistribution. (Gruber, pp. 490-491)

Let me unpack this.

Recall that a public good is defined by two characteristics: (a) non-rivalry, and (b) non-excludability. Non-rivalry means that one person’s use of a good does not preclude another person’s use of it. Non-excludability means that it is not feasible– as distinct from merely not legal as a matter of policy– to exclude anyone from using the good. In this sense (to illustrate the concept) public schools are not a public good, though the general public refuses to hear this message and public finance economists often try to weasel out of it because of its unpopularity. Nonetheless, the fact is logically inescapable, for it is quite feasible– though perhaps illegal, but that’s beside the point– to exclude a child from a public school classroom. Also, classroom seats may be scarce/rivalrous at the margin, and a teacher’s grading time is certainly a rivalrous service: I can grade student A’s exam or student B’s exam, not both.

A welfare payment is certainly not a public good. It is rivalrous: if you receive cash from the government, I can’t receive that same cash. It is excludable: it is clearly feasible not to send the welfare payment. How, then, can Gruber claim that redistribution might be a “public good?” In a rather subjective sense. If a poor person eats a meal, no one else can eat that meal, or get any immediate benefit from it. But if a certain kind of altruism is built into others’ utility functions, these altruists all get some satisfaction from the poor person eating the meal. Given that the poor person eats, these altruists can’t be prevented from thus enjoying, second-hand, his meal. Therefore, this benefit is non-excludable. Nor does one altruist’s enjoyment of the poor person’s meal prevent another person from enjoying it. Therefore, this benefit is non-rival. Being non-excludable and non-rival, the external benefits of helping the poor

I have many objections to this interesting argument. First, it seems improper, somehow, for public policy to take into account such subjective factors. If one does allow it, the practice soon leads to unwanted conclusions. Suppose that, instead of altruism towards the poor, the general population felt hostility towards some group, but didn’t bother to harm that group much because of a free-rider problem. (“I wish somebody would go beat up those nasty wogs, but I can’t be bothered to do it myself.”) If we accept Gruber’s “public good” argument for the welfare state, we should also have to argue, it seems to me, that the brutal mistreatment of unpopular minorities is a public good. Second, the attitudes imputed to the public are not observable. If they were observable, the welfare state could be financed by a Lindahl tax enjoying universal consent. Of course, this argument applies to some extent to all public goods– how much people like a public good can’t be measured effectively in the absence of revealed preference and the price mechanism– but at least in the case of other public goods, the physical use of the good– walks in the park, driving on the roads, listening to public radio, whatever– is observable. Third, the argument is, in its strange way, simultaneously flatters and insults taxpaying citizens, with a certain insolence in both respects. It tells the citizen: (a) we know that, whatever you may say to avoid paying taxes, you really do care about the poor, but (b) we know that, left to your own devices, you won’t give as much as you wish that people like you would give. If some citizen sincerely says, “No, I really don’t care about the poor at all,” the public goods case for the welfare state fails. On the other hand, if most people, when it comes to charitable matters, follow Kant’s advice and act by maxims they desire to be universally practiced, the public goods case for the welfare state fails again.

But my biggest objection to the “public goods” argument for the welfare state is that it assumes what might be called a citizenist, or perhaps a territorialist, social welfare function. That is, it imputes to citizens a certain degree of altruism towards their fellow citizens, but not an equal degree of altruism towards the rest of mankind. If citizens would like the poor in general to consume more, regardless of nationality, then their first priority would probably be open borders, though possibly, if they have a very different understanding of how economy and society work than I do, they might support more foreign aid instead. At any rate, helping poor people resident in the US would not be a very high priority. Even if citizens are assumed to have a citizenist social welfare function, that should really point them towards the citizenist case for open borders and keyhole solutions (like DRITI) that hold natives harmless. To offer the public goods case for the welfare state, and at the same time to support migration restrictions, seems to make sense only from a decidedly territorialist perspective, i.e., if citizens feel altruism towards those present in a country, or at least they’re squeamish about observing dire poverty, but place little or no value on the welfare of those not on the country’s territory. They don’t want to be made to feel pity towards the less fortunate: hence they support the welfare state, and at the same time, the border as blindfold.

It’s irritating to have such attitudes imputed to me as a citizen-taxpayer. Even more irritating is the suggestion that such attitudes are implicitly granted the moral high ground. Gruber may well be right that attitudes such as he describes are an important reason why the welfare state exists. But since some of us don’t share the territorialist social welfare function, the welfare state cannot properly be regarded as a public good. And from a universalist utilitarian or Rawlsian perspective, the territorialist attitudes on the part of citizens that undergird support for the welfare state may be among the chief barriers to rational pursuit of the welfare of mankind.