Yearly Archives: 2013

Update on Zuckerberg’s group: fwd.us

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On Monday, I blogged about Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration reform group, which had not been launched. The group was launched yesterday (Thursday, April 11, 2013), and most of the details were as expected in my previous blog post. The group is called FWD.us and has an eponymous website. The roster of supporters on the website reads like a who’s who of the tech industry Here are links to some news and commentary items related to the group that were published at and after launch:

Here’s a quote from Zuckerberg’s op-ed that reveals his vision for the immigration-related agenda of the group, and just how far it is from an open borders vision:

Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.

Some of the reactions from different people whom I’ve discussed this with include (note that some of the reactions are mutually contradictory, indicating the diversity of people I’ve discussed this with):

  • Zuckerberg’s op-ed is boilerplate text, i.e., it reveals nothing specific, and could be widely re-used for any future direction of the group.
  • Zuckerberg’s use of an overtly citizenist framing for the group’s ambitions is interesting, though not necessarily uplifting. The competitive angle to Zuckerberg’s citizenism is even more unfortunate, though he does pay lip service to migration not necessarily being a zero sum game.
  • Zuckerberg’s selectivity — attract the most talented and hardest-working people — suggests either a degree of selectivity even higher than that found in the modern immigration regime in the United States, or a serious degree of delusion regarding just how many potential migrants could be the “most talented” and/or the “hardest-working people.”
  • Zuckerberg’s putting securing the borders at the top of his agenda is puzzling.
  • Zuckerberg’s focus on a path to citizenship suggests a territorialist focus, which does not seem to resonate well with the open borders message. It’s not in conflict with complete open borders, but could conflict with some keyhole solutions such as guest worker programs.

Hopefully, we’ll publish more on this group and on other related initiatives as we get more information.

UPDATE: Here is a more detailed post from Nathan with his criticisms of Zuckerberg.

Venice, city of refuge

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From Peter Ackroyd’s lyrically beautiful history of Venice, entitled Venice, Pure City:

Venice has been construed as a great ship upon the sea… The ship was once, for the early settlers, a place of refuge. The ship of Venice was, from the beginning, a haven for exiles and wanderers. It was an open city, readily assimilating all those who came within its borders. One 15th-century traveler noted that “most of the people are foreigners,” and in the following century, a Venetian recorded that “apart from the patricians and the citizens, all the rest are foreigners and very few are Venetians.” He was referring principally to the shopkeepers and artisans. In 1611, an English diplomat, Sir Dudley Carlton, described Venice as a “microcosmos,” rather than city. It was created in the fashion of orbis [the world], rather than of urbis [city]. And so it has remained for the rest of its history. There were French and Slav, Greek and Fleming, Jew and German, Oriental and Spaniard, as well as assorted citizens from the mainland of Italy. Certain streets were named after them. All the countries of Europe and of the Levant were represented. It was something that all travelers noted as if quite suddenly they had come upon the tower of Babel in St. Mark’s Square.

No other port in the world held so many strange peoples. In many 19th-century paintings, the gabardine of the Jewish merchants, the scarlet caps of the Greeks, and the turbans and robes of the Turks, are seen jostling among the more severe costumes and tophats of the Venetian gentlemen. It might be said that the Venetians fashioned their own identity in perpetual contrast to those whom they protected. The Germans were granted their own miniature Germany in a complex known as the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, at Rialto, which contained two halls for dining and 80 separate rooms. The merchants were supervised and monitored by the government, but it was said that “they love the city of Venice more than their native land.” In the sixteenth century the Flemish settled in large numbers. The Greeks had their own quarter, with their own church dedicated to the Orthodox faith. After the fall of Constantinople in 1204, and the abandonment of that city to the Turks in 1453, there was a further flow of Byzantine Greeks– among them soldiers, mariners, artists and intellectuals looking for patrons. The Armenians and the Albanians had their own districts. Eventually an Armenian monastery was established on the island of S. Lazzaro, where Byron travelled to learn the Armenian language as a way of exercising his mind among the more sensual pleasures of Venice. There was a colony of Turkish merchants, established as the Fondaco dei Turchi, where a school for the teaching of Arabic was maintained. So Venice was the setting for a thriving cosmopolitan life. It was not altruism or generosity that occasioned this inviting embrace. Venice could not have survived without its immigrants. Some of them were raised to the rank of citizens; some of them intermarried with the indigenous people.

They were not all, of course, well protected. Many thousands of poor immigrants were cramped into cheap housing, sharing the corners of rooms with others of the same race or nationality. Many of them came as refugees from Balkan wars, or from impossible poverty; some of them were escaping the plague. They congregated in the poorer parishes and by the sixteenth century, as a result of the influx, Venice had become the most densely populated city in Italy. The immigrants also provided cheap labor for the city, and were even employed in the galleys of the Venetian warships. They did the work that the Venetians themselves preferred to avoid.

In the fourteenth century the Italian poet, Petrarch, celebrated Venice as the “sole shelter in our days of liberty, justice, and peace, the sole refuge of the good.” As a port, the city attracted such epithets as “shelter” and “refuge.” They were natural images. Pietro Aretino, himself an exile from Rome who had found safe haven in Venice, put it another way. In an address to the doge in 1527 he declared that “Venice embraces those whom all others shun. She raises those whom others lower. She affords a welcome to those who are persecuted elsewhere.” There were, after all, refugees who travelled to Venice for reasons other than commercial. There was a toleration in this open city that was unknown in other regions. That is why it became, from the eighteenth century forward, a resting place for what Henry James called “the deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored.” The deposed were a particular speciality of Venice. Many of the dethroned princes of Europe made their way here. At one time in 1737 there were five dispossessed monarchs living in the city, one of them being the young Charles Edward Stuart.

It was also a haven for those broken of spirit, for wanderers, and for exiles. Venice became the home of the dispossessed and the deracinated. Its watery and melancholy nature suited those who were acquainted with sorrow. It became a haven for those who were uncertain of their origin or of their true identity and for those, perhaps, who might have wished to escape from them. It was like a mother, endlessly accessible and accommodating. It was a womb of safety. The people were known for their placability and civility. Venice was a city of transit, where you might easily be lost among the press, a city on the frontier between different worlds, where those who did not “fit in” to their native habitat were graciously accepted… There came here, too, swindlers and fraudsters of every description; there were failed financiers and statesmen, shamed women and soldiers of fortune, alchemists and quacks. The rootless were attracted to the city without roots.

Venice was also a frontier between different faiths, Catholic and Orthodoxy, Islam and Christianity. So it attracted religious reformers of every description. A secret synod of Anabaptists was established here in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the German community harboured many Lutherans among its number. Venice always kept its distance from Rome, and protected the independence of its Church from the depredations of the pope; so it became, in theory, an arena for religious renovation. There was even a time when the English government believed the republic to be ready to join forces with the Reformation. In that, of course, it proved to be wholly mistaken.

If you had failed, then Venice was a good place for you to forget your failure. Here you were in a literal sense insulated from the outer world, so that its scorn or simple inattention could no longer wound you. Venice represented an escape from modernity in all its forms. And, like any port, it offered anonymity. If you were an exile in Venice you could lose your identity; or, rather, you could acquire another identity entirely in relation to the floating city. You, too, could become fluid and elusive. Tell me who I am. But not who I was.

We need cities like Venice today.

A DREAM Act for Singapore? Or, the arbitrariness of nationality-based residence laws

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There is a 19-year-old Filipino citizen who has literally lived her entire life in Singapore who, as of this writing, risks being kicked out of the only country she has ever called home:

Nadirah was born out of wedlock in Singapore and given a Filipino citizenship, as her mother was a Filipino. Along with her five siblings, two other siblings are also non-citizens while the other three siblings were given citizenship as her parents got officially married in Philippine before they were born.

…

As Nadirah graduates from ITE, she will soon be asked to return to Philippine once her student visa expires in a month’s time. To be relying on relatives whom she never spoken to for years and a country where she has no memory of, the situation looks utmost depressing for this young lady with a uncertain future.

Nadirah’s situation reminds me all too much of the “DREAMers” of the US –young people who are present in the US without lawful immigration status who have spent most, if not all, of their lives as law-abiding members of US society. The immigration laws of Singapore ought to give people like her relief: there’s an argument to be made that even if she doesn’t deserve citizenship, she certainly ought to be able to reside in the only country she’s ever called home.

But we ought to look beyond the specific issue of young people whose paper nationality does not match the nationality written on their hearts. There are plenty of older people who, whether or not they feel a sense of national belonging to another country, are productive and harmonious members of that country’s society.

My mother may provide a useful illustration: she is a Filipino citizen who resided in Malaysia with our family for several years on a renewable 1-year “social visit pass”: the Malaysian immigration authorities maintained this legal fiction that she was making a “social visit” to my father for an extended period of time. While this is certainly more favourable than how other immigration legal regimes treat families, it also meant my mother had no legal standing to work in the country (despite possessing a post-graduate degree in a STEM field) and risked deportation or being barred entry for fairly arbitrary reasons.

A real risk my family faced was that if my father died, there would be no legal fiction for her to remain on a “social visit” and force her to return to the Philippines (where she has not lived for decades). Moreover, the restrictions of the pass forced my parents to spend multiple working days every year processing the necessary red tape to renew my mother’s visa (a luxury which many less-educated, working-class families probably can’t afford), and deterred my mother from leaving the country (on one occasion, a bureaucratic error in her visa meant that she risked being unable to re-enter the country if she left, even for a brief visit — so she simply did not visit any friends or family in neighbouring Southeast Asian countries until the next year, when her visa was renewed and the error corrected).

In principle, my family could have obtained permanent residency for my mother. In practice, the immigration bureaucracy seemed content not to bother itself with her application. It’s going on 15 years since her application was first filed, and every single time we’ve checked on its status, we’ve been told: “Wait for a letter from us.” The last time my father visited a Malaysian immigration office to discuss this, he saw a white woman berating a civil servant. She had apparently married a Malaysian who had since died, which is probably why she was there at the office that day. She was shouting at the government clerk in fluent, well-accented Malay: “I have been living in this country for longer than you have been alive!”

(Of course, there’s always a story that can top any story you think of. If we are speaking of immigrants’ pulling rank based on seniority, I can only imagine what a Mr. Padilla, who had lived in the US for over 4 decades and fought for it in the Vietnam War, had to say when he received his deportation order.)

The way we think about immigration law assumes citizens must, more or less, live in the country of their nationality. If they live or develop ties elsewhere, they need to prioritise their loyalties and naturalise as necessary. The permanent residency systems of most countries assume that those holding permanent residency will eventually naturalise: I have heard of one Malaysian holding permanent residency in the UK who calls both the UK and Malaysia home being frustrated at the UK border when its immigration officers demand to know why she wants to come in (“because it’s my home!”).

Yet there is no reason to bind citizenship and residency together: even in the status quo we can simply define citizenship as membership in a polity, and residency as the right to reside there and submit to that polity’s laws. Perhaps Nadirah wouldn’t be satisfied without citizenship — she might have grounds for this, since it sounds like she has always thought of herself as a Singaporean. But she and her Singaporean friends and family would still find this arrangement a whole lot more palatable than the alternative, which is to expel her as a non-resident to a country that is just as foreign to her as it is to Lee Kuan Yew.

The very fact that some of Nadirah’s siblings are Singaporean citizens and some are not speaks volumes about the arbitrariness and ridiculousness of how immigration law treats human beings: the entire lives of people, and the communities they are embedded in, hinge on some pieces of paper. Whether it’s a birth certificate (God bless those lucky people whose foreign parents were rich enough to give birth to them in the US and entitle them to American citizenship) or a marriage certificate (which gave some of Nadirah’s siblings the legal imprimatur that she lacks), it serves as an entirely arbitrary division between people who, for all other intents and purposes, are identical.

If immigration policy prevents people who call a place their home — a home that their community recognises as theirs — from actually living in that home, then as a moral matter, immigration policy is wrong. Plain and simple. We recognise the moral truth of platitudes like “Home is where the heart is.” We may sing paeans to the importance of community and how that defines the space we call home. But when home is on the line for members of our communities who, by an accident of birth, don’t have the legal right to live in their own home, do we have the moral courage to change the laws which make a mockery of the concepts of home, family, and community?

Open borders and the justifications for the welfare state

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Three major justifications for the welfare state, distinct but related, are (1) social welfare functions may be increased by redistribution (see my previous post on “the conservative social welfare function,”) (2) the welfare state serves as a form of social insurance against the ill chances of life, and most impertinently ambitiously (3) welfare and aid to the poor generally may be a public good via its effect on the utility functions of people who are at least mildly altruistic. Jonathan Gruber’s Public Finance and Public Policy, 3rd ed. offers the following defense of argument (3), stopping at argument (1) along the way:

Why is the government involved in the business of redistributing income?… If society cares equally about the utility of all its members, then social welfare may be maximized by redistributing from high-income individuals (for whom the marginal utility cost of losing a dollar is low) to low-income individuals (for whom the marginal utility gain of getting a dollar is high). Arguments for redistribution are even stronger if society cares in particular about low-income persons, a philosophy embodied in the Rawlsian social welfare function…

The private sector, however, is unlikely to provide such income redistribution, since redistribution faces the same free-rider problems encountered in private provision of other public goods. The consumption of the poor is a public good: I would like the poor to consume more, but I would prefer if others provide them the means of doing so, since I would then get the benefits of seeing the poor consume more but not bear the costs of their increased consumption. If everyone feels this way, then there will be too little private redistribution because everyone will be relying on others to contribute… There may be a role for a government in solving this free-rider problem by taxing its citizens to provide public redistribution. (Gruber, pp. 490-491)

Let me unpack this.

Recall that a public good is defined by two characteristics: (a) non-rivalry, and (b) non-excludability. Non-rivalry means that one person’s use of a good does not preclude another person’s use of it. Non-excludability means that it is not feasible— as distinct from merely not legal as a matter of policy– to exclude anyone from using the good. In this sense (to illustrate the concept) public schools are not a public good, though the general public refuses to hear this message and public finance economists often try to weasel out of it because of its unpopularity. Nonetheless, the fact is logically inescapable, for it is quite feasible– though perhaps illegal, but that’s beside the point– to exclude a child from a public school classroom. Also, classroom seats may be scarce/rivalrous at the margin, and a teacher’s grading time is certainly a rivalrous service: I can grade student A’s exam or student B’s exam, not both.

A welfare payment is certainly not a public good. It is rivalrous: if you receive cash from the government, I can’t receive that same cash. It is excludable: it is clearly feasible not to send the welfare payment. How, then, can Gruber claim that redistribution might be a “public good?” In a rather subjective sense. If a poor person eats a meal, no one else can eat that meal, or get any immediate benefit from it. But if a certain kind of altruism is built into others’ utility functions, these altruists all get some satisfaction from the poor person eating the meal. Given that the poor person eats, these altruists can’t be prevented from thus enjoying, second-hand, his meal. Therefore, this benefit is non-excludable. Nor does one altruist’s enjoyment of the poor person’s meal prevent another person from enjoying it. Therefore, this benefit is non-rival. Being non-excludable and non-rival, the external benefits of helping the poor

I have many objections to this interesting argument. First, it seems improper, somehow, for public policy to take into account such subjective factors. If one does allow it, the practice soon leads to unwanted conclusions. Suppose that, instead of altruism towards the poor, the general population felt hostility towards some group, but didn’t bother to harm that group much because of a free-rider problem. (“I wish somebody would go beat up those nasty wogs, but I can’t be bothered to do it myself.”) If we accept Gruber’s “public good” argument for the welfare state, we should also have to argue, it seems to me, that the brutal mistreatment of unpopular minorities is a public good. Second, the attitudes imputed to the public are not observable. If they were observable, the welfare state could be financed by a Lindahl tax enjoying universal consent. Of course, this argument applies to some extent to all public goods– how much people like a public good can’t be measured effectively in the absence of revealed preference and the price mechanism– but at least in the case of other public goods, the physical use of the good– walks in the park, driving on the roads, listening to public radio, whatever– is observable. Third, the argument is, in its strange way, simultaneously flatters and insults taxpaying citizens, with a certain insolence in both respects. It tells the citizen: (a) we know that, whatever you may say to avoid paying taxes, you really do care about the poor, but (b) we know that, left to your own devices, you won’t give as much as you wish that people like you would give. If some citizen sincerely says, “No, I really don’t care about the poor at all,” the public goods case for the welfare state fails. On the other hand, if most people, when it comes to charitable matters, follow Kant’s advice and act by maxims they desire to be universally practiced, the public goods case for the welfare state fails again.

But my biggest objection to the “public goods” argument for the welfare state is that it assumes what might be called a citizenist, or perhaps a territorialist, social welfare function. That is, it imputes to citizens a certain degree of altruism towards their fellow citizens, but not an equal degree of altruism towards the rest of mankind. If citizens would like the poor in general to consume more, regardless of nationality, then their first priority would probably be open borders, though possibly, if they have a very different understanding of how economy and society work than I do, they might support more foreign aid instead. At any rate, helping poor people resident in the US would not be a very high priority. Even if citizens are assumed to have a citizenist social welfare function, that should really point them towards the citizenist case for open borders and keyhole solutions (like DRITI) that hold natives harmless. To offer the public goods case for the welfare state, and at the same time to support migration restrictions, seems to make sense only from a decidedly territorialist perspective, i.e., if citizens feel altruism towards those present in a country, or at least they’re squeamish about observing dire poverty, but place little or no value on the welfare of those not on the country’s territory. They don’t want to be made to feel pity towards the less fortunate: hence they support the welfare state, and at the same time, the border as blindfold.

It’s irritating to have such attitudes imputed to me as a citizen-taxpayer. Even more irritating is the suggestion that such attitudes are implicitly granted the moral high ground. Gruber may well be right that attitudes such as he describes are an important reason why the welfare state exists. But since some of us don’t share the territorialist social welfare function, the welfare state cannot properly be regarded as a public good. And from a universalist utilitarian or Rawlsian perspective, the territorialist attitudes on the part of citizens that undergird support for the welfare state may be among the chief barriers to rational pursuit of the welfare of mankind.

A Voice for Immigrants – Could it be Dan Mitchell?

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I’m a big fan of Dan Mitchell. We agree on 95% of political issues (and since I’ve never met anyone who agrees with me 100%, that’s a high mark), he’s got a great sense of humor (both in the sense that he’s funny, and in the sense that he appreciates humor and can laugh at himself), and he’s clearly a man who isn’t afraid to be open about his beliefs, even unpopular ones. But while these are all great qualities in a person, none of them are the thing I like best about him.

The thing I like best about Dan Mitchell is that he’s tireless.

You see, Mitchell has a solid, consistent belief structure, and he’s been advocating for policy based on that structure for a long time. And while every once in a while he gets a win, it can often seem like people fighting for human rights and liberty are taking ten steps back for every one step forward. That kind of record would demoralize most people, but Dan Mitchell has been fighting that fight for years and years, and hasn’t given up yet. That’s why I admire him.

It’s also why I’m writing this. Dan Mitchell’s most recent “Question of the Week” was on the subject of immigration. Immigration reform might be the single policy issue about which I’m the most passionate, and if I could convince a tireless crusader like Dan Mitchell to add the plight of the would-be American Immigrant to his mental checklist of injustices to fight, I think I could go to sleep knowing I’d done many people around the world a huge service. So with that said, while I’d like many people to read this, it’s primarily addressed to Dan Mitchell. I’m going to lay out three reasons why I think he should support a policy of radically increased immigration allowance, or even open borders. In an ideal world I’d convince him – but at worst, hopefully I’ll give him a little extra evidence in favor of that position.

Reason #1: If Immigration Is Mostly Good With Some Bad, It’s Actually Easy To Eliminate Just The Bad

Dan Mitchell is a reasonable person. In his Question of the Week post, he says:

By the way, a senior staffer on Capitol Hill floated to me the idea of a new status that enables illegals to stay in the country, but bars them from citizenship unless they get in line and follow the rules. I’m definitely not familiar with the fault lines on these issues, but perhaps that could be a good compromise.

This is only a very small, single example of a “keyhole solution” – a solution specifically tailored to the problem at hand. To most people, the only three options that come to mind regarding immigration are “allow all of it,” “allow none of it,” or “allow some of it.” But those aren’t the only ways of addressing the issue. It’s very possible to get just the “good parts” of immigration, in the same way that if you like the taste of soda but don’t want the sugar you can have diet soda. Let’s discuss the possibilities of “diet immigration” by discussing what could be considered the “bad parts” of immigration, and how we can eliminate them while still allowing immigration itself.

One of Mitchell’s worries, shared by many free marketers, is political externalities: immigrants may vote for bad policies like increased taxation, wealth redistribution, and the like. But if you can craft an immigration law to any specifications you like (in particular, you have the leeway to keep people out completely and arbitrarily), you could easily craft a law that makes immigration and even permanent residency perfectly legal for anyone, but does not include citizenship. Then there’s no voting issue – the people can come, but they can’t drop a ballot in the box. Continue reading A Voice for Immigrants – Could it be Dan Mitchell? →