Monthly Archives: January 2013

Open borders and the viability of democracy

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Let me raise a very large question: Is democracy viable under open borders?

Of course the question has no single answer: terms need to be defined, for one thing.

Democracy nowadays is usually taken to mean “one person, one vote,” which in turn seems like a political expression of the claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” Yet in the US Senate, voters in small states have 10 times as much per capita representation as voters from large states, or more. Nonetheless, I think most Americans would regard with horror the idea that anyone could be given 2 votes, or 7, or 0.3. The clause in the Constitution which reads…

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

… is regarded with horror, rightly, but I think for somewhat the wrong reason. The right reason for horror is that the Constitution seems to be tacitly condoning slavery. Worse, the slaves’ weight in this count increased masters’ representation. The wrong reason to be offended by the clause is to assume that it implies that black slaves were only three-fifths of a human. Logically, this is a nonsequitur, particularly since the slaves didn’t get to exercise three-fifths of a vote. If the slaves had been able to vote, but their votes had counted only three-fifths as much as those of free whites, that would have been much better than the system that actually prevailed in the Old South.

In fact, I would raise the question: is there really anything so wrong with giving different people different numbers of votes? If a municipality gave long-term residents two votes, recent arrivals one, would there be anything especially wicked about that? What if an electoral system gave an extra vote to anyone who had voted for a losing candidate in the most recent election, as a means of preventing tyranny of the majority? If there is some reason to regard such practices as unwise or even immoral, should “one person, one vote” be considered part of the definition of democracy, or is it just a desirable feature that some democracies might have?

This is relevant to open borders, because one way to safeguard a country’s institutions while opening the borders to immigrants might be to let immigrants vote, but give them fewer votes than natives. That way, if a very large number of immigrants came, say 200 million in the US case, they could have a political voice while leaving natives secure in their electoral dominance, with possible benefits for institutional continuity. But whether this represents a way that democracy could be viable under open borders depends on whether “one person, one vote” is part of the definition of democracy.

Loosely speaking, democracy seems to mean everyone can vote, as opposed to, say, gentry or aristocrats or oligarchs. Nowadays Britain is usually considered to have become democratic only in the later 19th century as the franchise was extended to all or almost all adult males, but of course Britain had voting for centuries before that. So, for that matter, did ancient Sparta, after its own fashion. Indeed, while to say that ancient Athens was a democracy and ancient Sparta was not captures an important truth, it is not a truth easily defined, let alone reconciled with any modern definitions of democracy, for the Athenians had lots of slaves and there were also many metics (foreigners) in the city: by this estimate, less than one-third of the population were citizens, and of those only the males could vote. For citizens, though, Athenian politics was highly participatory and inclusive; much more so than any democratic polity that exists today. Sparta was also probably more participatory and inclusive than any modern democracy for the members of its fierce citizen-elite lording it over masses of helots with whom the Spartan state was nominally in a state of war for centuries, so as to absolve its Krypteia or secret service of manslaughter as they made routine killings of uppity helots. If you’re going to deny Sparta the status of democracy on the “one man, one vote” criterion, Athens fails that test, too. Bottom line: democracy means everyone can vote, but who is “everyone?” All “citizens”– however defined? All residents? All natives? All whom the state regards as subject to its authority? Probably no answer could be offered which would correspond with all our traditional intuitions and historical judgments about what polities qualify as democratic. Continue reading Open borders and the viability of democracy →

Newtown, availability bias, and why civil disobedience works

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It is a well-known pattern in human behavior that people tend to overestimate the probability or frequency of any event which easily springs to mind. For example, Americans tend to greatly overestimate the number of minorities in the US. Why? Probably because minorities stand out, are striking, and therefore attract attention, and are easier to recall, particularly if one is prompted to recall people on the basis of their race. Similarly, people wildly overestimate the number of gays, and think there are a lot more immigrants than there really are. Again: gays and immigrants are striking, therefore easy to recall. Very few people are afraid of driving, but some are afraid of flying on airplanes, for safety reasons. In fact, flying is far safer than driving, but plane crashes, when they do (rarely) occur, are striking, and easy to call to mind. This common cognitive error is called “availability bias.”

Lately, I’ve been reminded of this by the national furor over the killings in Newtown, Connecticut, or Sandy Hook, or wherever (link). I don’t know the details: I have no interest in them. You shouldn’t either. It’s 20-some deaths, in a country of 300 million, a world of 7 billion: far below the number of murders that happen in the US a typical day, let alone deaths from AIDS or malaria. It shouldn’t be considered news. But one of the nuisances in an age of mass media is that availability bias and the media’s quest for profits conspire periodically to waste the nation’s time on events which ordinary people’s statistical ineptitude fool them into believing are important. Of course, you can say that every human life is enormous value if you like– I won’t contradict you– but then (if you want to be consistent) every birth, every marriage proposal (a landmark in most human lives), every heart-warming death in the midst of a loving family ought to be news too. People should resolutely ignore stories like that out of Newtown. The media should refuse to report on it. Such stories actually make people more ignorant, because they reinforce availability bias. The most scrupulously accurate reporting on extremely unrepresentative events is, an important sense, misinformation: people think they’re learning something about how the world world works, when they’re not. “Why is our age peculiarly haunted by nihilistic violence?” people might think. It isn’t: on the contrary, it is amazingly peaceful.

But availability bias has an upside. If we give disproportionate attention to particularly striking instances of evil, we can also give disproportionate attention to particularly striking acts, or lives, or courage, self-sacrifice, and zeal for truth. Heroes, one might say, are a function of availability bias. The hero leads one life but his example, his memory, may resonate in millions of lives. Grisly crimes seize our attention to our detriment; but the examples of heroes edify us, more or less. Of course, a lot of heroes actually set rather bad examples. Alexander the Great was brave, no doubt, and had some other virtues; but there is much about him that ought not to be emulated. Napoleon’s example exerted a decidedly negative influence on the life of Europe. I think, in particular, that he left behind a widespread impression– on Hegel, for example– that it is okay for certain great men, because of their world-historic importance, to violate the moral law. Che Guevara was a bad man. King David had his virtues– and his crimes. It’s better to think about heroes like these than to think about Newtown. They are (most of them) a more edifying subject for contemplation than that, and they are more genuinely important.

Here the heroes of civil disobedience occupy a special place. The archetype here is not a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King: they matter, but not just for their civil disobedience, for they were also eloquent and held positions of leadership. Rather, take someone like Rosa Parks. She was not in (much of) a position of authority (she was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP). At any rate, it wasn’t by using her position of authority that she made a difference. She simply disobeyed the order of a bus driver to sit in the “colored” section in the back of the bus. Or Mohamed Biouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who by lighting himself on fire in protest of police abuse, catalyzed the Arab Spring revolutions that proceeded to topple the governments of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Or many of the otherwise obscure individuals who through Christian martyrdom became enrolled in the lists of Christian saints and inspired people for centuries or millennia thereafter. The influence of these people depends on availability bias. I would argue, if pressed, that one ought to ignore an event like Newtown, because it is not actually important to the lives of almost anyone– it shouldn’t induce you to modify your behavior, or your opinions– and it’s not edifying to contemplate. It is appropriate to contemplate Rosa Parks or St. Vincent, because their lives are edifying. But I don’t think people focus on them just for the sake of being edified. They focus on them because they are striking; only in this case, it just so happens that they are striking in a good way.

Availability bias helps to explain why civil disobedience works, at least sometimes. Much more often, at any rate, than the merely numerical weight of civil disobedients in the human population would warrant. (Also see my post Why Jose Antonio Vargas Matters.)

UPDATE: I suppose I should make it clearer why this is related to open borders. It’s because I think civil disobedience is likely to be one of the means by which open borders is established. A lot of people will start out by being against the deportation of Jose Antonio Vargas, or some similar figure. In the course of much debate and mobilization, they’ll realize that they can’t justify restricting the set of the non-deportable in any reasonable, non-arbitrary way short of making everyone non-deportable, which, after phasing out the anomaly of trying to bar entry physically, will end in open borders.

Communitarianism, open borders, and “prisoners of the food metaphor”

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Let me start by quoting a good article on deportation at Huffington Post:

The True Cost of Deportation (Marielena Hincapie)

Americans are learning about a reality that immigrant families and communities have known about for some time: there has been a monumental rise in policies to deport the men and women who are living, working, and raising families in this country. Earlier this week, the Migration Policy Institute issued a report that shined a spotlight on just how much our federal government spends each year to detain and deport immigrants. Their findings are staggering: funding for these programs, which are housed under the Department of Homeland Security, dwarfs spending on the FBI, the Secret Service, and all other federal law enforcement combined.

What the Migration Policy Institute did not, and could not, quantify was the societal cost we all incur when a routine traffic stop turns a worker’s commute into a one-way trip out of the country she has made her home. The study did not consider the psychological cost we place upon U.S. citizen children whose studies are adversely affected because they worry about whether their mother will be able to pick them up from school.

This report chronicled the rise of a formidable immigration enforcement machine that came to life as a result of the immigration laws of 1986 and 1996, and rapidly expanded in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. This machine has allowed the federal government to deport individuals at unprecedented levels; records show that more than 400,000 people were banished from the country in the last year alone. Among these are tens of thousands of parents, men and women who will now miss birthdays, Thanksgivings, and other celebrations with their children.

Those costs are impossible to estimate: how much is a mother’s presence at a birthday worth? What price would you put on a loved one’s participation in life’s daily challenges and celebrations? These costs extend beyond the immediate family. Each working parent who is deported takes her ability to provide economically for her children with her, removing dollars that would otherwise have been spent in communities and local economies across the country.

A $17.9 billion price tag on federal deportation policies is evidence that our taxpayer dollars are being misallocated and that our priorities as a nation are off. At a time when our nation is about to embark upon a serious immigration reform debate, we must acknowledge that the true cost of these deportation policies will only continue to grow unless we create a process for the 11 million aspiring citizens who live and work in this country to apply for citizenship. We now know what some people’s insatiable appetite for deportations costs, both financially and at societal level, and we should be shocked by the bill.

This is a good jumping-off point for a foray into a discussion that started when commenter BK responded to Bryan Caplan’s recent post by suggesting that a communitarian ethical perspective would provide a justification for migration restrictions. Caplan wrote:

Philosophers emphasize a menagerie of mutually incompatible competing moral theories: utilitarianism, Kantianism, Rawlsianism, egalitarianism, even libertarianism. On immigration, however, all serious moral theories appear to support open borders.

BK replies to this:

Suspiciously wrong. Communitarianism is more popular than libertarianism among philosophers.

John Lee and Vipul Naik both seem to concede the point (I wrote a brief dissent). And that brings me to the quote above. I’m not sure that $17.9 billion– a little over 0.1% of GDP– is too high a price to pay for deportation policies. That is, if someone thinks the moral cost is worth it, I’d be surprised (though glad, I suppose) if someone felt the financial cost was not worth it. Certainly, I’d happily sacrifice 0.1%, or for that matter, 10%… well, actually, since a moral imperative is at stake here, I might as well say, oh I don’t know, 80%… of GDP, to prevent these deportations from happening. The more powerful argument in the article pertains to the intolerable moral cost of separating families by force. And that seems to be precisely a communitarian argument. If anything, it is what I might call the communitarian case against migration restrictions that is the most urgent of all.

I don’t wish, however, to pose as an expert in communitarian philosophy. I assume I haven’t read enough of the relevant authors, though I have read Alasdair MacIntyre, and (not a philosopher exactly) Robert Putnam, on whose recent work I commented here. Yet I do have some communitarian sympathies, and I’ll use an essay I wrote seven and a half years ago as an EconLog comment as an idiosyncratic segue from the individualism characteristic of economics into a more communitarian view of the world. The point of departure is utility theory, of which the essay is both an extension and a critique. You might, if you like, characterize the essay as a communitarian critique of economics. (In those days, I was writing under the pen name “Lancelot Finn.”)

Someday I’d like to write a book entitled Prisoners of the Food Metaphor: Why Economists Misunderstand the World.

After laying the groundwork by reviewing the miraculous power of division of labor, specialization and trade, and economies of scale to better the human condition (an argument mimicking, and updating, that of Adam Smith); after arguing that economies of scale are more important than science in explaining improved human welfare; I then take my experience in the remote Russian republic of Tuva as a starting place for questioning whether we know that humans are better off at all. Continue reading Communitarianism, open borders, and “prisoners of the food metaphor” →

Peggy Noonan

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Among other things, she writes:

Finally, Republicans should shock everyone, including themselves, by pushing for immigration reform—now. Don’t wait for the president, do it yourselves, come forward individually or in groups with the argument for legalization of who lives here now. Such bills should include border control and pathways for citizenship, but—and most important—they shouldn’t seem punitive or grudging and involve fines and lines and new ways to sue employers. The world has changed. Ease up now. In the past 10 years immigrants, legal and illegal, have fought our wars. We need to hurry in those who are trying to bring gifts we need into the USA. Whoever comes here learns to love our crazy country, or at least appreciate it. If we do a better job of teaching them why the goodness we have even exists, we will do OK.

Let’s hope.

With Friends Like These

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The New York Times last month ran a series of viewpoints on immigration. Now, as much as finding ways to argue against restrictionists can be enlightening (and maybe fun as well) today I’ve set out on a different task: pointing out bad arguments/strategies coming from a more pro-immigration (though not quite a pro-open borders) angle. To that end, Gary Segura’s article “Path to Citizenship Must be Included” is the target for today.

In this piece, Dr. Segura sets out four “must have” points for any immigration reform bill in the United States. I’ll take these from the least problematic to the most (a clever ruse to get you to read the whole post). To that end, we’ll start with demand number two:

Requirements and penalties for seeking legal immigration status should not be so onerous or punitive that they render the reform pointless. High fines or “touchback’’ rules that require immigrants to return to their home countries before applying would render status adjustment unattainable for many. Any reform that does not actually improve the lives of those affected is not acceptable.

This demand more or less works from my perspective, and to show why let me restate it: “immigration reform that is effectively not immigration reform is pointless.”

Now this isn’t to say that gradualism isn’t acceptable. On the contrary, gradualism may be the only way to actually eventually achieve any kind of open borders policy. But if a reform results in the vast majority of currently illegal immigrants staying in that condition then there is little progress achieved while potentially slowing the pace of future reform. A bad reform bill might still convince people that there does not need to be immediate action right afterwards. The real key is what constitutes restrictions so heavy that the bill is no longer worthwhile. Some level of fines, though perhaps not ideal, could still be better than nothing. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act required back taxes and some fines for legalizing many illegal immigrants and yet legalized three million immigrants. While making the fines and limitations as limited as possible will help more immigrants and create closer steps to open borders, a “no-limitations-or-no-deal” stance could derail even otherwise moderate reform. Personally I might like to see immigrants legalized with as few fines or limitations as possible, but that doesn’t mean that legalizing several million immigrants isn’t worthwhile. For this point, my main concern is just to avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good, a fault that seems to occur often in this piece.

Continue reading With Friends Like These →