Monthly Archives: July 2013

Conversation between Steve Teles and GiveWell

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Below are excerpts from a recent conversation between GiveWell staff (Holden Karnofsky and Timothy Telleen-Lawton) and Steve Teles, Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University about policy advocacy. I have included only the excerpts that directly discuss immigration, although the immigration section of the discussion includes a lot of general discussion of the policy advocacy “map” as Teles calls it.

Steve Teles: Within a year or two there will be a bill passed, and that is likely to exhaust Congress’s desire to legislate on immigration for about a decade. So it’s not worth investing a lot of money on the legislative lobbying side, at least as it’s currently defined: along the lines of numbers, regularization of status, internal enforcement.

It will be a very complicated bill, with a lot of responsibility passed on to regulatory agencies. There will be lots of litigating as well, so getting the optimal outcome from the law requires acting at the regulatory rulemaking side through the agencies, the litigation stage, and the actual implementation of the law in practice.

The process will be very long, maybe indefinite. The Clean Air Amendments of the 1970s are still being fought over. So it’s worth investing on the litigation and rulemaking side more than the legislative side.

Related material we’ve covered at Open Borders includes part 2 and part 3 of Fabio Rojas’ series on how to move in the direction of open borders.

Later in the conversation:

GiveWell: On the immigration reform bill, how do we figure out how much capacity is already there and how much room there is for funding? How would we decide how to get involved?

Steve Teles: You should talk to Min Hsu Chen, a professor at CU Boulder, who knows a lot about immigration, law, and civil rights.

It’s useful in these cases to do an advocacy map: who’s out there working on this, what are they working on, how stable is their funding. Since many of these issues are incredibly technical you often need people who have been doing this for a long time. The reputation of the people is normally the most important thing, and is inherently non transparent, since everyone has an interest in distorting how influential they are. The goal is to fund someone who has influence, which requires gaining the trust of people who can tell you who really has influence and who doesn’t. This makes it important to go deeply into an issue over time. Being a long term funder puts you into a multi iteration game with people you deal with, decreasing the probability of getting burned.

Back to opportunities on immigration: the regulatory side is the most elite dimension, involving lawyers, regulators, politicians, law review articles, etc. Another side would be immigrant self organizing, something funders rarely do. Funding tends to do things for immigrants, rather than increase their capacity to organize themselves. They’re a population that’s tough to organize, being transient and weakly settled, and are a group that politicians are rarely afraid of. The most important thing in politics is fear, and if they had organizational capacity politicians might fear them.

Organizing immigrants might impact employers or the media, eventually affecting people’s perception of what the nature of the issue is. Depending on the status of immigrants this could include electoral organizing. Ben Sachs (Harvard) writes about a potential role for organized labor in helping immigrants: casual immigrant workers are at risk of not getting paid or having regulations broken, and modern style labor organizations can help with these issues. Immigrant rights probably has more of a “funding arbitrage” opportunity than immigration as such.

Immigrants can be organized via worksites or at churches. The immigration bureaucracy is a mess and especially difficult for individuals who aren’t organized.

Related material on our website includes an optimistic blog post on the role of organizing by David Bennion, a post by Nathan Smith about Jose Antonio Vargas, and a more pessimistic and cynical take from me.

GiveWell: We’ve heard the claim that there aren’t many people interested in letting people from the
developing world into the US – either in support of it for humanitarian reasons, to improve the US, or for libertarian anti-border reasons.

Steve Teles: Admittedly immigration is not one of the topics I know much about, comparatively speaking. On this question, it’s partly a function of funding. It’s also the way people think about it – many people think of the humanitarian issue on an individual level, not as a numbers issue, or they think of it as letting family members in rather than letting in people from impoverished countries more broadly. The “trade not aid” argument is the same idea as immigration, but immigration doesn’t get discussed in that context generally – maybe it could be.

The most disruptive thing to a political environment is a new issue dimension. It tends to motivate and mobilize a new set of people who realize they have a stake, and it changes what people think the issue is about. So injecting a new issue dimension into immigration may be valuable. This could be accomplished either with a new, special purpose organization or an existing one. A new organization would start out with no branding, which is good and bad: you have neither the cachet nor the baggage of an existing group.

Philanthropists do create new things all the time. The NRDC was basically created by the Ford Foundation. They look for an opportunity that doesn’t already exist, find good people and give them some seed capital. These people might be ones who already work in a space but aren’t achieving their potential or want a new job. Finding them probably requires being embedded in a space, so that people trust you and tell you things like this.

Related material on our site: my blog post double world GDP versus scope insensitivity.

GiveWell: What about other countries? We would potentially see value in bringing about more open borders in any developed country, but that seems like a difficult field to survey.

Steve Teles: There are comparative immigration policy experts. In fact, the system at the moment is better in the US than many other countries, which are using human capital weighted systems to figure out who to bring in. Funding people in European countries would be very difficult, since we don’t know the landscape. The US system is more permeable, whereas the systems of bargaining and deep bureaucracy in European countries make them difficult to influence from an outside perspective.

Some good people to talk to: Antje Ellermann, at the University of British Columbia, who has written about deportation and knows a lot about German policy specifically. She’s a humanitarian, less of a nationalist. Peter Skerry of Boston College knows the INS bureaucracy really well. He’s more of a restrictionist but would be an interesting person to talk to. He knows something about the European bureaucracy as well. Rebecca Hamlin at Grinnell is working on a book comparing the immigration policies of the US, Britain, and Australia, looking at immigration processing at a deep regulatory level, and knows the intersection of regulation and courts really well. Many of the people at that intersection are former students of Robert Kagan of Berkeley.

A blog post by Carl Shulman is related.

Jim Manzi’s thoughts on immigration are surprisingly ill-considered

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Jim Manzi, the founder of Applied Predictive Technologies, last year published the book Uncontrolled, an excellent exposition of the view that business and government should rely on more randomised field trials to assess the value of different choices. Overall I found little to disagree with in the book, except when it came to immigration. Manzi leans right in his politics, but in general refrains from regurgitating standard right-wing political bromides; unfortunately, immigration seems to be an exception to this rule.

Manzi only touches on immigration in the book when discussing actual recommendations; besides a selective immigration policy, his other recommendations include expanding school vouchers and promoting government spending in R&D. Manzi views existing US immigration policy as rather destructive, and I agree. He and I both see eye to eye on the point that US policy arbitrarily and absurdly treats high-skilled immigrants. But Manzi paints with an unnecessarily broad brush when it comes to low-skilled and unauthorised immigration.

Manzi suggests that with immigration policy permitting low-skilled immigration:

It is hard to imagine a more damaging way to expose the fault lines of America’s political economy: We have chosen a strategy that provides low-wage gardeners and nannies for the elite, low-cost home improvement and fresh produce for the middle class, and fierce wage competition for the working class.

The “fierce wage competition” bit itself is controversial. It is commonly taken for granted that of course immigration lowers wages, but empirical data supporting this claim is thin on the ground. Manzi wisely limits this critique to the working class (as there is essentially zero convincing evidence that immigration suppresses wages for middle- to upper-income workers), but even there, only a handful of studies have ever shown wage impacts larger than something on the order of reductions around 1 or 2% for low-income earners. The consensus estimate remains that immigration at worst impacts the most vulnerable earners at a negligible level. This is not great, but it hardly suggests “fierce” competition.

Manzi’s other points make even less sense, for one could argue that the only thing preventing the middle class from enjoying low-wage gardeners and nannies, or the working class from enjoying low-cost home improvement, is in fact restrictive immigration policies. The typical citizen of the UAE, after all, enjoys the benefits of cheap immigrant labour, regardless of income level! A tangible example that most people might find more relatable: in Malaysia, it’s typical for middle-class white collar workers to hire live-in maids, and even lower-income workers might be able to afford maids coming in every so often to clean. Manual labour for any task you desire, from moving to home renovation, is both abundant and cheap. In both cases, a very significant portion of the work force is foreign.

You might resist this, arguing that it’s not a slam dunk that this is what would happen if the US or any rich country opened its borders. I agree, it’s not a slam dunk at all. But neither is it implausible. And on the other hand, it’s certainly impossible to take for granted Manzi’s assertion that liberal immigration policy widens the income and socioeconomic gaps between rich and poor.

Manzi agrees that his preferred high-skilled immigration policy is not an obvious slam dunk — he also obliquely points out that it’s difficult to know what criteria on which to select high-skilled immigrants, although he takes pains to cite Australia and Canada as examples to learn from. Manzi proposes that the US “test and learn” via visa allocation. Come up with different rules to target high-skilled immigrants, and approve a small number of visas following these different rules. Follow the population of admitted immigrants over time to see how they perform on a number of indicators, and refine the visa regime accordingly.

I fully agree with the broad thrust of Manzi’s sentiments; test and learn is a fantastic motto. But given the empirical evidence that suggests low-skilled immigration is often highly beneficial in its own way, why limit the test purely to high-skilled options? Surely one can test alternative rules besides those aimed at picking up high-skilled immigrants? Experiment with different visas beyond just granting guest worker permits or green cards? Experiment with different ways of allocating visas altogether? Manzi remarkably omits one of the best test and learn examples of immigration policy I know of in the world today — the Canadian policy of allowing provinces to sponsor a certain number of visas for just about anyone they like.

Finally, Manzi in a throwaway remark suggests that the US can only get its immigration house in order “[o]nce we have reestablished control of our southern border.” I think this makes a remarkable assumption about history: that the US ever had totalitarian control of its borders in the first place. I’m not aware of empirical evidence suggesting that this is the case, and would be glad if anyone could show me that for a reasonable period of time in history, the US government actually tightly monitored and controlled a very large proportion (say >90%) of border crossings. The restrictionist-hallowed 1950s Operation Wetback was necessary in the first place because so many Mexicans were able to cross the border undetected.

A restrictive border control system that can detect and punish most to all unauthorised border crossings is the right-wing ideal, but for any other than the smallest or more geographically-isolated countries, I’m not convinced such a system has historically existed (at least outside totalitarian dictatorships) or can exist. Even North Korea faces difficulties with people smuggling South Korean soap opera DVDs and cellphones across its borders. A determined government can surely stop >90% of unauthorised border crossings, but only at substantial fiscal and political cost. For Manzi to blithely assume this can be so easily accomplished, and then move on to proposing his test-and-learn skills-based immigration policies, strikes me as strange.

None of this is to say Uncontrolled is not worth reading or ill-thought out. The immigration section of the book struck me for how out-of-place it seemed compared to other sections of the book. When I was in university I focused my studies in economics on education and immigration; Manzi has a lot to say on education, and I found little to quarrel with in his characterisation of the academic policy debates around education. Manzi has comparatively little to say on immigration, and unfortunately, it looks like he was not as thorough in his coverage of the issue. And if Jim Manzi, a smart and well-read businessman and public intellectual can make such egregious oversights and oversimplifications in discussing immigration, just about anybody can. The quality of public thinking and discourse about immigration is unfortunately disproportionately poor, compared to the potential it has to offer all of us.

Immigration Reform Is Not Amnesty

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This post was originally published at the Cato-at-Liberty blog here and is reproduced with the author’s permission.

Many opponents of immigration reform have labeled any type of legalization for unauthorized immigrants “amnesty.” In common terminology, an amnesty is a general forgiveness for past offenses. Calling immigration reform amnesty brands it with a scarlet letter in the minds of many who are skeptical of reform. A recent video made by the Cato Institute explains just some of the many steps an unauthorized immigrant will have to go through to become legalized if the Senate’s immigration reform becomes law:

Here are some of the steps (this is not an exhaustive list) an unauthorized immigrant must follow to earn the initial registered provisional immigration (RPI) status:

  • In the country prior to 2012
  • Pays any and all outstanding tax bills (not back taxes)
  • Goes through national security and background checks
  • $1,000 fine
  • $500 fee
  • Then the unauthorized immigrant will receive a work permit valid for six years

After six years, the immigrant will need to apply for another RPI permit:

  • Proves that she’s been employed for virtually the entire six year period
  • Be at no less than 100 percent of the federal poverty level
  • $500 fee

After four years, the immigrant can apply for a green card if she:

  • Proves she can speak English
  • Proves she hasn’t been on welfare
  • Passes another round of background and security checks
  • Pays all of the normal fees associated with a green card
  • The federal government meets most of its immigration enforcement goals

That doesn’t seem like amnesty to me.

Migration: how many, what kind, and why it matters

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This post is an introduction to a planned series of posts (some by me, some perhaps by others) that explore questions related to how many people might move under various changes that lead towards open borders (locally or globally). The goal of the current post is to explain why I consider the question extremely important. A subsequent post will take a somewhat opposite stand: namely, try to sketch a case for open borders that is independent of how many people might move. Later posts will look at specific policy changes, some of them realistic and others less so, and estimates of what might happen under these. Another area I plan to explore is the question of what the most critical bottlenecks are to large-scale migration (the most obvious candidates are housing and infrastructure) and what limits they set on migration rates.

A while back, I wrote a blog post critical of what I called “economic determinism”: the idea that migration flows are determined completely by economic conditions and that legal barriers to migration have practically zero effect on the magnitudes of migration flows. There are factors other than economic conditions and legal barriers to consider as well, of course: factors such as cultural connections between the sending and receiving country. Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s recent book Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization, and America drove this point home for me. So, I guess the position I am broadly critical of could be expanded beyond economic determinism to what I might call “restriction irrelevantism”: the idea that restrictions imposed by nation-state governments on migration are largely irrelevant in terms of their effect on the magnitude and nature of migration flows.

Vargas Llosa is definitely not an economic determinist, but whether or not he’s a restriction irrelevantist remains to be seen. This article seemed to suggest that he might be, but op-eds tend to be oversimplifications, and his book, which I haven’t completed reading, may offer a more nuanced picture. I was nonetheless somewhat disappointed by the fact that Chapter 3 of the book, titled “Why They Move” and otherwise excellent at considering the motivators for migration, gave short shrift to the idea that different degrees of restrictionism in different target countries might significantly affect people’s decision of whether or where to migrate.

In any case, this blog post is not about the somewhat extreme position of restriction irrelevantism, which may or may not have real proponents. The majority of proponents and opponents of open borders do not subscribe to restriction irrelevantism. Rather, I think there’d be general agreement that millions more would move, temporarily or permanently, under open borders. But “millions” is a vague term. It could range from an extra five million people over the next two decades to an extra 100 million migrants (many of them temporary) within 2-3 years of global open borders (the main data for how many would move under open borders in terms of the stated preferences of potential migrants are the polling data on migration, which suggest that over a billion people want to go to other countries temporarily or permanently, and about 500-700 million people think they would make long-term moves if they were allowed to). One could come up with a fairly diverse (albeit less so) range of estimates for the number of people who might move under a more targeted open borders regime. For instance, if the United States announced open borders for Haiti (population about 10 million), one might envision a scenario of anything between 2 million people moving to the United States over the next year to a roughly equal number moving to the United States over the next two decades.

The closer the proposed change is to the status quo, the less likely the range of disagreement, but since we are talking here about relatively radical ideas such as open borders, there could be considerable divergence of opinion.

Closely related to the question of how many is the question of who. Many arguments offered by open borders advocates rely on the crucial idea that migrants self-select, i.e., it is not all that easy to migrate to a new land, and therefore migrants are not representative of the populations they hail from, but rather, are selected for positive qualities. As BK has pointed out in the comments (see for instance here and here) you can’t have your cake and eat it too for selectivity: if your estimate says that 25% of the population from region A will move under open borders, you can’t assume that the average migrant who moves will be selected to be in the top 1% of people from region A.

While the precise economics behind double world GDP estimates tends to be complicated, an important point is that all the estimates of huge economic gains also predict that this happens through large numbers of people moving. If, in fact, large numbers of people do not move, then at any rate these specific estimates are not applicable (there may be other mechanisms by which world GDP might increase considerably, such as innovation, but at any rate the specific estimation exercises of the papers would be flawed if very few people moved). For instance, in his blog post about John Kennan’s paper on Open Borders, Nathan Smith writes:

In predicting the volume of migration, Kennan does not assume that humans are strict homini economici who will go wherever they can earn the most. He writes:

One might initially expect that in a world with open borders, everyone would move to the most productive location. But this ignores the strong attachment to home locations that is evident in the data.

He takes this into account by making the migration decision probabilistic, such that the proportion of people who stay in a country is the same as the proportion of the rich-country wage that is paid in that country. For example, if there are open borders between the US and Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rican wages are 2/3 of those in the US, then 2/3 of Puerto Rican adults would stay in Puerto Rico. This roughly fits the data in that particular case, but there is no theoretical motivation for that particular functional form. Relative to a homo economicus model in which everyone who could earn more elsewhere migrated, this assumption causes Kennan to understate the economic benefits of open borders. On the other hand, it also makes Kennan’s version of open borders less scary than it would be if all who stood to gain economically from migration migrated.

This still posits a large number of people who’d move under open borders. Nathan writes later (emphasis mine):

Now, two big things we would like to know about open borders are (a) how many people would move, and (b) how much would world GDP actually increase. If I’m not mistaken, Kennan could easily derive estimates of these things from his model. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t tell us how world GDP would rise under open borders, in the short or the long run. He doesn’t tell us how many people would move, or where they would come from. I think Kennan’s model implies a short-run increase in world GDP of about 65%, and I’m pretty sure in the long run world GDP would double. Since the increase in the effective labor supply comes from growth in the populations of rich countries where labor productivity is high, I think Kennan’s model implies that rich countries’ populations would more than double due to immigration under open borders.

Another related concern is swamping. One of the main concerns of people ranging from hardcore restrictionists to moderate pro-immigrationers and even some who identify as being pro-open borders is that true open borders would lead to very large numbers of people moving over short time periods in a manner that would strain housing, electricity, water supplies, and other infrastructure in the countries receiving the immigrants. The typical response is to point out that (i) borders can be opened somewhat gradually to minimize the possibility of an immediate flood of people (see here for instance), and (ii) in any case, migration flows will tend to be self-regulating and people are likely to plan ahead at least somewhat before making a big move. Evaluating the legitimacy of swamping as a concern is part of the reason why it’s important to get a handle on how many might move under migration regimes that move the needle considerably towards open borders.

Finally, in addition to the direct relevance of understanding migration counts and selectivity, making correct predictions, or at any rate, refraining from making laughably wrong predictions, can help build one’s credibility as an advocate or analyst of migration regimes in the eyes of others approaching the matter from the outside view.

Thomas Sowell on Immigration

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This post was originally published at the Cato-at-Liberty blog and is republished with the author’s permission.

Thomas Sowell is an influential and prolific writer whose books span the social sciences.  My shelves are full of them, decorated with underlines, marginalia, and dog-eared pages.  But in his recent columns and comments on immigration, Sowell has not approached that topic with the same rigorous attention to detail that he has in his books.  His reliance on incomplete historical examinations in his columns leads him to seemingly support a vast array of government interventions.  In these writings, Sowell makes the same mistakes that he accuses the “anointed” of making in many of his books.

In the column I’ll focus on, professor Sowell’s claim that today’s debate about immigration reform is not as fact-based as previous debates.  The implication is that a lack of facts will lead to poor policy decisions today whereas the policy changes 100 years ago were well thought out and fact-based.  He wrote:

A hundred years ago, the immigration controversies of that era were discussed in the context of innumerable facts about particular immigrant groups. Many of those facts were published in a huge, multi-volume 1911 study by a commission headed by Senator William P. Dillingham.

First, Sowell’s description of the Dillingham Commission’s commitment to facts is inaccurate.  It was a bi-partisan committee formed in 1907 to investigate the impacts of immigration on the United States – especially the so-called “new immigrants” from Eastern and Southern Europe.  The Commission was staffed by Progressives who believed that scientific managerial methods could effectively plan large parts of society and the economy by using the power of the government.  With the exception of one member, William S. Bennet of New York, the commission was stacked with members who had previously supported immigration restrictions. 

The Dillingham Commission produced 42 volumes by 1911, arguing that the “new immigrants” were fundamentally different from old immigrants who came from Western and Northern Europe.  Their culture, rates of economic success, and assimilative potential were supposedly severely constrained.  Those are the same claims made by today’s immigration opponents.  The Dillingham Commission suggested that immigration restrictions (ranging from relatively modest literacy tests to outright quotas and other massive interventions) could solve this “problem.” 

Information gathered by the Commission that showed new immigrants succeeding and assimilating was ignored or explained away because it contrasted with the world view of the commission members.  When charitable societies started to report on questionnaire slips that large numbers of Western and Northern Europeans received aid, “the slips were returned to societies for further information or for corrections.” The Commission defined retardation for children as being behind in school – an absurd definition designed to exaggerate retardation among non-English speaking immigrant children.  In American schools, the Dillingham Commission found that 66.9 percent of Polish Jewish students and 63.6 percent of Southern Italians students were retarded.  The Dillingham Commission was intensely worried about Asian immigration. 

Today’s immigration debate is better off without these types of “facts” produced by a commission designed to reach a certain conclusion. 

The Commission’s findings were similar to Sowell’s comment: “The immigrants of today are very different in many ways from those who arrived here a hundred years ago.”  Literally, Sowell is correct, but the implication that they are different in ways that make them less suited to modern American society doesn’t follow.  Immigration restrictionists 100 years ago said the same thing about Southern and Eastern European immigrants, looking back fondly on the Germans, Nordics, and Irish immigrants who came before.  Brutal terrorist bombings carried out by Italian anarcho-communists, including 38 mail bombs in 1919 and numerous attempts on the life of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, confirmed the pessimism. 

Before the Dillingham Commission, immigration restrictionists in the early and mid-19th century thought the Germans and Catholic Irish were unassimilable compared to the Scots-Irish and Huguenots who came before.  One worry about the Germans was that their collectivist culture and political struggles in Germany would clash with the individualism necessary to make freedom flourish in America.  Catholics were considered to harbor a deep anti-republicanism and a culture inimical to liberty.  Time has shown how absurd those worries were.

Thomas Sowell wrote two books explaining the flaws of supporting massive government interventions based on the recommendations of elites – especially in the face of so much historical and economic counter-evidence.  In the Vision of the Anointed, Sowell rightly criticizes the Ralph Naders of the world for spinning tales of doom and gloom that call for government intervention based on very little evidence.  He humorously calls these people Teflon prophets.  But Sowell is acting as a Teflon prophet when it comes to immigration.  In a cagey way, he predicts that great harm will come to the United States due to immigration.  He does not propose a policy solution but because he describes a supposed problem with such a dire tone the reader is meant to feel that he should oppose immigration liberalization. 

Did the Dillingham Commission’s fears that new immigrants and their descendants would fail to assimilate come true?

Asians and their descendants, a group viciously criticized by the Dillingham Commission, have culturally assimilated and their rate of economic success exceeds that of other Americans.  You don’t have to take my word for it, just read what Thomas Sowell has written on the issue.  Italians, Jews, and other immigrant groups criticized by the Commission also culturally assimilated and their descendants have been very successful.  The Dillingham Commission was clearly wrong about these immigrant groups.  Immigration restrictions inspired by that Commission imposed large costs on America: We likely lost an opportunity to have at least tens of millions of more productive citizens from Europe, Asian, and elsewhere – unintentionally sentencing many to death.   

The Dillingham Commission also claimed that there were just too many people and the economy could not create enough wealth to sustain a high standard of living – a ludicrous proposition thoroughly demolished by Julian Simon.  With a population of just over 92 million people in 1910, the Commission concluded that too much immigration was slowing America’s economic growth and that large numbers of new people were not necessary for industrialization because that phase of economic expansion was behind us … in 1910.  Such grandiose claims of the future that call for government intervention could only come from the self-proclaimed anointed. 

The Dillingham Commission was severely criticized when it was released and was not accepted as fact as Sowell claimed.  A criticism of the report famously questioned its entire statistical methodology and conclusions.  That criticism, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, dismissed the “popular delusion” that immigrants displace American workers by writing: “[i]n the long run … supply and demand approximately balance each other.”  Just as then, similar disagreements have continued to this day over other immigration studies.     

The Dillingham Commission’s immigration restrictionist recommendations were based on poor statistical methods, an undue faith in the ability of Progressive social-reforms to guide social development, and a rejection of labor market economics.  The Dillingham Commission was not an honest study to determine the facts of immigration as Professor Sowell described.          

Second, Sowell brings up the Boston terror attack as a warning against immigration of people with cultures that are incompatible with Western values.  He has a point about security, but it’s not that immigration should be curtailed.  As much as this is painful to consider, some criminals and terrorists will always be able to sneak in regardless of our immigration policy.  The question is not whether we want no criminals or a lot of criminals, the relevant question is: which system will prevent more criminals and terrorists from entering at an acceptable cost? 

A legal system that prevented all immigration and tourism would prevent some criminals from coming in and could have prevented the Boston terror attack, but at a gargantuan economic cost not to mention the violation of individual liberties such a policy would entail.  But a more open immigration system that screens people for criminality but lets peaceful people through will reduce the size of the haystack and make it easier for law and immigration enforcement to catch the criminal and terrorist needles.  Public policy should be based on facts and not anecdotes.  There is evidence that there should additional screenings and investigations for some immigrants but that does not mean blanket bans on the immigration of certain ethnic or religious groups should be instituted.

Thomas Sowell’s trust in the findings of a Progressive immigration commission that recommended massive government interventions based on manipulated statistics – a near textbook example of a Teflon prophet – is in blaring contrast to the rest of his work that produces many reasons to be skeptical of such schemes.  In 100 years, will Americans look back fondly on today’s immigrants and their successful assimilation as they have in other periods of American history?  Or will this be the first time that immigrants and their descendants don’t become Americans?  Given the rapid rate of assimilation across the board, with varying rates of success, there is little to distinguish today’s immigration experience from that of our forefathers.