Yearly Archives: 2013

Introducing Evan

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We’re happy to announce Evan will be joining Open Borders: The Case as an occasional blogger!

Evan is a librarian from Ann Arbor Michigan. He’s particularly interested in the moral and political philosophy surrounding questions of immigration and intends to examine issues through that lens. It is his belief that immigration restrictions are one of the great moral wrongs of our time. He intends to engage the moral frameworks used to justify open and closed border views, though still being grounded in empirical evidence where appropriate.

We look forward to seeing Evan’s posts and his first contribution will be ready soon!

REMINDER: If you’re interested in blogging for the site in any capacity, please fill out  our potential guest blogger contact form.

An appeal to emotion in the argument for voting rights

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This post is a break from our normal type of analysis for a more personal look at the impact of immigration and restrictions on individuals. The opinions here are not necessarily the same as those expressed by the regular blogging staff at Open Borders. However, we think personal experiences of immigration can still offer interesting perspectives to consider within the wider context of the evidence for and against open borders.

See also 18 years of immigration torment, a blog post by John Lee about the story of Atanas.

I’m an immigrant entrepreneur. For the past 12 years, I’ve been dutifully paying U.S. taxes and contributing to the American economy. I have committed no crimes, and I have never used social security benefits. Yet I still haven’t received permanent resident (“green card”) status, let alone citizenship. At the same time, the kid next door, who just turned 18 and recently got out of juvenile detention, can vote.

This is the beginning of a story told to me by a fellow entrepreneur. He came to the United States 12 years ago as a software engineer, and went through all the hoops of the system. He worked on an H-1B visa for six years, with the associated risks and downsides – inability to switch employers without losing his place in line for the green card, requirement to leave the United States or find another visa sponsor in case of losing his job at once (there no official grace period), and a permanent feeling of impermanence, of not being supposed to grow roots. Why would one purchase assets such as a house if they knew they could be forced to liquidate those assets within days?

Next, he applied for employment-based permanent resident status, a process that imposes waits from 5 to 10 to 70 years (depending on the country of citizenship – a clear case of discrimination), due to a myopic policy of limiting any country (be it China or Montenegro) to a total of 7% of an again artificially limited visa quota of 140,000 per year. Every time he returned to the U.S. from international travel, he had to be “paroled” (a process solely at the discretion of a Customs and Border Protection officer), with the occasional detention for several hours (which happens even if you have a green card).

Today, my friend is still waiting for his green card, while working on a web startup that he founded. Assuming he obtains his permanent residency status this year, it will take another five years until he is eligible to apply for citizenship. By that time, he will have been in the United States for 18 years, as long as his teenager neighbor with a police record. In the meantime though, he risks being kicked out of the country on a technicality, an occurrence far from rare, if we only consider the widely publicized cases in the media:

One of the keyhole solution alternatives to a blanket immigration ban has been preventing immigrants from voting until they become citizens, after passing a test which in its current form is notably inaccurate, and which many natives would probably flunk. In the light of the story I’ve just shared, one must consider the ethical basis for the inequity between an entrepreneur with 18 years’ worth of contributions to the welfare budget, deep familiarity by now with the social, political and economic realities of the Unites States, and a newly minted voter with likely no history of productive employment.

On what possible ethical basis are we to favor the latter?

I will leave the question above as a rhetorical device in the arsenal of open borders advocates. Hopefully it will be useful where reasoned arguments may not convince. If you interlocutor isn’t impressed by the fact that fully 19% of the 2012 Fortune 500 Companies were founded by a 1st-generation immigrant – while only 1% of the U.S. population are high-skilled immigrants – tell them the story of my Indian friend and his neighbor.

The Simplicity and Fairness of Open Borders

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“It is not up to the British state to decide where people should or should not live, or anyone else but migrants and refugees themselves. We support the unfettered right of entry of the feckless, the unemployable and the uncultured.” This quote comes from the 2003 Manifesto of the No One Is Illegal (United Kingdom) organization and is a favorite of mine in the literature supporting open borders.  These sentences appear in a paragraph opposing having to justify the immigration of people based on their contributions to the receiving country, but their appeal is that they communicate that borders should be open to everybody, with rare exceptions such as when an individual immigrant is determined to be likely to commit terrorism in the receiving country.  A policy which allows everybody to enter, stay, and work in a second country regardless of their occupational skills, their family or employment connections in the receiving country, their country of origin, or other factors, is both simple and fair.

The opposite exists under the current restrictionist immigration policy of the U.S., which is anything but simple or fair.  Kevin Johnson of the University of California, Davis notes its complexity: “By many accounts, only the much-maligned Internal Revenue Code rivals the intricate, lengthy, and frequently obtuse Immigration & Nationality Act of 1952, which is the centerpiece of modern American immigration law…  The areas of complexity of the U.S. immigration laws are too numerous to review here in detail. The labor certification process for certain employment visas is one of those areas. The myriad of exclusions, criminal removal provisions (and removal grounds generally), judicial review provisions, and many other rules also are incredibly complex, cumbersome, ambiguous, and obtuse. As a result of their complexity and ambiguity, the U.S immigration laws create much work for immigration attorneys…” (The complex laws also keep government lawyers, officials, and judges busy.  There are over two hundred immigration judges, who are employed by the Department of Justice and not part of the judiciary, applying the law to cases.  Federal judges all the way up to the Supreme Court also rule on matters of immigration law.)

Consider the intricacies of the immigration laws concerning marriage, a flashpoint in the current debate over the immigration bill proposed in the Senate.  U.S. citizens and permanent residents can sponsor foreign born spouses to become permanent residents.  But what about same sex couples?  Current law does not allow this, and efforts to change the law to include the sponsorship of immigrants who have a same sex citizen or permanent resident partner face significant opposition in the Senate.  It is also not necessarily a simple legal path for heterosexual spouses, especially if there have been prior violations of immigration laws. Even without prior violations, what about situations in which married couples are separated? (Answer: it depends on the type of separation.)  Another aspect is that the government tries to determine whether a marriage is based on love or is really only a means of gaining legal status for one of the spouses.  In New York, a unit of 22 immigration officers is devoted to examining marriages, based on which immigration applications are filed, for fraud.

Consider the complexity of laws concerning asylum.  To obtain asylum, “an individual must prove that he is unable or unwilling to go back to his home country ‘because of persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.’” Legal decisions distinguish between prosecution, when the individual is subjected to “fairly administered laws” that are applied to all citizens of that country, and persecution.  In one case an Iranian national sought political asylum for, among other things, distributing movies and concert videos made in the Western Hemisphere. His request for asylum was denied, even though he faced a two-year prison sentence and 19 lashes under Islamic law if he returned to Iran. A federal court of appeals held that, standing alone, asylum seeker’s prosecution for distributing movies and videos was not persecution, but prosecution “for an act deemed criminal in Iranian society, which is made applicable to all people in that country.”  Also, how persecution is defined determines case outcomes.  “Generally, harassment and discrimination will not constitute persecution. Persecution is regarded as an extreme concept that differs from general discrimination against minority groups.” In a 2011 opinion by the a federal court of appeals, Richard Posner, one of the judges, identified “three forms of oppressive behavior toward a group despised by the government or by powerful groups that the government can’t or won’t control. The three forms are discrimination, harassment, and persecution. The first refers to unequal treatment, and is illustrated historically by India’s caste system and the Jim Crow laws in the southern U.S. states. Discrimination normally does not involve the application of physical force, except as punishment for violation of the discriminatory laws.  Harassment involves targeting members of a specified group for adverse treatment, but without the application of significant physical force. Had Lions furious at Naumov’s being soft on Albanians followed his taxi (he was a taxicab driver in Macedonia) and ticketed him whenever he exceeded the speed limit by one mile per hour, that would be an example of harassment… Persecution involves, we suggest, the use of significant physical force against a person’s body, or the infliction of comparable physical harm without direct application of force (locking a person in a cell and starving him would be an example), or nonphysical harm of equal gravity…” Additionally, sometimes how the five grounds on which persecution can be based (race, religion, etc.) are applied to asylum cases determines how they are decided.

The issue of fairness arises for almost every aspect of the American restrictionist system.  For asylum cases, problems of fairness have abounded, and historically politics appears to have intruded on decisions.  During the Cold War, asylum seekers from the Soviet Union were favored over those from non-Communist countries like  El Salvador, Haiti, and Guatemala, according to Bill Frelick and Court Robinson (International Journal of Refugee Law, Vol. 2, 1990). The U.S. has had a much more restrictive policy towards Haitians seeking asylum compared to Cubans.  Furthermore, Stephen Legomsky notes that research “has brought home the extraordinary extent to which the outcome of an asylum claim hinges on the particular adjudicators who are assigned the case.”

Beyond asylum cases, here are a few examples.  There is the unfairness of the administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). There is the fact that lower skilled workers are allotted very few permanent residence visas compared to more highly skilled individuals.  Same sex spouses are excluded from sponsoring a spouse for permanent residence.

At the same time, complete fairness would not be achieved even if same sex couples were allowed to sponsor a spouse, if there were equal numbers of visas for unskilled workers as for skilled  workers, if the deferred action program protected more people from deportation, or if other modifications were made to the restrictionist system.  Some people would still be barred from immigrating.  As the No One Is Illegal Manifesto observes:  “…what about the single gay person, the celibate, the lonely, those of no sexual orientation or the promiscuous of any sexual orientation? Including gay couples within immigration law and its spurious ‘rights’ means that all these other people are by definition excluded… The way forward is to fight for the rights of all gay women and men along with everyone else to be able to come and remain irrespective of personal circumstances or relationships. The only equal opportunities immigration controls are no immigration controls.”

So aside from improving the lives of massive numbers of people and being morally preferable to having immigration restrictions, an open borders policy offers the advantages of simplicity and fairness.  Resources currently devoted to navigating complex immigration laws or attempting to make the laws fairer could be devoted to more productive uses under an open borders policy.

How Did We Get Here? The Origins of Immigration Restrictions: The Chinese Exclusion Act

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As promised, here is the start of my historical examination of immigration rule changes, and we begin with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For those interested in the text of the act itself it can be found here.

For a little background, the first restriction on immigration to the US was actually the Page Act of 1875. This act too focused on Asian immigrants attempting to limit people being brought over for forced labor or prostitution. In practice that latter provision was a significant limiting factor on Chinese women coming to the United States, less because of most emigrating Chinese women actually being prostitutes than officials being overly skeptical towards claims of virtue. This association of the Chinese with crime was one of the major arguments used by anti-Chinese restrictionists in the years leading up to the exclusion act’s passage and parallels modern arguments about immigrant criminality. To explore this (and other major restrictionist arguments) the internet has made easily accessible wonderful resources such as arguments made before the California State Senate (the state with the highest Chinese population) by State Senator Creed Haymond. On page 4 he argues:

The State of California has a population variously estimated at from seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand, of which one hundred twenty-five thousand are Chinese…The evidence demonstrates beyond cavil that nearly the entire immigration comes from the lowest orders of the Chinese people, and mainly those having no homes or occupations on the land, but living on boats on the rivers, especially those in the vicinity of Canton.

This class of the people, according to the castes into which Chinese society is divided, are virtually pariahs—the dregs of the population. None of them are  admitted into any of the privileges of the orders ranking above them. And while rudimentary education is encouraged, and even enforced among the masses of the people, the fishermen and those living on the waters and harbors of China are excluded by the rigid and hoary constitutions of caster from participation in such advantages.

It would seem to be a necessary consequence, flowing from this class of immigration, that a large proportion of criminals should be found among it; and this deduction is abundantly sustained by the facts before us, for of five hundred and forty-five of the foreign criminals in our State Prison, one hundred and ninety-eight are Chinese—nearly two-fifths of the whole—while our jails and reformatories swarm with the lower grade of malefactors.

(Emphasis mine).

Continue reading How Did We Get Here? The Origins of Immigration Restrictions: The Chinese Exclusion Act →

Why Are There So Few Unlawful Immigrants?

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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.

Open Borders Note: See also Vipul’s post and our posts tagged economic determinism.

Labor markets are heavily distorted by immigration restrictions, producing wide and persistent wage differences for observably identical workers in developed and developing nations. Income for low skilled American workers is 16 times as high as Haitians in Haiti, about 7 times as high as Indians in India, and about 4 times as high as Mexicans in Mexico—all adjusted for purchasing power parity. Just by moving here immigrants can largely close that wage gap.

There are very limited avenues for low skilled immigrants to immigrate legally, which raises an important question: if the economic benefits of immigrating are so high, why are there only 11 to 12 million unlawful immigrants here?

Below are the two broad reasons:

First, the benefits of immigrating are not as high as they seem. The probability of being employed in the destination country is a vital variable because unemployment does not confer any benefits on the immigrant. The skill level of prospective unlawful immigrants restricts job opportunities to certain occupations. If the sectors where low skilled immigrants work have high unemployment rates, as many do now, the chances of earning higher wages here is lower so the economic benefits of immigration are lower. Downward wage bargaining by immigrants is limited but unlawful immigrants do take a wage cut, all else being equal, of about 20 percent to compensate their employers for the legal risk of hiring them and other reasons. Growing economies in places like Mexico, China, and elsewhere might partially offset the benefits of immigrating by promising higher incomes in the near future.

Second, the cost of unlawfully immigrating is very high. Opportunity costs, search costs(including language barriers), transportation costs, legal costs, the probability of dying en route, the probability of being sold into slavery, and the probability of not making it to the United States despite paying the smuggling fee are all high and increase risk. Immigration enforcement is very effective at deterring most would-be unlawful immigrants. Highsmuggling fees are a high up front cost.

Immigration can be understood as an investment over a period of years.  The length of time the immigrant spends here employed at higher wages increases the economic benefits of immigrating. The costs of immigrating, like paying for a smuggler, are fixed while there seems to be a low marginal cost for staying here to avoid immigration enforcement. The psychic costs could shift with time.

Here is an example:

Assume a Mexican immigrant wants to illegally move to the United States and work in construction. A marginal worker in the construction sector would have about an 86.2 percent chance of being employed at $40,000 with an effective tax rate of about 18 percent (including income and FICA taxes) and a 2.6 percent annual average wage increase.

The cost of being smuggled in ($9,000 by boat, $4000 by land), buying documents to decrease the chances of detection, and opportunity cost from being out of the labor force is $11,000 assuming no psychic costs. After the first year, I assume that the out of pocket cost of living illegally was $1,000.

Assuming a two percent discount rate, the net present value of moving to the United States for five years is $126,000.  The net present value (NPV) of working in Mexico assuming a starting wage of $10,000 a year, 95 percent chance of being employed, a one percent wage growth, and a two percent discount rate is about $48,000. The wages are about 2.6 times as high assuming the immigrants successfully enters on his first attempt and immediately finds a job.

The uncertainty of working illegally in the United States, a higher smuggling price, and separation from one’s home dramatically increase costs. A relatively low annual cost of $11,000 a year in addition to smuggling fees of $9000 in the first year lowers the NPV to $77,340, just 61 percent greater than staying in Mexico. Psychic costs are higher for immigrants from countries that do not send many in the first place—like Yemen or the Central African Republic—because there is not a diaspora to fit in to. Unlawful immigrantsare typically young, male, single, and without families—groups with the lowest psychic costs of immigrating. The opportunity cost of using capital to pay smugglers is also high, especially in poor countries.

Immigration enforcement has a gargantuan deterrence effect—larger than any other factor. The vast majority of would-be unlawful immigrants are deterred by breaking immigration laws and the punishments—even if there is a small chance of being caught. A 10 percent increase in immigration enforcement hours along the border produced a 2.5 percent increase in smuggling prices—raising the cost of unlawfully immigrating. The size and scope of Border Patrol has increased substantially since 1980—virtually doubling in size since 2004.

Here are the first year wage gains including the cost of smuggling from different countries of origin:

Source Country

Smuggling Cost

Median Ind. Earnings, US Full Time

Income in Home Country

Wage Gain

Wage Gain/Smuggling
Brazil

$16,000

$31,905

$12,594

$19,311

1.21
China

$50,000

$31,863

$5,445

$26,418

0.53
Cuba

$10,000

$24,103

$5,400

$18,703

1.87
Haiti

$1,500

$35,103

$726

$34,377

22.92
India

$60,000

$50,443

$1,509

$48,934

0.82
Mexico

$9,000

$13,520

$10,047

$3,473

0.39

Source: 2011 American Community Survey, DHS, Havocscope. 

The smaller the wage gain to smuggling ratio is, the smaller the pure economic benefits of coming here are, assuming successful entry. If the Coast Guard was less effective or if Haitians could find a cheaper way to enter the United States unlawfully, many more would come. The pressure from Mexico is not nearly as great as many imagine. These numbers are only averages and probably understate the desirability of coming here but they explain why Indians and Chinese send so few unlawful immigrants despite the massive wage gains: immigration enforcement is very effective so it raises the price of smuggling.

The costs of moving to the United States are very high and the benefits are lower than international wage differences make them seem. The benefits from moving to the United States for millions of people would be enormous for most Americans, the immigrants themselves, and those who stayed behind. Given those large wage differences, it is truly remarkable that there are so few unlawful immigrants in the United States.