Yearly Archives: 2013

On Two-Steps And Fallacies

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Readers of this blog know that there are many moral and practical reasons to favor open borders. Indeed, many open borders advocates, like myself, support open borders for a multiplicity of reasons. There are a lot of reasons to agree with any good idea.

There are so many good reasons for open borders that it can prove challenging for all sides of the debate to carry one particular case all the way through to the end of a single conversation. Nonetheless, staying on point is necessary to avoid miscommunication.

Take the economic side of the issue for example. Open borders advocates treat the issue like a classic import quota on labor: buyers of labor are forced to over-pay for something that is under-supplied, sellers of labor are forced to experience lower levels of employment, and thus society as a whole suffers a deadweight loss. Immigration restrictionists answer that increasing the supply of labor will drive down wages.

What should happen next is that the two parties debate the comparative merits of increased employment at lower wages on the one hand, and lower levels of production at higher wage rates on the other. Unfortunately, the debate all too often moves on to other issues. Open borders advocates might respond by saying that there is a moral case for allowing poor workers to compete for our comparatively higher-paying jobs, because the immigrants’ situation is desperate. Immigration restrictionists might respond by suggesting that immigrants change the social dynamic in their new communities in a way that the immigration restrictionists don’t like.

Either way, as soon as someone mentions a Topic B, we are no longer discussing Topic A. This doesn’t mean that either topic isn’t relevant or interesting. Instead, it means that the parties to the debate aren’t very good at staying on point.

The Open Borders Two-Step

We should keep this in mind when the likes of “The Crimson Reach” state that open borders advocates are “two-stepping.” Here he is in his own words:

I’m noticing a slippery dynamic when it comes to open-borders advocacy. Broadly, in plain English there are two different things one might mean by ‘open borders’ and in advocating for ‘open borders’:

1. The government has no right to restrict border crossing. (More immigration being, presumably, a result.)

2. More immigration should be allowed by the government; we should make the decision to allow it because it’s neat/good/etc.

Obviously #1 is the stronger claim (and seems to include #2, kind of) but it is also harder to establish. The most popular attempt involves invoking free association in the form of the immigration = employment fallacy, or similar.

But here’s the slippery part: when you take them seriously and therefore try to argue against #1 in good faith, you often get a retreat in response: hey, we’re just saying #2! We just think the government should, like, allow more immigration!

True, open borders advocates often make both of the above claims. But are these two claims mutually exclusive from a rhetorical standpoint? No: the first is an ideological claim, while the second is a political one. It stands to reason that #1 could function as a justification for #2. Likewise, #2 could be a pragmatic means of achieving #1. To make both claims simultaneously certainly presents no direct contradiction.

To see this easily, apply the same reasoning to the freedom of speech. Would it be a “two-step” to first assert that governments have no right to restrict speech and then to subsequently assert that existing restrictions on speech ought to be removed? Obviously not.

There is another important difference between these two statements. The first one is a deontological ethical appeal to natural rights. The second one is a consequentialist ethical appeal to social utility. If “The Crimson Reach” is correct that all good-faith efforts to engage open borders advocates on a point about natural rights results in change-of-subject to social utility, then he has made a fair criticism. The truth is, though, that there are many examples of open borders advocates directly addressing natural rights arguments. The majority of my last piece on this blog was devoted to the natural (property) rights case for immigration. Readers can also find a wealth of information on the natural rights cases for immigration on this blog’s Moral Case page and the links contained therein.

Morality seldom reduces to a single ethical theory. Freedom of migration is as much about personal autonomy and free trade as it is about economic gain. There is no need to choose between moral theories in the real world, and few of us do so.

As you can see, if there is any two-stepping going on, it is not something open borders advocates are perpetuating. As this website handedly demonstrates, many of us have gone to painstaking lengths to make the case for open borders on a variety of moral and practical levels. If immigration restrictionists feel there is more to debate, it is incumbent upon them to first become aware of our responses, and to then respond to them accordingly. While anyone in a passionate debate sometimes fails to stay on point, it would be wrong to categorically suggest that open borders advocates are unwilling to follow a single point to its conclusion. That is in fact what OpenBorders.info is all about.

Do All Immigrants Have Job Offers, And Does This Matter?

I would like to dispense with the “fallacy” to which “The Crimson Reach” so often refers on his blog. Because he seems to think our intellectual honesty is on the line, let me begin by stating outright: Not every would-be immigrant has a job offer. Not every legal citizen has a job offer. Some immigrants have jobs, but no pending offers; some have offers but no current jobs; and the same is true of domestic citizens. (But, in point of fact, Pew Research estimates that the labor force participation rate for illegal immigrants was 71% in 2010, compared to 65% among the legal workforce as measured by the BLS.) The real world is full of people who face a wide variety of circumstances. No one set of conditions is ever true of all people, all the time.

In truth, there is no fallacy, because no one has ever claimed that every single human being who wants to immigrate has a job offer. “The Crimson Reach” is wrong whenever he suggests otherwise. If something sounds silly, it usually is silly.

Instead, what open borders advocates say is:

(All of the above statements appear on “The Crimson Reach”’s blog as examples of an open borders “immigration = jobs fallacy.” )

The argument reflected by these statements is this: we consider it a basic human right to search for a job and accept it wherever it happens to be located. Another way to say this is that we feel immigrants ought to be allowed to participate in the US labor market whether or not they can ultimately procure a job. That’s not a job, it’s a job search.

Of course, this point strikes open borders advocates as being a bit pedantic or banal. Does the difference between having a job offer and merely searching for one impact the argument for open borders? Only if you believe that accepting a job in a foreign country should be permissible, but searching for it ought not be. As this is not the open borders position, it is an irrelevant distinction to us.

However, it might be a fair question to ask of immigration restrictionists: Will “The Crimson Reach” go on record as stating that anyone who has a job offer in a foreign country ought to be allowed to immigrate?

Still, many immigrants do have job offers. There are recent college graduates (international students) who find domestic job offers before their student visas expire, as is the case with several of my own friends and family members who graduated this past Spring. There are currently-legally-employed workers whose visas allow them only to work for their current employer, who are barred from accepting job offers from other domestic employers even though they are legally entitled to work here – and are actually doing so. There are migrant agricultural workers who slowly work their way across the country, following the harvest season from south to north before ultimately returning to their homes abroad. There are families of legal immigrants who must follow special visa applications in order to legally contribute to their families domestic income.

And, yes, the fact that so many illegal immigrants also find domestic work to the tune of 71% labor force participation proves in no uncertain terms that immigrating with a job offer is not unique to highly skilled legal immigrants.

There are other reasons to immigrate, of course, beyond just getting a job. Some people immigrate to be closer to family. Some do it because their spouse-to-be is a citizen of that country. Some do it to seek political asylum. There may be as many reasons to immigrate as there are immigrants. But, as I said at the outset, we cannot possibly speak to all of these points simultaneously each time we wish to speak to one of them individually. To suggest that we commit a “fallacy” each time we make one point, just because we don’t dedicate limited print space to every other point, is wholly unreasonable.

Conclusion

Immigration is a multifaceted issue, so it’s easy to get lost among all the different reasons to embrace open borders. We all have a responsibility to stay on point, and to that end, OpenBorders.info has assembled and organized information on all the major cases for, and arguments against, immigration. We do not dodge or “two-step” any aspect of this issue.

Even so, it is useful to refer to points concisely. Those of us close to this issue – including passionate immigration restrictionists like “The Crimson Reach” – often refer to larger points using shorthand language. We often say, “Accepting a job offer is not a crime” because it is more concise and identifiable than writing a multi-page explanation of the labor market freedom every time we have something new to say about it. If, in doing so, we have fallen short of outlining the basic idea, my hope is that what I’ve just written will be accepted as an explanation for the general idea. Whether “The Crimson Reach,” or anyone else, finds this explanation a fully persuasive justification for open borders is probably not in question, but perhaps at the minimum the debate can now advance beyond false accusations of fallacy.

Weekly link roundup 8

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Here’s our weekly installment of links from around the web (see here for all link roundups). As usual, linking does not imply endorsement.

Keyhole solutions: permissibility, desirability, feasibility, and stability

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At Open Borders: The Case, we have often discussed a general class of “compromises” between full-scale open borders and full-scale closed borders that we call keyhole solutions. The possibilities include immigration tariffs, guest worker programs, linguistic and cultural fluency requirements, and DRITI (migration taxes). As John Lee recently blogged, we also note that open borders does not necessarily imply a path to citizenship for all prospective migrants, although such a path to citizenship may be desirable for other reasons. However, just to be clear, it is not generally the case that Open Borders bloggers endorse each and every keyhole solution, and even to the extent they do, they may not endorse every possible practical implemenetation of the keyhole solution.

Before proceeding, I’d like to note that the general discussion of such keyhole solutions is in the context of migration that is otherwise radically liberalized, not as ways to mitigate (real or perceived) problems with migration that occurs under the status quo. In particular, even if a particular potential migration-related problem (such as crime) does not seem to be actually occurring under the status quo, it might still be worthwhile to consider a keyhole solution to that problem as a possible add-on to a proposal for radically freer migration. Even if there are no compelling reasons to believe that the problem would be severe under open borders, investigating keyhole solutions might still be justified from a “Burkean conservative” perspective, or equivalently, from a moderate and reasonable version of the precautionary principle.

In this blog post, I outline four criteria that can be used to evaluate a potential keyhole solutions. Future blog posts will go into considerable detail evaluating along these criteria various types of keyhole solutions.

Moral permissibility of the keyhole solution

Certain kinds of keyhole solutions may be morally impermissible. For instance, consider a “keyhole solution” to the problem of crime that allows people to migrate as long as they agree to be shot dead if they are suspected of committing any crime (no matter how minor). This keyhole solution might strike some people (including both open borders and closed borders advocates) as immoral, even if it were effective at reducing the risk (and the perception of risk) arising from immigrant crime.

There are some examples that appear morally impermissible from an open borders perspective but not from a restrictionist perspective. For instance, one can argue that guest worker programs as currently constituted are a reasonable keyhole solution: people can migrate if they find a willing employer, and they are required to leave the country if they lose the employment status without acquiring a new one. From the open borders perspective, this may be better than closed borders, and hence less morally impermissible than closed borders, but it is still somewhat morally impermissible, because it denies the right to migrate. It also opens up workers to more risks of worker abuse (see also this video).

Desirability of the keyhole solution

My co-blogger John Lee wrote:

Once we protect non-citizens from arbitrary deportation, the moral harm of raising the bar for citizenship seems almost non-existent. It certainly pales in comparison to the moral harm of keeping people out of your country at gunpoint because you’re afraid letting them in might morally obligate you to throw a blank passport at them.

In other words, John is saying that allowing people to move freely (whether temporarily or permanently) is morally required, whereas giving them a path to citizenship is not. John is not opining here on whether denying a path to citizenship is desirable.

If a particular keyhole solution is morally permissible but undesirable, then the main significance of proposing that keyhole solution is as an alternative to closed borders, not as an alternative to open borders. In the jargon of this blog post of mine, a keyhole solution that is morally permissible but undesirable would (typically) correspond to a rank ordering (1) > (2) > (3), whereas a keyhole solution that is morally permissible and desirable would (typically) correspond to a rank ordering (2) > (1) > (3).

Feasibility of the keyhole solution

Open borders advocates and the audience for their blog posts are not philosopher-kings creating policy in a vacuum. Such policy is created by politicians who respond to incentives, generally catering to the electorate, with some slack exploited by special interest groups. Even if a keyhole solution looks great on paper, it may not be feasible to actually bring about. For instance, one might argue that an immigration tariff scheme in infeasible because of taboos against selling citizenship. Generally, it seems to be that many of the infeasibility claims are not insurmountable, and there may be “keyhole solutions within keyhole solutions” that can be used to get over public resistance. This isn’t to say that these keyhole solutions will be implemented any time soon — it’s just to say that they may be about as feasible as outright open borders, or perhaps even more so. Particularly in the case that a keyhole solution isn’t desirable in and of itself to open borders advocates, its being more feasible than outright open borders may form a compelling reason to advocate it nonetheless (provided it is morally permissible).

Stability of the keyhole solution

Another related concern is stability. Whereas feasibility is about whether the keyhole solution can be implemented in the first place, stability is about whether the keyhole solution will remain intact over time. For instance, some people have argued that denying voting rights to prospective migrants may be feasible, but it’s not stable, because politicians would be sorely tempted to offer citizenship to the currently disenfranchised migrants and win over their loyalty. John addressed this particular example somewhat in his post (same as the one quoted above), but the topic of the stability of voting rights denial or of lengthy paths to citizenship will be treated in more detail in a future post.

Yakko’s World and the incredible danger of fetishising borders

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Recently, I stumbled across this clip from the children’s cartoon Animaniacs, which in a little ditty lists the countries of the world:

The ditty is not actually accurate for two reasons:

  1. The map and composition are based on information that was current in the early 1990s, which is well over two decades ago;
  2. For musical purposes, not all countries are named and some countries are incorrectly named

Both of these reasons, in other words, highlight the incredible arbitrariness of national borders. Some I noticed in just one listen:

  1. “French Guiana” is one of those former European new world colonies that are still in old world hands today
  2. “Russia” in the video is really the USSR, comprising many regions that today are independent countries
  3. “Germany now in one piece”
  4. “England” is only one constituent country of the United Kingdom
  5. “Two Yemens” (Yemen used to be two separate states)
  6. “Sumatra and Borneo” — the island of Sumatra is entirely Indonesian (although it once had an active and violent separatist movement), while Borneo is divided between Indonesia and Malaysia
  7. “Somalia” is arguably two or three countries, depending on whether you recognise governments like those of Somaliland
  8. “Sudan” is now two countries

You can easily conceive of a very different world map, one where:

  1. French Guiana is its own country
  2. Russia/the former USSR are partitioned or united in different configurations
  3. Germany remains partitioned
  4. The United Kingdom is splintered into its constituent countries (some people are still trying to make this happen)
  5. Yemen is splintered (this potentially could happen, given the unrest today)
  6. Sumatra and Borneo could be countries of their own, or divided in some different way between Malaysia and Indonesia (Sumatra is actually culturally and linguistically more similar to Peninsular Malaysia than Borneo is)
  7. Somalia is splintered, and Somaliland could be a sovereign state in its own right
  8. Sudan would still be unified

All of those outcomes are either incredibly realistic, being actively worked towards, or once actually were the case. What reason do we have for these not being the case, other than accidents of history? If the British and the Dutch hadn’t signed a few pieces of paper because Napoleon invaded the Netherlands, Singapore might be part of the former Dutch East Indies (i.e. Indonesia) today, while Sumatra could be a thriving former British colony instead of a region of Indonesia. Nothing innate about the people of Singapore or Sumatra dictated that their borders be where they are today — in a larger sense, Napoleon had more to do with how their borders are set and where these people may travel than any living Singaporean or Sumatran does today. A similar story applies to just about any patch of land you might pick in Southeast Asia.

Depending on which side of a line you were born on, or on what side of the midnight hour the clock read when you were born, you could be Sudanese or South Sudanese. You could be Dominican or Haitian. You could be Pakistani or Bangladeshi. And based on these totally arbitrary factors, where you can live, travel, work, and study will forever be defined. If Napoleon invaded your former coloniser two centuries ago, maybe you wound up British or Singaporean instead of Dutch or Indonesian, or vice-versa. I do not see the sense in this.

There are two sensible ripostes I can think of:

  1. Some arbitrariness is inherent to the workings of the world, and necessary if we are not to go insane
  2. Countries and their unique institutions and cultures are incredibly relevant to shaping who you are

I would articulate the first as similar to observing that in the US, if you drink at 11:59PM in the evening you can be committing a crime, and 2 minutes later, simply exercising the natural right of an adult to enjoy an alcoholic beverage. But while arbitrary cutoffs may be necessary, at least these arbitrary cutoffs which lawmakers set are based on some non-arbitrary study. Governments (one hopes) consider the relevant medical and social science research in deciding an arbitrary minimum drinking age, just as they consider traffic engineering research in deciding an arbitrary speed limit. So remind me, why is it that Napoleon’s invasion of the Netherlands means someone born in Sumatra can’t work in Singapore today without begging for permission? What social science study are we relying on here?

As to the second point, I think this is all well and good. But it is one thing to suggest that countries are relevant to policymaking and our real lives. Nothing inherent to this point demands an automatic ban on foreigners living and working in your country. Maybe it demands a special language test. Maybe it demands an immigration surtax that funds language classes for immigrants or subsidises job training for displaced natives. The point I am making is that you cannot rely on the relevance of the institution of countries to demand a fetishisation of their arbitrary borders. I probably have more in common with a New Yorker of Asian descent than I do with a Borneo longhouse-dweller, yet I am a “foreigner” to the first and a “fellow citizen” to the second. Yet I am allowed to “impose” myself on the Bornean’s community and not the New Yorker’s, because ostensibly I have more in common with the Bornean and pose a threat to the New Yorker.

None of this means we should discard the nation-state, treat it as irrelevant, or even refuse to consider nationality in policymaking. Even borders have some relevance: they define the boundaries of a certain legal jurisdiction, and I would hesitate to just tear that down.

But we cannot take borders for granted. If we find ourselves suddenly declaring someone shouldn’t count or matter because of this arbitrary line, we need to be absolutely sure why we believe this. We cannot grant borders all the due deference in the world. When borders depend on which tyrant invaded your country a century or more ago, that’s a strong reason to instead believe borders might not be worth the paper they’re drawn on. Considering how often our fetish of borders gets in the way of exploring new ideas about citizenship or adhering to our most-cherished civilisational beliefs, this is no trivial matter.

Poverty, International Aid and Immigration

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One of the main justifications for supporting open borders is that it has the potential to alleviate poverty.  But opening borders is not the first thing that comes to mind when people think of poverty reduction measures.  Most people tend to think of international aid programs. Trouble is, international aid isn’t that effective.

For a quick primer, see this report published by the Center for Global Development. The main points include the following:

  • International aid has four main objectives: stimulation of economic growth, strengthening local institutions, immediate humanitarian relief, and economic stabilization after a shock.
  • The evidence accumulated from numerous studies is that there is basically no correlation between international aid and economic growth even though many countries receive over 10% of their gross national income in aid annually.
  • Donors are faced with a significant Principal-Agent problem, which results in a lot of aid ending up in the hands of corrupt officials and useless bureaucrats, or being wasted in some other way.
  • There is some evidence that aid is (slightly) more effective when given to countries with better governance and policies in place, but this does not always correlate with who needs aid the most.

Basically, international aid doesn’t work that well in the long run. Interestingly, this does not mean that we are losing the war on poverty. In fact, according to this article in the economist, the world met the millennium challenge goal of cutting poverty in half between 1990 and 2015 five years early.  So how did it happen?

In a word, China. We are all familiar with the story of China by now. After China adopted meaningful economic reforms in the 1970’s, their economy exploded and millions of people got jobs in new industries making goods that are exported across the world.  What we don’t always take into account is that this massive economic growth depends on a massive level of economic migration.  Chinese cities have over 250 million migrant workers.  Some estimates claim that another 250 million will move to the city by 2025.  China’s migrant population will soon be greater than the entire population of the US.

China has hundreds of millions of internal migrants despite the fact that the government does not allow its citizens to freely move around the country.  Chinese migrant workers live under conditions similar to illegal immigrants in this country.  Millions of migrant worker children are not even allowed to attend school even though China’s leaders know that their urban industries depend on migrant labor.  Migration has been vital to China’s economic growth, but there is massive bureaucratic resistance to granting these migrants basic rights because of the strain it would put on local welfare and education systems.  Sound familiar?  Still, hundreds of millions of rural Chinese have decided it is better for them to live on the margins of an industrialized economy than to risk starvation in a backward agricultural area.

Despite government attempts to prevent it, migration has been a fundamental part of how the world has cut poverty in half.  The explanation is pretty simple. Prior to industrialization, pretty much everyone lives in poverty.  Individuals in agricultural societies don’t produce very much, and they are fairly evenly distributed across the land. Individuals who specialize in a modern economy are very productive but they need to live in close proximity to other people. Thus industrialization goes hand in hand with massive rural-urban migration.

China isn’t the only country that has been transformed by internal migration. 30 percent of India’s population are migrants, as that countries citizens search for better conditions. In Brazil, the urban population went from 36% to 81% of the total in the second half on the 20th century.  And of course, the United States has experienced several periods of migration that shaped our nation’s history.

When we talk about poverty reduction, migration should be the first word that comes to mind.  Of course, the movements discussed here have been internal.  Internal migration is a bigger factor than international immigration in global poverty reduction because it is easier for people to move around within their own countries (despite restrictions, as in China).  A few countries have both the massive rural populations and dynamic urban production centers that make economy changing rural-urban migration possible.  But many areas of the world are being choked off either because their rural population has nowhere to go or their aging economy lacks an influx of new workers.

The benefit of open borders is that it allows the process of industrialization and poverty reduction to proceed without artificial barriers.  The China miracle could become a comprehensive global solution to poverty.