Yearly Archives: 2013

Introducing Michael Carey

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We’re happy to announce that Michael (Mike) Carey will be joining Open Borders: The Case as an occasional blogger. As our site expands its contributor base, we are trying to incorporate a diverse range of perspectives and writing styles that may differ from what readers have seen so far on this site (potential writers on this site need not always agree as shown in this comment thread).

Mike is a math teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah where he works with a diverse group of students including many children of undocumented immigrants and refugees from Africa. In addition, he also works as a Judge Advocate in the Air Force Reserve.

Prior to becoming a teacher, Mike was a C-130 pilot in the Air Force. He has a BS in mathematics from Brigham Young University, and MS in Physics from North Carolina State and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Mike writes about education reform, politics, and economics at his blog, www.ergoscribo.com. He became an ardent supporter of open borders after reading the work of development economist Lant Pritchett, who has shown that relaxing border restrictions could be the most effective way of relieving world poverty. Through his work with students, he has also become intimately aware of the tragic circumstances that result from the deportation of immigrant families.

His first post will be published soon.

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

Immigration Restrictionists – Why Not Eugenics?

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I’m a pro-natalist.  I’m in favor of people being born.  Be careful when you think to yourself, “that’s a silly thing to be specifically in favor of; isn’t everyone?”  Because I assure you, not everyone is.  There are plenty of Malthusians out there, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.  There are people who believe in eugenics; people who think the world would honestly be better if we revoked reproduction privileges from those with low IQ’s, criminal histories, certain racial or ethnic backgrounds, genetic defects, etc.  And if the idea of forcibly spaying and neutering everyone with a wheelchair, a below-average IQ, the wrong skin color, or any other factor appalls you – then breathe a sigh of relief: You have a conscience.

Sadly however, this belief is not universal.  I’m not sure it’s even a majority belief (I hope it is, but the cynic in me says that if you really asked all seven billion people, most would come up with a certain class of people that they’d rather not see more of).  But there is a specific category of person, with a specific category of belief that I want to address here.  That is:  People who do not believe that we should limit births based on any factor, but who are restrictionists when it comes to immigration policy.

In a way, birth is a form of immigration.  Someone is moving from the generic “somewhere else” to the here and now.  The place you occupy and call your home is getting a new occupant.  But obviously there are many differences between a newborn in America and an immigrant in America, for example (by no means do I intend to say that these concerns are limited to America – I use that country solely as an example).  The newborn is going to use vastly more social resources.  The newborn is statistically more likely to be a criminal.  The newborn is less likely to join the labor force, and infinitely less likely to do so within the next ten years.  On the other hand, most newborns immediately have a private support network (albeit one that will rely heavily on public services).

Newborns have lots of other differences from immigrants, of course – they look like natives, they sound like natives, and they’ll probably share native cultural beliefs and social norms.  These are all reasons that other natives will like them more, but they’re not reasons why they would be more beneficial to the country than immigrants, so we’re going to ignore those for now.

Other than the instinctual reasons for liking a newborn more than an immigrant, is the only real benefit that a newborn offers over an immigrant as a choice for “new addition to the country’s population” that they have a private support network of mostly self-sufficient people (at least, as self-sufficient as anyone gets in a modern first-world country)?  If that’s the case, it seems like the immigration issue is pretty easy to solve.  If the one and only criteria that potential immigrants needed to meet before coming in was to find a voluntary supporter, it seems like we’d have plenty of immigration!

Let’s do a thought experiment.  Let’s pretend that current citizens of America can invite immigrants in using only the same criteria by which they can have children.  Any two people could invite an immigrant in – and the same two people could invite in as many immigrants as they wanted.  They would not have to be able to support those immigrants, though socially speaking there would be pressure to do so.  If you decided two years later that you didn’t like your immigrant, you couldn’t send him or her back, any more than you can “send back” a baby; though you could in theory put yours up for adoption.  Since immigrants can generally take care of themselves, this seems like less of an issue for immigrants than it does for children, so that’s an extra point in favor of immigrants.  You could be irresponsible and invite too many immigrants in the same way that you can be irresponsible and have too many children; but since immigrants can work and are far less dependent on their caregivers than children are, it seems like this is far less of an issue – score another point for the immigrant.

You don’t need to submit to a background check to have a child, so you wouldn’t need one to invite in an immigrant.  The child obviously doesn’t have a background to check, while the immigrant might – but given the respective crime rates, it seems like it would make more sense to check potential parental backgrounds to weed out potential criminals than to do the same with immigrant backgrounds.  Since we don’t do the former, it’s hard to make a moral case for the latter.

Of course, children can’t vote for at least 18 years, so immigrants wouldn’t be able to, either – fair enough (and as a keyhole solution, this has already been suggested).

For those whose restrictionist attitude stems from the fear that immigrants might eventually “take over” the country due to sheer numbers – well remember, that’s guaranteed with children.  If immigrants were brought into this country by a parental figure, the same as children, you’d have the same opportunity to influence them.  It might even make people of competing political or cultural outlooks compete to have MORE immigrants, for the same reason you want to have more kids in that circumstance:  If you think your culture is so great, you want to pass on that culture to the next generation in larger numbers than the “other people” – whoever they are in your eyes.

So there you have it.  Regardless of what opinions you hold about birth and immigration respectively, there’s very little non-instinctual reason to restrict immigration more than birth, relatively.

Of course, there are those that don’t believe births should be restricted along any categorical lines, but do believe that overall restriction in terms of sheer quantity should happen.  Again, I’m a pro-natalist, so I don’t share this view.  But even if you do hold that view, that view isn’t analogous to the view most people have about immigration.  Most people who you’re likely to meet on the street have one of two opinions on immigration:  Either we should restrict it even more than we do now (even to the point of zero), or we should be increasing “high-skill” immigration while decreasing other kinds.  But statistically speaking, only a tiny fraction of American newborns will grow up to be the kind of people the “high-skill” immigration proponents want.  What’s the native birth rate of engineers compared to the total native birth rate?

But let’s say you actually hold comparable quantity-restriction views on both birth and immigration.  You don’t believe in restricting either by category, but you do believe in strict quantity limits on both.  There are a number of problems with this view.  First – what’s the optimal number?  A quota of any kind means that something other than spontaneous order is determining the number of births and/or immigrants, and that’s therefore pretty much guaranteed to be the wrong number.  Then of course are all the administrative difficulties – how do you parcel out the set number, given that the desired number will be higher?  Who gets to come and who doesn’t?   There’s almost no way to do a quantity restriction without also imposing a categorical one, except for some sort of “first come, first served” method that is very unlikely to be satisfactory.  We need only to look to China to see some of the negative effects of a quantity restriction on birth; like any prohibition of something nearly universally desired, the unintended consequences are severe.

Restrictions on immigration based on quantity have all the same problems as restrictions on birth rates based on quantity, and immigration restrictions based on category appear significantly less moral than birth restrictions based on the same.  Considering that we don’t restrict births in any way in America, it would seem difficult to build a moral or utilitarian case to restrict immigration.

Why Erasing All the World’s Borders Would Double World GDP

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The article below, by me, was published this morning at the Daily GOOD: http://www.good.is/posts/why-erasing-all-the-world-s-borders-would-double-gdp.

Economists have estimated that opening the world’s borders to migration could double world GDP. To get the gist of that number, imagine that your boss walked into your office tomorrow and said, “we’re doubling your salary”—and the same thing happened to everyone else, too.

What would we all do with the money?
Buy better food, more cars, better educations for our children, medical care, books, vacations, and other entertainment. We’d take more leisure and patronize the arts more, enjoy more of the charm of life and more of the latest technology, and lead happier, more fulfilling lives.
In short, higher standards of living.
These estimates, though admittedly speculative, are actually rather conservative. If the whole world population migrated to the U.S. and earned what Americans earn, world GDP would multiply more than four-fold. That isn’t actually possible, and researchers take that into account in various ways, thus bringing estimates of the impact of open borders down to a mere doubling of world GDP.
Poor countries aren’t poor because their people are defective individuals. The proof of that is that when they migrate to rich countries, they usually close most of the earnings gap quickly. Some countries are cursed by geography—it’s hard to be productive in malarial, landlocked regions of Africa—while poverty partly reflects a lack of capital, public (e.g., roads) and private (e.g., structures and equipment). Predatory, corrupt and/or foolish governments bear some of the blame. Many places are improving, but fixing countries is usually harder than moving people.
Open borders would be far more disruptive than everyone just getting a pay raise. They would probably lead in fairly short order to epic mass migrations. In the burgeoning cities of the United States and western Europe, there would be far more visible poverty than there is today. Of course, open borders would not create that poverty. In fact, they would improve it. But they would also make it visible to the rather complacent middle classes of America and Europe, for whom the border serves as a convenient blindfold.
The big gains probably wouldn’t show up in the average American’s paycheck, not according to the Revolut reviews we’ve studied. They’d come in the form of a surging stock market, soaring land values, and steeply falling prices of labor-intensive services and locally made goods and services.
If open borders are such a good idea, why haven’t they been tried already? They have. In the mid-to-late 19th century, the U.S. and most of the world’s leading nations had entirely or nearly open borders. How did that work out? Brilliantly. Open borders were a big reason why the 19th century was by far the most technologically progressive and politically liberalizing era in the history of the world up to that time, and maybe since, too.
Everyone knows that the 20th century witnessed a hideous descent into widespread totalitarianism and large-scale war. Recently, though, several economic historians have begun to argue that the period from 1880-1940, the era of open borders and its immediate aftermath, was the real heyday of technological progress, and recent decades have seen a “great stagnation,” though this is counter-intuitive, since we are more advanced than people a century ago (technology accumulates) even if the generations that introduced electricity and indoor plumbing and the automobile and the airplane and the assembly line and so on were more innovative. And while domestic inequality was greater in the 19th century than in the mid-20th century, global inequality was less.
Meanwhile, the 19th century puts paid to the panicky protests of people who think open borders will dissolve the nation-state and lead to anarchy. America in the age of open borders possessed and gloried in its distinctive identity and institutions at least as much as it does today. So did other countries in that time, for better or worse.
Open borders might threaten national identity today as they didn’t then, but it’s not clear why. Indeed, since American culture today is a global juggernaut, assimilating the world even beyond its borders; more foreigners than ever are prepared to fit into American life almost immediately, speaking English (probably more than a billion people speak it now), wearing blue jeans, listening to rock-n-roll, understanding and supporting democratic tolerance.
Under open borders, some would come who don’t want to be Americans. They’d stay a little while, earn some money, and go home. Nothing wrong with that. Others would want to stay, and, please note, they’d have made a positive choice to be Americans, as native-born Americans have not done. When you think about it that way, it’s not surprising that open borders never seem to have weakened anyone’s national identity much, just as a church doesn’t lose its distinctiveness by accepting converts.
The irony is that the people who complain about Mexicans not wanting to assimilate are usually the same people who minimize their incentive to assimilate by keeping them in the shadows, under the threat of deportation. Why invest yourself in a country that might deport you?
No less important than the economic benefits are the gains in freedom and respect for human rights that open borders would probably achieve. Open borders would represent a huge gain for freedom per se, opening up vast new opportunities for people to pursue their dreams and be the authors of their own lives.
But most crucial is the protection open borders would afford for basic human rights. There are still far too many countries where basic freedoms of speech, of the press, of religion, and from arbitrary arrest are not protected. It helps if people can get out from under regimes that abuse them. Those whose consciences compel them to practice the Bahai faith or criticize a Central Asian dictator should be able to do so at home, but failing that, they should be able to emigrate to somewhere that they can do so safely. Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the right to emigrate, and it really has become rare for governments to try to lock their citizens in.
The problem is that many have nowhere to go. We think of refugees, in particular, as victims of this or that dictator or episode of ethnic cleansing, but in an important sense they are victims of our entire world order, which partitions the surface of the earth among a cartel of sovereign states, who insist on the right to exclude people for every reason and no reason. It doesn’t have to be that way. It wasn’t that way in the past. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, it won’t be that way anymore.
Until then, refugees will suffer, as every pathway to some sort of normal life is blocked by closed borders. For those who want to do right by the world, open borders should be a high priority.

Skirting Around the Restrictions: Will Technology Make Borders Obsolete?

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The rise of modern communications technology has drastically changed the way humans interact with each other. Physical distance matters less than ever. You my dear reader may be seeing this post of mine from 10 minutes away from my apartment or from 12,000 miles away. Indeed the difference in time which you might theoretically be able to first read this is insignificant between those two locations. Compared to times when it took six months to traverse the silk road from Europe to China that is absurd. And this technology is not limited by borders (with some important exceptions, though just like real borders people find ways to sneak around that). Looking at the author list for this site even it’s possible to find people from across the globe writing about open borders. Technology might be beating us to the punch on open borders (for a similar argument that poverty might end before we open the borders see Vipul’s earlier post). So if this is all true does this mean there’s no point to open borders advocacy? Has technology already won the battle for us?

Sadly this post doesn’t end with me cracking open a bottle of champagne and celebrating victory (or maybe just a beer, champagne isn’t really my thing…anyways…). Continue reading Skirting Around the Restrictions: Will Technology Make Borders Obsolete? →

Nathan Smith vs. Hans-Hermann Hoppe

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When I wrote Principles of a Free Society, I believe that I very dimly had in mind Hans-Hermann Hoppe as an intellectual adversary, but for some reason– some stray remarks at the Cato Institute which I over-interpreted, I think– I had the impression that Hoppe was so disreputable that it would be a kind of sin to mention him or read him. Thinking it over now, that’s hardly fair! My views on the Iraq War would, I suppose, make me at least as heretical from a Cato Institute perspective as Hans-Hermann Hoppe for his views on immigration (and homosexuality, but that’s not relevant here). Hoppe seems, like me, to aspire to a thoroughgoing rationalism, and to like Lockean homesteading as an origin for property rights. We have enough in common to provide the basis for an argument. Moreover, what I realize now is that even before I wrote Principles, I had heard a rumor about Hoppe’s argument for migration restrictions, guessed the nature of the argument from that rumor, and wrote Principles, among other things, to refute it. But since my argument against Hoppe is spread out throughout Principles and does not explicitly mention Hoppe, it seems worthwhile to bring Hoppe’s argument and my refutation together in one place. This is my contribution to the debate summarized at our anarcho-capitalist counter-factual page.

First, Hoppe’s argument, from “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem.” Hoppe starts by suggesting, without really arguing for it, that:

People of one ethno-culture tend to live in close proximity to one another and spatially separated and distant from people of another ethno-culture. Whites live among Whites and separate from Asians and Blacks. Italian speakers live among other Italians and separate from English speakers. Christians live among other Christians and separate from Muslims. Catholics live among Catholics and separate from Protestants, etc.

Well, no, they don’t tend to, really, except when the government compels them to. Segregation occurs often in history, but so does integration. And anyway, given that the suggested groupings of people overlap greatly– there are white, Asian, and black Christians; there are white Christians and Muslims and atheists; there are people who speak both Italian and English– the proposed regime of spatial segregation doesn’t seem to make sense (unless the segregation is very fine indeed, e.g., “only Italian-speaking white Catholics in this neighborhood”… but that’s hardly typical). But Hoppe’s next move is what makes his argument distinctive:

Let us take one more step and assume that all property is owned privately and the entire globe is settled. Every piece of land, every house and building, every road, river, and lake, every forest and mountain, and all of the coastline is owned by private owners or firms. No such thing as “public” property or “open frontier” exists. Let us take a look at the problem of migration under this scenario of a “natural order.”

First and foremost, in a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property. Essentially, a person can move only if he is invited by a recipient property owner, and this recipient-owner can revoke his invitation and expel his invitees whenever he deems their continued presence on his property undesirable (in violation of his visitation code).

Given this assumption, the rest of the argument is rather predictable, at least to me. Still, we may as well follow Hoppe a little further. First:

In a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property.

Second, on roads and other transportation:

There will be plenty of movement under this scenario because there are powerful reasons to open access to one’s property, but there are also reasons to restrict or close access. Those who are the most inclusive are the owners of roads, railway stations, harbors, and airports, for example. Interregional movement is their business. Accordingly, their admission standards can be expected to be low, typically requiring no more than the payment of a user fee. However, even they would not follow a completely non-discriminatory admission policy. For instance, they would exclude intoxicated or unruly people and eject all trespassers, beggars, and bums from their property, and they might videotape or otherwise monitor or screen their customers while on their property.

To this we will return. Finally, it is in residential property where Hoppe expects to see the highest degree of segregation:

It is in the residential housing and real estate market where discrimination against and exclusion of ethno-cultural strangers will tend to be most pronounced. For it is in the area of residential as contrasted to commercial property where the human desire to be private, secluded, protected, and undisturbed from external events and intrusions is most pronounced. The value of residential property to its owner depends essentially on its almost total exclusivity. Only family members and occasionally friends are included. And if residential property is located in a neighborhood, this desire for undisturbed possession—peace and privacy—is best accomplished by a high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity (as this lowers transaction costs while simultaneously increasing protection from external disturbances and intrusions). By renting or selling residential property to strangers (and especially to strangers from ethno-culturally distant quarters), heterogeneity is introduced into the neighborhood. Transaction costs tend to increase, and the peculiar peace-and-privacy-security—the freedom from external, foreign intrusions—sought and expected of residential property tends to fall, resulting in lower residential property values.

Many very interesting things to note here. First of all, Hoppe’s scheme must create a strong bias in favor of the right to invite. Second, Hoppe’s scheme justifies not only immigration restrictions but also domestic residential segregation of the kind that existed in the US before the 1960s. I suppose one must give Hoppe credit here both for consistency and for political incorrectness. Hoppe does not presuppose the moral relevance of countries and assume a right to free migration within but not across national boundaries. He explicitly envisions a society of ethno-culturally homogeneous neighborhoods, based on a generalized preference that he seems to regard as an indelible human propensity to stick with one’s own kind. Though Hoppe is much too complacent about this, Robert Putnam’s work probably demands that this view be taken more seriously than political correctness might admit. Hoppe goes on to introduce the state, and argue that the lack of freedom of migration that, he supposes, would prevail in a “natural order” should cross-apply to a society ruled by a state. Even then, the right to invite persists:

If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited).

It’s not clear to me that VDARE restrictionists are right to claim Hoppe as an ally within the libertarian camp. After all, an unlimited right to invite might not look much different from open borders– many US natives would quickly learn to sell their rights to sponsor immigrants to the highest bidder– and limiting the right to invite violates Hoppe’s principles. But I’m not not too interested in how to apply Hoppe’s argument at this stage, because my dissenting argument branches off at the stage in the argument where Hoppe defines the “natural order.” Continue reading Nathan Smith vs. Hans-Hermann Hoppe →