Monthly Archives: May 2013

Michele Wucker was making the case for open borders 7 years ago

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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.

Open Borders, Terrorism, and Islam

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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.

Heritage’s Flawed Immigration Analysis

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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.

The Most Uplifting Form of Human Allegiance

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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”?

Continue reading The Most Uplifting Form of Human Allegiance →

Electing a new people in Malaysia: illegal naturalisation and election fraud

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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.