Monthly Archives: December 2012

Open borders: what to do about it (part 2)

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This is a guest post by Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Rojas maintains his personal webpage here and is one of the bloggers at the orgtheory.net blog.

This guest post is the second in a three-post series on how one could achieve open borders. The series focuses on public opinion and immigration policy in the United States, but its insights may apply to other nations as well. The first post of the series can be found here.

Open Borders: Changing Public Opinion

Broadly speaking, fundamental policy change, such as creating open borders, is often the result of two forces, public opinion and organized action (“politics”). Open borders will become a reality when the public stops believing that immigrants are a threat and people who take the time to fight anti-immigration policies in the courts, legislatures and even in the street succeed. This essay focuses on one side of the equation – public opinion. Though I believe that all countries should have open borders, my comments are aimed at people in Western nations such as the US because my comments are based on what I’ve learned by studying social movements in relatively open nations. My comments don’t apply to nations that are authoritarian, such as North Korea, or countries that do not have some type of legal and political system that admits challenge. The next instalment will focus on politics, the “how to” of political change.

Framing the Issue

What should open borders advocates say to the public? In general, it is a mistake to offer highly technical arguments. Most people won’t be interested in subtle arguments about migration. Instead, open borders advocates should offer what social psychologists and linguists call a “framing,” a very general concept that allows people to succinctly identify a problem and think about the solution. A successful framing defines the way we see things and what we think is possible. A good framing appeals to some basic moral intuition, not scholarly argument. Scholars who study social change often find that framing among activist is something that often precedes broader change. (See Robert Benford and David Snow’s “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” in the 2000 Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611-639. Available on JSTOR).

Anti-immigration sentiment seems to rely on two frames. Among liberals, there is the “social problems” frame. Immigration is bad because new people require more resources such as jobs and government services. There is also a related view that immigrants will have problems assimilating into American society. They won’t learn the language and they can’t get educated. All these criticisms of immigration appeal to the idea that a nation is like a boat. The boat has only so much space and overcrowding will sink the ship. Immigrants are inherently bad. It’s just that low levels are preferable for technical reasons.

There is also a nativist framing that views immigration as a threat. Immigrants are viewed as outside the native ethnic group. They are impure and not really American. They are of lower moral character and are more likely to require charity and more likely to be criminals. From this perspective, immigration restrictions are needed to preserve native culture and keep out people who will drain resources and be a drag on the rest of society.

It is not clear to me that open borders advocates have articulated a compelling alternate frame, even though I find lengthier academic arguments to be persuasive. For example, many in the immigrant rights community draw attention to the suffering of immigrants. While I agree that immigrants unjustly suffer, this is an ineffective framing of the issue because immigrant rights activists rarely attack the premise that immigration restrictions themselves are unjust. In other words, as long as average Americans think that it is normal to restrict immigration, framings such as “immigrant rights” or “end the suffering” will not be effective.

It is worth mentioning that some writers have thought carefully about framing. The FrameWorks Institute, a group that studies how to make people think differently about policy issues, has issued two papers dealing with framing immigration (available here). Continue reading Open borders: what to do about it (part 2) →

Answer to Vipul’s question about enforcement

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This post is in answer to Vipul’s post “Immigration enforcement — what’s morally acceptable? A question for fellow open borders advocates.” I have indeed thought a lot about this. In fact, to establish the answer to this question was one of my main goals in writing Principles of a Free Society, though I don’t focus my arguments on that question in any one place in the book. Vipul asks: “I feel that harping too much on [criticism of enforcement] is dismissive of… legitimate concerns, namely, how can you enforce any immigration policy — or any specific keyhole solution — without some enforcement teeth?” Yes, that’s why I had to be a rather careful policy designer in Principles. Because I think conserving good institutions is very important, but at the same time, deep moral logic compels me to regard most of the sorts of measures governments use to control immigration today as unjust. Morally, I think ICE is pretty much on a level with any gang of robbers: an organization whose raison d’etre is unjust violence.

My starting point in Principles is natural rights:

A human being is mind and body. The body has a particular telos, or peculiar flourishing, of which we have some natural understanding. Thus, we see the difference between a healthy body and a body wounded, injured, decrepit, or sick, though it would probably be impossible mathematically to define the difference in microphysical terms. To flourish, the body must have food, water and air; must not be subjected to cold or heat too extreme or for too long; must not be pierced by sharp objects or crushed by heavy blows; must not be exposed to certain substances, certain types of radiation, certain intensities of sound; must be allowed a certain degree of movement and a certain degree of sleep; should not spend too much time in water or darkness; and so forth. Each body is naturally subject to one human mind. To be subject to that mind is part of the body’s telos. The means by which the body can be subjected to the power of other human minds– it can be beaten, wounded, dragged in chains, and so on– trespass against or violate the body’s telos. The body should belong to its natural possessor. (Principles of a Free Society, p. 1)

I call this the habeas corpus principle, “taking some liberties with a venerable phrase from the English common law, yet faithfully capturing, I think, both its strict semantic sense and its highest historical significance.”

To cut a long story short, you can’t violate natural rights except as retribution for violations of natural rights. Utility can’t trump natural rights because (a) a person must generally be presumed to be the best judge of their own utility, and (b) utility isn’t interpersonally comparable. The state’s claim to a special right to use violence must derive from a social contract if it is to be just at all. Most problematic here is taxation. Ordinary law enforcement is (if the laws in question are just) retribution against violations of natural rights, usually at the behest of the victim, so that’s fine. But what justifies the state in forcing people who have violated no one’s natural rights to pay it money.  To this, I give a handful of answers which are not that satisfying, but which I think are the best you can do. Three of them are:

  1. Violating rights to protect rights.Even if utility does not trump rights, might an action be acceptable which violates rights but prevents other rights violations so that there are “less” violations (whatever that means) than otherwise?
  2. Free-rider problems.It’s possible that Pareto-improving collective action could be prevented by interminable problems of negotiation. Perhaps a state is assuming power justly if doing so improves the welfare of all members. (Interpersonal utility comparison is not a problem in this case, but it’s still a problem that utility is unobservable.)
  3. Payment for judicial services.Complex forms of property rights, such as corporate property rights with their separation of ownership and control etc., are probably only possible with the help of state coercion. To the extent that the state facilitates wealth creation through provision of sophisticated property rights (which arise from natural property rights but are too complex for casual moral intuition to settle disputes about), it may be justified in extracting some of the wealth thus created from the beneficiaries of judicial services.

Where does this leave the undocumented immigrant? To simplify somewhat, he has violated no one’s rights, and no one has a right to interfere with him. Continue reading Answer to Vipul’s question about enforcement →

Collected comments on the World Values Survey data

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Co-blogger Nathan Smith recently had a post titled who favors open borders? that looked at some data from the World Values Survey on attitudes to immigration. Nathan’s post was mentioned by Bryan Caplan at EconLog here and by Steve Sailer on his own blog here and here. Commenters at all places have raised a number of interesting points. This post is meant to expound a bit on my own interpretation and mention issues raised by commenters across all these posts.

Interesting theories for the general patterns

This is an expansion and restructuring of some stuff I already mentioned in a comment on Nathan’s post. I’ll first offer the individual theories, then the synthesis.

  1. Countries that people generally want to leave (emigrate from) tend to have a larger proportion of people supporting “let anyone come” and in general seem to have a more pro-open borders position. If this holds up empirically, one simple explanation may be a sort of intuitive Golden Rule: people who want to migrate to other countries take the right to migrate more seriously for immigrants to their country as well.
  2. Countries that generally see a higher proportion of immigrants generally tend to be more restrictionist, while countries that have a low proportion of immigrants (and a low proportion of the foreign-born in general) tend to be more pro-open borders. If this holds up empirically, then the simplest explanation might be that high levels of immigration lead to a nativist backlash by making the native-immigrant distinction more salient. One confounding factor here is that countries with a high proportion of immigrants also tend to have a high proportion of people who are more pro-open borders on account of being immigrants or related to immigrants. My suspicion is that the relation between high immigration levels and low support for open borders would be even stronger if we restricted attention to natives who are native-born and do not have a foreign-born spouse, sibling, parent, or child.
  3. Slightly related to (2), but different: countries that have higher proportions of immigrants tend to be less likely to favor extreme solutions. In other words, in addition to leaning more restrictionist, they’re generally less likely to have lots of people at the extremes of “Let Anyone Come” and “Prohibit” whereas countries like India that have a very low share of the foreign born have large proportions of people at both extremes. Of course, it’s possible that India is an outlier in this regard. I’m less sure of this pattern than the others. The simple explanation for this pattern, if it holds up, is that countries with a large resident foreign born population (whether immigrants or guest workers/students) is more tuned to the practical constraints and “arguments on both sides” and hence would be more likely to support middle-of-the-road solutions.

My overall guess, based on looking at the table, is that the very high “Let Anyone Come” countries are mostly explained by (1). Take a look at the top five countries: Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Mali. With the exception of Vietnam, they all have GDP (PPP) per capita per year less than $2000 (they’re in the $1000-1500 range by a number of estimates — see here). Vietnam, with a GDP (PPP) of about $3000-3500 per year, is somewhat of an outlier on the GDP front, but still poor enough to go with the general thesis here. The only other country that I can see on the list with a notably low GDP (PPP) is Ghana, but the estimates for Ghana (#11 on the “Let Anyone Come” ranking) vary quite a bit between $1800 and $3100.

From #6 onward on the list (percentages 28% or lower for “Let Anyone Come”) we start seeing middle-income countries and “upper low-income countries” which are generally not places that people want to desperately leave, but also aren’t attractive destinations for immigrants in general (though they see some traffic from their bordering countries). Countries 6 to 10 are Morocco, Romania, Uruguay, Peru, and India. Of these, Morocco and India are low-income but not the extreme low-income levels of sub-Saharan Africa, whereas Romania, Uruguay, and Peru are solidly middle-income countries — GDP (PPP) between $8000 and $16000 for all of these. The case of India is a little confusing because of its huge size — there are parts of India that have income levels comparable to the extreme low-income sub-Saharan African countries, and other parts that almost make it to middle-income status. One reason for the unusual response percentages in India may be this considerable diversity in the income levels between regions.

For these countries, then, I think the main operative factors are (2) and (3) — they tend to generally be more pro-open borders but also have high numbers of people at both extremes. However, unlike the extreme low-income countries case where almost all these countries are strongly pro-open borders, middle-income countries overall are all over the map. Malaysia, the most restrictionist country by the “Let Anyone Come” metric, is also middle-income. So a more careful statistical analysis would be needed in order to decipher the patterns here.

Patterns for specific countries

Some outlier countries have been pointed out in various comments:

  • The causes of Vietnam’s top position are unclear. Eric speculates a bit about this here (comparing Vietnam to Indonesia), and some commenters on Steve Sailer’s blog post also offer their thoughts.
  • India has received a lot of attention for having unusually high percentages of people in both the “Let Anyone Come” and Prohibit” categories. Regional variation within India may be part of the story. I offer some thoughts on India at this comment.
  • Among developed (high-income) countries, Sweden is a bit of an outlier with respect to its “Let Anyone Come” percentage. Its percentage, 18%, is much higher than the 8% and lower values for other developed countries. Steve Sailer and his commenters offer some theories about Sweden here.
  • Malaysia’s unusually low “Let Anyone Come” number has sparked the interest of my co-blogger John Lee, who offered some preliminary thoughts in this comment.
  • In this comment, Brian Moore points out that Canada and the USA have very similar views on immigration but very different immigration policies.

Immigration enforcement — what’s morally acceptable? A question for fellow open borders advocates

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My co-bloggers at this site, particularly Nathan and John, have expended quite a lot of words to the effect that deportation (or self-deportation) is a cruel solution to the problem of illegal/unauthorized immigration (see here, here, and here for some of John’s stuff, and here and here for examples from Nathan). Their arguments draw on the distinction between immigration legislation and morality and on the distinction between law and legislation, plus a lot of moving anecdotes. Nathan has gone so far as to suggest that breaking unjust immigration laws is not merely morally permissible but even morally laudatory — a form of satyagraha — see for instance here.

I’m sympathetic to these kinds of arguments (and I’ve been critical of the “they broke the law” type arguments myself). At the same time, I feel that harping too much on this kind of reasoning is dismissive of some very legitimate concerns, namely, how can you enforce any immigration policy — or any specific keyhole solution — without some enforcement teeth? Christopher Chang makes a related point in a comment:

You repeatedly frame this as a righteous crusade, with some implied urgency. This can be very dangerous. We’re in agreement that fighting poverty is a righteous crusade; I wouldn’t be trying to communicate with you if I thought you were actually enemy combatants. But I can easily come up with mathematical models more accurate than any that Caplan has ever proposed where opening borders *decreases* human welfare, potentially massively so. While there is a human cost to deportation, the reality is that the eventual human costs of not enforcing the law can be far, far greater, so even your “urgent advocacy” example is fallacious. [emphasis added]

In fact, in the way it cheaply exploits normal human biases to try to both undermine accurate accounting and depict more sober thinkers as evil, it’s essentially belligerent. You need to stop doing this, and do a far better job of adhering to the spirit of the “principle of charity” rather than just making a show of it. Otherwise, it will become correct to actually treat you as an enemy combatant, regardless of what your intent is.

Presumably, the reality that Christopher Chang is referring to is the fact that, in the absence of any enforcement teeth, whatever immigration policy or keyhole solution a government puts down on paper will have little effect on the ground. For instance, a policy of keeping out criminals is pointless if the criminals who migrate illegally have immunity from any enforcement actions. Similarly, a policy that imposes an immigration tariff has no real-world meaning if people can migrate illegally with immunity and are insulated from any recourse for failure to pay the tariff.

Open borders advocates are often dismissive of “enforcement first” individuals but I think that this is a very legitimate concern that open borders advocates have done a poor job of addressing publicly. It lies at the heart of the frustration of many restrictionists who are afraid that illegal immigration, moral sanctions against strict enforcement, and periodic amnesties make a joke of the stringent-on-paper immigration policies. To my knowledge (and I may be missing something here) neither Nathan nor John, nor most other open borders advocates, have publicly written about the kind of enforcement teeth they think would both be morally permissible in immigration law and be effective in making sure that the immigration policy is actually enforced. I’m sure they’ve thought about this issue at least a bit, but it would be good to have these thoughts in writing. So, here are some of my questions for fellow open borders advocates, and I’d love to hear answers.

  1. What are some morally permissible enforcement mechanisms for immigration policy and under what circumstances? Under what circumstances is deportation permissible? If there’s an immigration tariff to migrate legally, would a fine that is some multiple of the immigration tariff be acceptable to impose on people who migrate illegally? What type of multiple are we talking here? If the fine is not paid, what are the recourse options for the state? Is imprisonment an acceptable option? Deportation?
  2. At what level of openness of immigration policy would it be morally permissible to expend serious resources into beefing up enforcement? Clearly, my co-bloggers think that a lot of “enforcement” nowadays is misguided because the policy they are trying to enforce is immoral and harmful. But, getting the perfect policy isn’t possible. Would it be morally impermissible to expend resources on enforcement for an immigration policy that moves halfway toward the goal? Would it be morally desirable? Would my fellow open borders advocates get behind stricter enforcement for an immigration policy that is a radical improvement over the status quo but falls far short of open borders? How would they trade off the theoretical openness of borders against the strictness of enforcement?
  3. If non-deportation is a moral side-constraint, does that mean that immigration tariffs need to be price-adjusted for the difficulty of migrating illegally? For instance, if the US computed that the ideal immigration tariff for workers with no specific in-demand skills is $20,000, but a Mexican would choose to migrate legally only if the tariff were $10,000 or less (based on the coyote fees), does this impose a practical restriction on the US to offer a special discount to immigrants from Mexico, compared to immigrants from, say, China or Malaysia? Or would it be acceptable to expend resources on stricter border enforcement once some legal migration option is present?
  4. If you’re convinced that your preferred immigration solution will cause illegal immigration to drop to practically zero, thus rendering all the previous questions irrelevant, why do you think so? After all, there are strong social and legal sanctions against murder, yet there are over 10,000 intentional homicides in the United States every year. What makes you think that illegal immigration will drop to zero, or anything close to that, even under near-open borders?

Some absurdities of immigration policy

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One oft-overlooked point about immigration policy is just how absurd and arbitrary it is, in any country you can name. One of the best prima facie arguments against the policy status quo is that it literally does not make sense: it is internally inconsistent, opaque, impossible to make sense of. A couple stories I have rounded up from friends (the VDARE link is courtesy co-blogger Vipul):

Co-blogger Nathan has dug up data suggesting that my fellow Malaysians are the most restrictionist people in the world. The absurdity here is both in public policy and public sentiment: 10% of Malaysia’s population (3 out of about 30 million) are immigrants and depending on how you slice it, 40 to 95% of Malaysians are descended from immigrants. The norm for middle-class Malaysians is to send their children for overseas education, and to encourage them to stay on and work for a time — if not indefinitely. Most of my friends from grade school (I attended public schools in a middle-class suburb of Kuala Lumpur) are currently studying or working in a Western country. When I went home last month for vacation, immigrants were everywhere, in every service job I encountered. The only complaints I heard about immigrants from any actual people was that government policy isn’t generous enough to high-skilled immigrants (the absurdity being that it is easier to hire a restaurant waiter from India than a college graduate from Italy).

Telling an absurd immigration story is like shooting fish in a barrel. One hot off the presses: a US government programme (“Secure Communities”) aimed at deporting illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds is now “optional” in California because a review found that 28% of the deportation victims in California actually aren’t criminals. So much for President Obama’s supposed amnesties (in the first place, this supposedly generous president has deported immigrants at a faster rate than any other president in history).

Finally, here’s the picture which Buzzfeed ranked 26 on its 45 most powerful images of the year:

I can’t even begin to start with the absurdities here:

  • The man and his family are Rohingya from Myanmar; he is begging the Bangladeshi Coast Guard officer to not deport them back to Myanmar, where he and his family are presumably fleeing recent “anti-immigrant” sentiment against the Rohingya, who the Burmese accuse of being “illegals” from Bangladesh
  • This man and his family are being treated like common criminals — clearly, their behaviour here screams “I am a selfish sociopath who hates the law” — and are literally on their knees, begging for mercy from the law for daring to get on a boat and go somewhere
  • In theory, international law ought to protect refugees like the Rohingya — in practice, good luck with that
  • If this family were fleeing crushing poverty or a natural disaster instead of persecution, even in theory international law doesn’t give a damn
  • Let’s not even talk about Bangladeshi or Burmese law — and who can blame these countries, when even most “civilised”, developed countries don’t give two hoots about most refugees?

Literally millions of Pakistani immigrants have risked being shot to death by border guards to get into Iran. The moral case for open borders (a concept no less crazy than free trade, and much more intuitively appealing to human moral sensibilities) demands the governments of the world explain themselves. I’ve used this quote from US Senator Marco Rubio before, but to me it sums up the case for open borders so well, I can’t help using it again:

If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here.

I certainly understand the pragmatic (and, I agree, almost just as intuitive) case for immigration restrictions in theory. But those making the restrictionist case need to face up to the exacting human cost of any immigration restrictions they propose. And more than that, there is incredible certainty about the human suffering immigration restrictions impose, but incredible uncertainty about the benefits they yield. Who is to say what the exact benefit of shooting one Pakistani in the head is to Iranians?

At the company I work for, various business programmes need to be reviewed and recertified annually by leadership, in order to ensure they are still serving their originally-intended purpose and are still desirable projects. The heritage of immigration restrictions is rooted in prejudice, bigotry, and racism, and they have rarely been audited or reviewed since — except on a piecemeal basis, where the human harm has been explicitly discounted, and the supposed benefits not explicitly considered beyond the vaguest terms (for instance, it is often declared that the goal of immigration policy is to reduce immigration — but with little actual valuation of different restrictive policy options).

The absurdity of the immigration status quo is I think morally indefensible and intellectually very unsettling. I would, with little hesitation, pronounce the immigration policies of most of the world unsound and morally wrong. I recognise it is impractical to do much about them in the short term, and I don’t know if I would recommend “no borders” as a superior option to be implemented tomorrow (if this were even feasible). But I don’t need to have a recommendation to know that closed borders are illogical and just plain wrong.