Yearly Archives: 2013

Welcome Atlantic readers! (And, how you can help)

4 Comments

This morning, Shaun Raviv published an article about open borders in The Atlantic, one of the finest magazines in the world, entitled “If People Could Immigrate Anywhere, Would Poverty Be Eliminated?” Atlantic readers: welcome. If you want to give us money to support the cause, sorry, you can’t. As far as I know, we don’t have an infrastructure for that. What you can do is comment on our posts. We love to get thoughtful, high-quality comments, so as to see what kind of impression our arguments make on outsiders. We adapt what we write about considerably in response to thoughtful criticism. In particular, see here, here, and here. We’re good listeners here. We’re Socratic and inquisitive.

Here’s Shaun’s description of Open Borders: The Case.

Vipul Naik is the face, or at least the voice, of open borders on the Internet. In March 2012, he launched  Open Borders: The Case, a website dedicated to the idea. Naik, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, is striving for “a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances.” Naik and his two primary co-writers, Nathan Smith and John Lee, parse research into    immigration impacts, answering claims by those they call “restrictionists”–people who argue against open borders–and deconstructing writings on migration    by economists, politicians, journalists, and philosophers.

My favorite part:

In 2008, Clemens and his frequent co-writer, Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, came up with a new statistic called “income per natural.” Their goal was to show “the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides.” They found that large percentages of people from Haiti, Mexico, and India who live above international poverty lines don’t actually reside in their home countries. “For example, among Haitians who live either in the United States or Haiti and live on more than $10 per day–about a third of the U.S. ‘poverty’ line–four out of five live in the United States,” Clemens wrote. “Emigration from Haiti, as a force for Haitians’ poverty reduction, may be at least as important as any economic change that has occurred within Haiti.”

Getting this kind of coverage makes me think again about a question that’s sometimes come to us: What can I do to help? For example, Bryan Caplan blegged: “Suppose you wanted to spend your charitable dollars to increase the total number of people who migrate from the Third World to the First World.  What approach would give you the biggest bang for your buck?  Are any specific countries, organizations, or loopholes especially promising?”

A rather staid, cautious answer is that you might be able to join the list of sponsors of the IMPALA data project. They didn’t ask me to solicit money for them and I don’t even know whether they’d accept it, but I assume a large project like theirs would have things to do with financial support, and we could definitely use better data on migration policies around the world. If you want to learn about trade policy, you can go the WITS database hosted by the World Bank, and get very detailed information about volumes of trade around the world, broken down into very specific categories, as well as about tariff rates and other restrictions. There is nothing close to that for immigration law, but the IMPALA data, when available, should help. See this talk for more about IMPALA’s data project.

IMPALA is not agitating for open borders, of course. But as I argued a while back, good indices measuring the openness of all the world’s borders could be quite useful for advocacy: Continue reading Welcome Atlantic readers! (And, how you can help) →

Saudi Arabia: a land of closed borders, keyhole solutions, or both?

2 Comments

I don’t often think of Saudi Arabia as a country I’d particularly like to migrate to, which is why I’ve always found it surprising how popular Saudi Arabia is in polling data on migration. For instance, a recent Gallup poll put Saudi Arabia as the 5th-most desired destination migration country in the world, projecting that 29 million people would permanently settle in Saudi Arabia if they could.

My initial reaction was to surmise that perhaps Saudi Arabia’s status as a cultural or religious beacon in the Muslim and/or Arab worlds accounts for this. It’s also worth noting that millions of Muslims from around the world descend on Saudi Arabia for the Muslim haj or umrah every year. It’s not difficult to imagine that some of them might want to retire and die in the land of their prophet, or just fall in love with the country from their visit there.

However, some recent news from the BBC has made me rethink this hypothesis a little: apparently Saudi Arabia is copying the US and Israel in constructing a 1,800km long border wall that will seal it off from Yemen. Unlike the US, Saudi Arabia actually has legitimate reasons to fear that terrorists will cross the border here: a destabilising situation in Yemen has reportedly allowed al-Qaeda to thrive there. But according to the BBC, security is not the whole story:

Border security has dramatically worsened in the aftermath of the revolution, as thousands of illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and gun runners try to slip from impoverished Yemen into Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s richest countries, Lt al-Ahmari told the BBC’s Frank Gardner.

Five Saudi border guards had recently been killed along the border in shoot-outs with well-armed smugglers, he added.

The first part of the fence has already been built on the coast, slowing down – but not stopping – the tide of illegal immigrants.

It seems a bit disturbing to me to characterise economic migrants or refugees fleeing war and terrorism in the same boat with “drug smugglers and gun runners”. If all they have in common is that they’ve crossed an arbitrary line in the map, what purpose does this serve? Are we now to classify high school students and cyberterrorists in the same bucket because they both violate intellectual property laws with their online activity?

The “one of the world’s richest countries” certainly gives one pause at the suggestion that security against terrorism is all there is to this. There are plenty of rich oil-producing countries in the Middle East — so it does puzzle me that, say, the United Arab Emirates don’t pop up as much in Gallup’s polling. But perhaps the reason Saudi Arabia is popular with prospective unauthorised immigrants is because of its long land borders which can be easily crossed. Saudi Arabia also has an extensive guest worker programme which I suppose further spreads word of the economic opportunities there.

I am curious to find out more about immigration to Saudi Arabia. There are plenty of questions which come to mind:

  1. What accounts for its unusual popularity on the list of prospective immigrant destinations? All the other countries which top the list are developed Western democracies.

  2. What kinds of immigration programmes does Saudi Arabia have? They recently gave unauthorised immigrants a 3-month amnesty to either leave or regularise their status, but otherwise it is unclear to me how their programmes operate, though I do know that they have millions of guest workers.
  3. What is the status of unauthorised immigration in Saudi Arabia? If it is true that 10% of the 2 million annual pilgrims overstay their visas each year, there could be millions working and residing without permission in Saudi Arabia (indeed, it looks like some have settled there permanently).
  4. How does Saudi Arabia handle permanent residency versus nationality? Has it successfully decoupled the two concepts? Some anecdotal evidence suggests that perhaps it has. Some might term this a keyhole solution. Although I am not happy about the idea of someone spending their entire life in a country and yet being unable to claim citizenship there, if Saudi Arabia does easily grant residency while more tightly controlling citizenship, this is actually much more civilised and moral than the alternative in much of the “civilised world,” which is to deny most human beings both residency and citizenship.

I am not sure whether the Yemeni border wall is justified. But whether it is or not, it is sad to think that those fleeing war, oppression, or economic collapse will be the ones who suffer the most. Drug smugglers and gun runners have the resources to find another way in or out. Regular people don’t have those resources. In principle, under international law, the borders are open for refugees. But in practice, it’s a different story. It is sad to think that there are millions of innocent people, who through no fault of their own, will remain trapped in a country wracked with conflict, having nowhere to go.

Open borders: the solution to conflict in the Middle East

2 Comments

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a respected US academic and former bureaucrat in the field of international studies, recently authored an interesting piece highlighting an unconventional 2-state solution for Israel and Palestine:

“Two-state condominialism” is as visionary as the name is clunky. The core idea is that Israelis and Palestinians would be citizens of two separate states and thus would identify with two separate political authorities. Palestine would be defined as a state of the Palestinian people, and Israel as a Jewish state. Under “condominialism,” however, both Palestinians and Jews “would be granted the right to settle anywhere within the territory of either of the two states, the two states thus forming a single, binational settlement community.”

…Palestinians “would have the right to settle anywhere within Israel just as Jews would have the right to settle anywhere within the territory of the Palestinian state. Regardless of which of the two states they lived in, all Palestinians would be citizens of the Palestinian state, all Jews citizens of Israel.” Each state would have the authority and the obligation to provide for the economic, cultural, religious, and welfare needs of its citizens living in the other state’s territory.

…

Condominialism recognizes the reality of the deep interconnectedness of Israeli settlers in the West Bank with the rest of Israel – through roads, water supplies, electricity grids, administrative structures, and economic relationships (just as Israeli and Palestinian parts of Jerusalem are interdependent). Instead of trying to separate and recreate all of these structures and relationships, it makes far more sense to build on them in ways that benefit both states’ peoples and economies. And, in a world in which many citizens spend an increasing proportion of their time in virtual space, de facto condominialism is already happening.

As ideas go, I’ve seen worse. I like this a lot. In fact, I like this enough to the point that I would like to know: what’s keeping the rest of the world from trying this out? In many parts of the world, the forms of “deep interconnectedness” Slaughter describes already exist in total defiance of arbitrary, human-defined borders. In fact, I am a bit surprised she almost seems to gloss over the human relationships and communities that constitute the most important interconnectedness here.

To take an example I’m familiar with, it matters little to a Malaysian living in East Malaysia on the island of Borneo where the technical border is. Not when he and his family have been living and moving across the land long before any international border sprung up separating Malaysia and Indonesia. Across the South China Sea in West Malaysia, Malaysians who live in the north are permitted to cross our border with Thailand without passports or visas, a governmental nod to our deep interconnectedness. Stories like these can be found across the world, including in the southern US, where people still recall how, before paranoia post-9/11 set in, communities divided by a border paid it no heed, their lives bonded together by social and economic ties that matter far more than arbitrary lines drawn on a map.

And to her credit, Slaughter closes by obliquely pointing to the relevance of open borders outside the Middle East:

In the 1950’s, after four decades of war across Europe, the idea of a European Union in which member states’ citizens could live and work freely across national borders while retaining their political allegiance and cultural identity seemed equally far-fetched. (Indeed, the name of the political process by which the EU was to be constructed, “neo-functionalism,” was every bit as abstract and cumbersome as “two-state condominialism.”) Yet French and German statesmen summoned the vision and the will to launch a bold experiment, one that has evolved into a single economy of 500 million people.

The EU has proven that on a fairly large scale, open borders work. (I am not too sure about the feasibility of a single currency, though.) To the extent that open borders in the EU have been detrimental, they have been addressable by keyhole solutions (such as transparent, clearly-defined temporary restrictions on immigrant flows to allow societal adjustment). And to the extent that they have been harmful in spite of keyhole solutions, it is absolutely clear that most, if not all, predictions of catastrophe have not come to pass.

Borders may be arbitrary, but we don’t need to abolish them to have open borders. Indeed, Slaughter says: “To make this work, the borders of each state would first have to be defined – presumably on the basis of the 1967 borders, with mutually agreed territorial swaps.” Borders define the area of a state’s sovereign jurisdiction. But they don’t define the human relationships that form the warp and weave of everyday life. Fundamental morality and economics agree: we need open borders.

Singapore: 29% of the labor force is foreign

1 Comment

From Singapore’s Success: Engineering Economic Growth, by Henry Ghesquiere:

Like other countries, Singapore controls the income of foreign labor. Here, too, economic growth has benefited from openness. Augmenting the domestic labor supply is an integral part of the country’s overall development strategy.

Foreign manpower made a key contribution to Singapore’s economic growth. By 1970, full employment had been achieved and Singapore began to attract temporary foreign workers, then accounting for 3.2 percent of the labor force. Their number grew rapidly, reaching 7.4 percent of the workforce by 1980. By 2000, foreign workers made up an estimated 29 percent of Singapore’s labor force– 5 percent higher-skilled or professionals on an “employment pass” and 24 percent lower-skilled holders of a “work permit.” Expatriates filled half of the 600,000 new jobs that were created during the 1990s, with the other half filled by the domestic labor force. The upward trend has continued since.

Foreign workers now play a key role in Singapore’s economy. Low-income earners, mainly from the Philippines and Indonesia assist in households and with elderly care, while road and construction workers hail from all over South and East Asia. Professionals and highly skilled workers are being courted through an aggressive open-door policy to attract global talent. Foreigners on temporary work permits and employment passes are expected to leave at the expiry of their term, unless renewed. There are procedures to keep the lower skilled as a revolving pool on fixed employment terms to prevent them from establishing roots. Jail penalties await landlords and employers who house or employ illegal immigrants. Foreign labor and the Singaporean economy have become intertwined in mutual dependence.

In this area as well, Singapore relies on the price mechanism as a policy instrument to manage the total inflow and skill level of expatriate labor. Under the foreign work permit system, employers pay a levy to the government budget that differs according to the skill level of workers and sector of activity. Permits are renewable every two years. Levies are raised if demand from employers is strong. Levies are lower or nil for better-skilled workers. This differentiation has encouraged construction firms to invest in training their workers and to introduce labor-saving techniques. One consequence of improved skill levels is increased competition: during the downturn in 1998, some local employees were retrenched while stronger performing foreigners kept their jobs, unlike in 1985. Also, the inflow of one important category of less-skilled workers may have indirectly contributed to higher productivity. The increase in female labor force participation from 29 percent in 1970 to 53 percent in 1999 has provided more than 228,000 additional workers over the past three decades. This includes 130,000 maids, allowing many families to have a second income-earner. The government explains the beneficial impact of the foreign presence, even though such a policy has led to some concerns among Singaporeans about future job prospects and more intense competition for housing.

Of course, I don’t approve of all of this. In particular, to jail landlords and employers who house or employ illegal immigrants is a  violation of human rights. That said, it may be more tenable for a city to adopt such measures– jail is indefensible, but fines might be tolerable– than for a country to do so, since congestion and local externalities perhaps give people a more legitimate stake in their immediate physical neighbors than any citizen of a large territorial state has in anyone’s residence, or not, somewhere in the territory, including perhaps in wild and uninhabited parts of it.

Most impressive is the statistic: 29% of the labor force is foreign (as of, I think, 2007). This share is a little less than twice as high as the 16.6% in the US. To get to the Singaporean level, the US would need to let in about 30 million more immigrants. Singapore is wealth worth emulating, considering that Singapore is about 20% richer than the United States (per capita). Moreover, Singapore seems to be maintaining rapid rates of GDP growth even since they’ve overtaken the United States and supposedly should be bumping up against the “economic frontier.”

UPDATE: By the way, the idea that foreign nannies and maids could free high-skilled women from housework and childcare and facilitate their entry into the labor force is particularly interesting. The feminist case for open borders?

Nonexcludable but rival goods

3 Comments

There seems to be a widespread sense that while immigration can benefit immigrants, it hurts natives because immigrants grab a share of the pie. This argument is invalid as regards private goods and public goods, but it may be valid for nonexcludable but rival goods.

Economists distinguish private goods from public goods by two criteria: (a) rivalry, and (b) excludability. Private goods are rival and excludable. Public goods are nonrival and nonexcludable. At least, that’s what economists do when they’re being rigorous. There’s a frustrating tendency to stretch the concept of a public good from the narrow niche in which it is most proper and to which the theory of public goods– for example, the idea that you sum demand curves for private goods horizontally and demand curves for public goods vertically— properly applies, and use the word in a loose populist fashion to include lots of stuff that governments in fact provide even though it’s rival and/or excludable. Most obviously, here: public education. If economists had more logical rigor and theoretical integrity, they would proclaim with one voice that public education is not a public good, because classroom seats are rival– only one student can sit in a seat at a time; teachers can only grade one homework assignment at a time– and excludable– it’s perfectly feasible, though not permitted by current law but that’s irrelevant in principle, not to let a student into the classroom. But since that’s too politically incorrect, they usually say, with a shade of embarrassment, that, well, yes, education must be a public good, although it’s not an “impure” public good, since… well, since it doesn’t really meet the criteria for being a public good, at all. (At most, it has positive externalities.) I won’t say that education isn’t a public good, since everyone muddle-headedly insists that it is and I don’t feel I have a right to redefine the phrase public goods to be consistent with the theory. But I would advocate limiting the use of the term to exclude education.

While private and public goods get the most attention, the two criteria clearly imply, not merely a dichotomy, but a four-way typology, as shown in the table below:

Excludable Nonexcludable
Rival Private goods, e.g., food, shelter especially if privacy is a human need, a car if sharing isn’t feasible Parking spaces are one example. These goods might make the basis for legitimate nativist complaints
Nonrival Patented inventions and copyrighted books are the most well-known examples National defense is the classic example; public statues; music in the park; clean air

There would be many grey areas here even if what ought to be the clear case of education were definitely reclassified as a private good. We don’t exclude people from the park; but could we? Could we do it at reasonable cost? The park is usually non-rival, but perhaps on a brilliant bright Saturday when winter suddenly melts into spring, it is so crowded with picnickers that one can’t find a place on the grass, and the park becomes rival. Emergency room care is technically excludable: one could leave people who don’t have insurance or cash bleeding outside the doors. But it’s not legally excludable, since 1986, and perhaps it’s not morally excludable somehow, if we think a doctor has a moral obligation to help someone in desperate need in his field of vision even if they can’t pay. (I’m much less sure that that’s true, than that it’s wrong to exclude peaceful people from US territory by force.)

Now, the comparative advantage argument suffices to show that natives will collectively benefit from immigration to the extent that only private goods are at stake, and in a sort of rough, approximate fashion, migration taxes and transfers to natives should be able to make open borders Pareto-improving with respect to private goods. Basically, just by coming into the country, immigrants don’t acquire access to any of the private goods natives previously possessed. Natives’ exclusive claims to their private goods aren’t affected.

As for public goods, while immigrants can’t be prevented from enjoying them, this is not a downside to immigration, because public goods are, by definition, nonrival. The fact that immigrants are enjoying them doesn’t reduce natives’ ability to enjoy them, at all. Even if immigrants make zero contribution to the public goods of their host country, natives have no grounds for objecting to their presence, because the natives still enjoy just as much of the public good as they did before. More likely, immigrants will make at least a small, possibly a large, contribution to the host country’s public goods. In that case, natives are strictly better off.

Nonrival but excludable (or partially excludable) goods are important because they include designs, ideas, blueprints, technologies, whatever you want to call them. Migrants won’t reduce the supply of those. Well, unless open borders has a negative effect on the progress of the global economic frontier, but that’s a topic for another post.

The category of goods for which the nativists’ “smaller-share-of-the-pie-for-us” notion might be valid is for goods that are nonexcludable yet rival. Parking spaces may serve as an example, for although exclusion is sometimes possible– parking meters, gates and tickets in parking garages– it’s costly to regulate street parking, so to hold down transactions costs it might sometimes be best to treat parking as nonexcludable. If parking is nonexcludable, newcomers to a city may lower the quality of life for existing residents, by crowding the streets with cars and making it hard to find a parking space.

How many nonexcludable but rival goods are there? We treat public education as one, though in principle it need not be. Likewise emergency room care. The streets themselves are treated as nonexcludable (and probably exclusion would be infeasible and/or would violate rights in many cases) and might be rival in some respects, e.g., if you’re using the street for a rally of shouting protesters, I can’t very well use it to play serene classical music. Do storefronts have a nonexcludable but rival character for window shoppers on a crowded day? Does the random interaction of people with strangers on the street somehow have the character of a nonexcludable, rival good?