Yearly Archives: 2013

New Cato bulletin on immigrant welfare use in the United States

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We at Open Borders: The Case have not blogged much about the empirics of the welfare state/fiscal burden objection. We do have some thoughts on the matter which we hope to blog in the future. But one reason why this is a low priority, at least for me, is that I think that whatever the specific truth regarding welfare use by immigrants (under the status quo, modest variations thereof, or open borders), the keyhole solution of building a stronger wall around the welfare state to prevent immigrants and non-citizens from accessing it is politically feasible. Other keyhole solutions, such as immigration tariffs and DRITI, often run against opposition from voters across the political spectrum, but denying immigrants benefits seems to be quite politically popular. At any rate, (open borders + strong wall around the welfare state) seems no less feasible than (open borders without strong wall around the welfare state).

Nonetheless, the empirics of welfare usage, both under the status quo and under open borders, are important in so far as these allow us to better understand and prepare for the impact of open borders. With this in mind, I link to Economic Development Bulletin No. 17 put out by the Cato Institute. The bulletin is Poor Immigrants Use Public Benefits at a Lower Rate than Poor Native-Born Citizens and it is authored by Leighton Ku and Brian Bruen. It is a shorter version of a Cato working paper by the same name. Here is the conclusion of the bulletin:

Low-income non-citizen adults and children generally have lower rates of public benefit use than native-born adults or citizen children whose parents are also citizens. Moreover, when low-income non-citizens receive public benefits, the average value of benefits per recipient is almost always lower than for the native-born. For Medicaid, if there are 100 native-born adults, the annual cost of benefits would be about $98,400, while for the same number of non-citizen adults the annual cost would be approximately $57,200. The benefits cost of non-citizens is 42 percent below the cost of the native-born adults. For children, a comparable calculation for 100 non-citizens yields $22,700 in costs, while 100 citizen children of citizen parents cost $67,000 in benefits. The benefits cost of non-citizen children is 66 percent below the cost of benefits for citizen children of citizen parents. The combined effect of lower utilization rates and lower average benefits means that the overall financial cost of providing public benefits to non-citizen immigrants and most naturalized immigrants is lower than for native-born people. Non-citizen immigrants receive fewer government benefits than similarly poor natives.

These results seem to be at odds with research and findings published by the Center for Immigration Studies, one of the relatively more respected think tanks on the restrictionist side. The authors of the Cato bulletin explain the discrepancy as follows (I’ve removed the internal footnotes in the quoted text):

A study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)found that immigrant-headed households with children used more Medicaid than native-headed households with children and had higher use of food assistance, but lower use of cash assistance. The CIS study did not examine the average value of benefits received per recipient.

There are several reasons why our study differs from CIS’s study. First, CIS did not adjust for income, so the percent of immigrants receiving benefits is higher in their study in part because a greater percent of immigrants are low-income and, all else remaining equal, more eligible for benefits. Non-citizens are almost twice as likely to have low incomes compared with natives. We focus on low-income adults and children because public benefit programs are means-tested and intended for use by low income people. It is conventional in analyses like these to focus on the low income because it reduces misinterpretations about benefit utilization.

Second, CIS focused on households headed by immigrants while we focus on individuals by immigration status. Our study focuses on individuals because immigrant headed households often include both immigrants and citizens. Since citizen children constitute the bulk of children in immigrant-headed households and are eligible for benefits, CIS’s method of using the immigrant-headed household as the unit of analysis systematically inflates immigrants’ benefit usage. For example, 30 percent of U.S children receiving Medicaid or CHIP benefits are children in immigrant-headed families and 90 percent of those children are citizens.

Third, CIS focused on immigrants in general, including naturalized citizens, while we also included non-citizen immigrants. Naturalized citizens are accorded the same access to public benefits as native-born citizens and are more assimilated, meaning their opinions of benefit use are more similar to those of native born Americans. Separating non-citizens from naturalized Americans gives a clearer picture of which immigrant groups are actually receiving benefits.

I haven’t had time to study the data carefully, but the most obvious counter-response seems to be that even if immigrants use benefits at a lower rate than natives, the fact is also that on average they pay less in taxes, so that they are still bigger net fiscal drains than natives. A related argument is that even if they do better than low-income natives, this is too weak an argument, because low-income natives are even bigger fiscal drains. But low-income natives are here to stay, while immigrants can be denied entry, so it makes sense to admit immigrants only if they are net fiscal pluses. In this view, immigrants performing better than low-income natives, even if true, is not a good enough argument to support more immigration. The “net fiscal burden” argument is one that we will take up on this blog some other time for more detailed discussion.

Another related point that is highlighted by this paper is what relevant groups one should look at when studying the effects of immigration. The position taken by the CIS is that the relevant groups to look at are all foreign-born people, including citizens and non-citizens, as well as the minor children of the foreign-born. Others have taken the position that we should look only at the proportion of the population that comprises non-citizen immigrants, and that it would be cheating to include their citizen children in the calculation. I tend to be agnostic on this question framed generally, since a lot depends on what specific aspect is being studied. For this reason, I like the fact that the Cato paper explicitly separates naturalized citizens and non-citizen immigrants, as well as separating children based on both their own and their parents’ immigration status, and dutifully reports all numbers.

Phillip Cole’s classic summary of the moral case for open borders

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Phillip Cole is a professor of ethics at the University of Wales, Newport and recently wrote half of a book arguing that modern egalitarian liberal ideals demand open borders (the other half, written by another ethicist, took the opposite position that states have extremely broad powers to exclude whomever they desire from entering their territory). In December of 2012, he delivered a lecture summarising the ethical arguments for open borders. I urge you to read it in full, even though if you are familiar with the contents of Open Borders: The Case, not much in Cole’s talk should surprise you.

Cole starts by defining open borders, noting that this is not synonymous with “no borders”:

…the right to cross borders is embodied in international law, but only in one direction. Everyone has the right to leave any state including their own. This is a right that can only be over-ridden by states in extreme circumstances, some kind of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation. What we have is an asymmetry between immigration and emigration, where states have to meet highly stringent tests to justify any degree of control over emigration, but aren’t required to justify their control over immigration at all.

In effect all I’m proposing is that immigration should be brought under the same international legal framework as emigration. Immigration controls would become the exception rather than the rule, and would need to meet stringent tests in terms of evidence of national catastrophe that threatens the life of the nation, and so would be subject to international standards of fairness and legality. This is far from a picture of borderless, lawless anarchy.

Cole builds the ethical argument for open borders on 3 pillars. The first is human agency: as human beings with dignity of our own, we are the captains of our own lives. Those who would prevent us from “authoring our own life story,” as he so eloquently puts it, need to meet stringent tests in order to do so:

Human rights constitute a framework that supplies the conditions people need to become empowered to achieve their own humanity on their own terms.

If we place the right to mobility in this context, we see it as an essential component of human agency, such that it is a crucial part of people’s ability to become free and equal choosers, doers and participators in their communities, including the international community.

An illustration of the power of this idea is how unacceptable we would find it if our right to freedom of movement, including the right to settle, was restricted at the national level. It seems surprising to find how easily people accept the idea that it is alright to block people’s freedom of movement at the international level.

Cole’s second pillar rests on global Rawlsianism (the moral argument I typically find most compelling), and he quite unforgivingly tears apart conventional liberal norms that certain moral rights stop at the water’s edge:

I take it that a central commitment within liberal political morality is the moral equality of persons – not citizens, but persons. This is the universalist and egalitarian ethics that has made liberal political thought so dynamic, yet it’s a universalist and egalitarian ethics which some think stops at the national border…

We can’t exclude anybody from the scope of our moral principles unless there’s a morally relevant difference that justifies us in doing so… And yet we don’t seem to consider that the determination of life prospects by the randomness of birth to be rare and exceptional at all –we just accept it as morally legitimate. But how bizarre is that?

His third pillar is that there are no “common sense” arguments for immigration restrictions; you need to build extremely sophisticated ethical arguments in order to do so. He takes on some very sensible and pragmatic objections (the feasibility of maintaining a welfare state, the overriding importance of citizenist principles, the lost sense of community concomitant with rising immigration levels, the risk of a “swamping” catastrophe, etc.) directly and shows how they are impossible to reconcile with modern moral norms. Rather than quote a third of the lecture to you, I urge you to read Cole’s lecture itself.

In closing, Cole turns to some broader questions, and notes that his analysis is troubling for conventional ideas about citizenship. It’s worth noting that one possible reading of Cole is that all barriers to acquisition of citizenship anywhere are unjust (though Cole never makes this claim himself); this claim I would not find convincing. Cole quite wisely devotes most of his lecture to stressing the immorality of existing barriers to movement.

I am in awe of this lecture, primarily because of how well it summarises the moral case for open borders. Cole unpacks a whole host of arguments in a fairly compact amount of time. In a single bracketed throwaway paragraph, for instance, Cole unleashes the novel (at least to me) argument that citizenist policies are ironically only justifiable in a world with open borders:

[Which side of the border you are born on is clearly arbitrary from a moral point of view, and so this can’t be used to justify the moral priority of insider-rights over out-sider rights. The only way location could be used to justify ethical priority is through freedom of choice– if people have freely chosen to be here rather than there. And so the only way an egalitarian liberal can claim that members’ rights have moral priority over the rights of outsiders is if the members have freely chosen to be members and outsiders have freely chosen to be outsiders – in other words, under conditions of freedom of movement. Ironically, it seems that the only thing that can justify the morality of special rights between co-nationals which over-ride rights of non-nationals is, in fact, complete freedom of international movement.]

Michael Clemens’s lecture “The Biggest Idea in Development that No One Really Tried” is to me the classic summation of the economic case for open borders (though it makes a fairly compelling moral case too). Cole’s lecture is, I daresay, a worthy moral case counterpart to Clemens’s.

Open borders encourages assimilation: a lesson from the EU?

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The Economist recently ran an interesting story on intra-EU migration. Relative to Greece and Spain, Germany has an economy chugging along well. Peripheral immigration to Germany is growing, which was the whole point of the common labour market in the first place. But though visas may no longer be an issue, language remains a challenge. So prospective immigrants are adapting:

When the euro crisis began, the branches in southern Europe of the Goethe Institute, the German equivalent of the British Council, were overwhelmed by demand for German courses, says Heike Uhlig, the institute’s director of language programmes. That demand was also different, she adds: less about yearning to read Goethe’s “Faust” than about finding work. So the institute retooled, offering courses geared to the technical German used by engineers, nurses or doctors.

…

Britain, thanks to English, has an advantage in the competition for foreign talent, which big German firms try to minimise by accepting English as their working language. But many of the job openings in Germany are to be found in medium-sized and private Mittelstand firms, often in remote places, where speaking German is still a must. That’s why Mr Gómez is advising his friends back home in Spain to bone up on the language and then “leave, get out”.

The common labour market is actually encouraging pre-assimilation, because of the incentive it provides for workers to learn the languages of thriving economies. If people have to cross borders unlawfully in times of economic crisis, it is harder for them to command a wage that corresponds to their productivity, since they must work under the table. Consequently, they have less reason to invest in pre-assimilation, or assimilation itself: the marginal return to investing in learning the language is not going to be great, especially if you’re going there to be a janitor instead of a technician, and especially if there’s little reasonable chance of moving up the career ladder.

If immigrants can cross in the full light of day, they have more reason to expect a better career trajectory in their new country. How far they can go will depend more on how much they invest in their careers; they aren’t arbitrarily circumscribed by immigration restrictions. They will have more reason to learn their new country’s language, more reason to try and fit into the new working culture. It is difficult to tell under a closed-borders regime how prospective immigrants would approach assimilation under true open borders (as opposed to more economically distortionary schemes, such as those specifically targeting open borders for refugees or open borders for citizens’ relatives). But the early read from the EU may have lessons for us here.

Open borders artwork bleg

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Post by Vipul Naik (regular blogger and site founder, launched site and started blogging March 2012). See:

A comment by John Lee on a guest post by Fabio Rojas got me thinking: what are some possibilities for artwork related to open borders? John writes:

“Bumper stickers might also be a cheap way to spread the word. Maybe Open Borders: The Case should start a bumper sticker campaign?”

This should be easy to do; cafepress.com allows you to order almost any design on almost any type of souvenir (T-shirt, mug, bumper sticker, you name it). BTW, I did a quick search and found that virtually every open borders-related accessory on CafePress is restrictionist.

This was in response to another comment which in turn was in response to ideas mooted in the original post. Fabio’s original suggestion:

[W]e should develop a symbol, like the pink triangle for gay rights, that represents our view that people should be free to move as they wish between countries.

Does anybody know of any existing artwork related to open borders? Is anybody interested in creating artwork? A symbol as suggested by Fabio Rojas would probably be the most high-value item, but other pieces of art (T-shirt and coffee mug designs) may be easier to create and could also be highly valuable.

If you either know of or are interested in creating artwork related to open borders, please elaborate in the comments with links to the artwork. Representative artwork will be featured on the site.

PS: Also mentioned in the comments is the “human passport” YouTube video from the No One Is Illegal group:

I blogged about another YouTube video from No One Is Illegal a while back here.

Vindictiveness versus indifference in the open borders debate

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People on both sides of the open borders debate believe that their opponents often discount, or perhaps give zero weight to, the welfare of certain groups of people:

  • Open borders advocates believe, with some justification, that the citizenist and territorialist perspectives used to justify restrictionism discount the rights and interests of non-citizens (respectively, non-residents) compared to citizens (respectively, residents).
  • Restrictionists believe, again with some justification, that those on the open borders side discount the interests of less fortunate natives who are most hurt by competition from immigrants (see here for more).

Still, there’s something potentially worse than indifference — vindictiveness. Indifference is about placing a zero or small positive weight on the rights, interests, or utility of specific people or groups of people. Vindictiveness is about placing a negative weight on their interests. In other words, it is about deriving positive utility from doing things that hurt or injure those other people.

The vindictiveness analogues of the above claims would be things like:

  • Some open borders advocates believe that a non-negligible minority of restrictionists are motivated by animus or vindictiveness towards current and/or potential immigrants. In most cases, this would not be a “first-principle” animus but rather, would be justified in terms of the immigrant having done something to deserve the animus. For instance, a restrictionist may argue that the bad behavior of certain immigrants (like taking natives’ jobs, going on welfare, or crossing borders illegally) means that they are evil and deserve to be hurt (this and this seem to be interesting blogs/websites that use similar rhetorical styles). Certainly, the claim is not that all restrictionist objections to these behaviors are motivated by animus, but rather, that some people are influenced to take restrictionist positions due to animus and vindictiveness towards immigrants for behavior that they disapprove of.
  • Symmetrically, some restrictionists have argued that open borders advocates are motivated by animus towards low-skilled natives. In one narrative, open borders is a “revenge of the nerds” against the jocks who stole their lunches and bullied them at school. In another narrative, open borders is a way for natives (particularly conservatives) to stick it to low-skilled blacks and low-skilled whites by getting cheaper and more compliant Hispanic labor instead. Another narrative is that people dissatisfied with the status quo (including libertarians, anti-imperialists, anarchists) want to use mass immigration to “heighten the contradictions” in the existing system and destroy it from within to get a blank slate to create a new utopia. (This last claim isn’t necessarily an indication of vindictiveness, but it could be). I believe I’ve encountered variants of these arguments made by Steve Sailer and also by others in EconLog comments, but I can’t locate a comprehensive list of sources. Here is one: Sailer commenting on a Caplan post:

    Dr. Caplan’s views on immigration differ only marginally from those of the editorial boards of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Barack Obama George W. Bush, John McCain, or Ted Kennedy. We should thank him for making explicit the hostility toward the American citizenry that motivates much of today’s conventional wisdom on immigration.

    Here is another:

    Indeed, much of current white conservative support for illegal immigration is a covert way of sticking it to African-Americans and their liberal supporters by importing harder-working Hispanics to drive blacks out of the workforce.

There is a key difference between indifference and vindictiveness. The former leaves a much wider door open for “win-win” keyhole solutions that work out to be Pareto improvements for all sides concerned. Restrictionists who don’t care about non-citizens can find common meeting ground with open borders advocates who are indifferent to the welfare of some subset of natives, by agreeing to a compromise keyhole solution that makes everybody better off. There are of course issues of feasibility and stability, but at least the possibility is there.

If either side is motivated by vindictiveness, however, the situation gets more complicated. Keyhole solutions may still be possible, but they’d be much harder to achieve. Continue reading Vindictiveness versus indifference in the open borders debate →