All posts by Joel Newman

Joel has a bachelor’s degree in history from Pomona College and works as a teacher in Beaverton, Oregon. See also: our blog post introducing Joel all blog posts by Joel

Open Borders Is the Best Way to Help Haiti

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Advocates have suggested open borders (here and here) as a way to help Haiti, which has a long history of poverty, environmental disasters, political turmoil, and human rights abuses. Yet after a devastating earthquake in 2010 led to billions of dollars of outside help for Haiti in the form of humanitarian and development aid, as well as debt relief, has Haiti improved significantly? Has massive aid been the solution to Haiti’s problems? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding no, and open borders as a solution for much of Haiti’s misery continues to be as important as ever.

Even after the infusion of aid, Haiti has a per capita GDP of $1,800, placing it 209th out of 230 countries, with the 230th being the poorest. The Associated Press  recently described Haiti as a “…deeply poor nation, with an official unemployment rate of about 40 percent and the World Bank says more than 6 million out of roughly 10.4 million inhabitants live under the national poverty line of $2.44 per day.” Statistics from three years ago show that about 23 percent of young children in Haiti were chronically undernourished and 4 percent were acutely malnourished.

Haiti also has been been cited as one of five countries where slavery is most prevalent. Human Rights Watch states that thousands of children from poor families are sent to live with wealthier families in order to provide them with schooling in exchange for domestic work, but often the children do not receive an education and are abused.  Human Rights Watch also notes “long-standing human rights problems” in Haiti, as well as “concerns about the resurgence of political violence.”

Aid from other countries clearly hasn’t and might never transform Haiti. Per capita GDP has increased from $1200 in the years 2009-2012 to $1800 in 2014, but it is difficult to know to what extent this increase is due to foreign aid, remittances (see below), or other factors. The bottom line is that Haiti continues to be very poor, along with suffering from other problems.  Foreign Policy in Focus concludes that “four years and billions of dollars later, conditions do not appear to have improved for Haitians affected by the earthquake; in fact, it can be argued that things are worse.” Similarly,  GlobalPost, referring to American aid for Haiti, states that “the extent to which that money is creating sustainable progress remains unclear even four years after it began.”

While some good has been accomplished in Haiti because of outside help (see here and here and here), problems with its delivery have been identified. U.S. government aid for Haiti has largely gone to American companies and non-profits, and The Guardian notes that “Critics have argued for years that donors’ practice of spending aid money through organisations located in their own countries has hampered efforts to build self-sufficiency abroad, and works to the detriment of local businesses and industries.”  And the impact of nearly $500 million raised by the American Red Cross for Haiti since the earthquake has been underwhelming, according to a recent investigation by National Public Radio and ProPublica. The groups found “… a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success…” associated with the funds. The American Red Cross built a total of six permanent homes in Haiti, even though housing is the area in which “the Red Cross made its biggest promises.” An article on the NBC News site states that “to Jonathan Katz, author of ‘The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster,’ the aid story is one of good intentions and bad policy, short-term fixes without a ground-breaking long game, Band-Aids over self-sufficiency.” (See here and here and here for additional criticism of aid efforts.)

On the other hand, emigration is much more promising than foreign aid, both for the Haitians who leave Haiti and for those who stay behind. Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development argues that international migration is “the cheapest and most powerful economic tool” for helping Haitians.  He states that “the large majority of Haitians who have ever escaped poverty have done so by leaving Haiti.”  Citing research by others that was published in 2008, he notes that Haitian immigrants to the U.S. gain a 680% wage increase due to the migration.  He adds that “for those who don’t move, remittances… unlike foreign aid, generally go directly into the pockets of Haitian families. They are spent almost entirely on locally-produced goods and services…”  The CIA World Factbook notes that for Haiti “remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange, equaling one-fifth of GDP and representing more than five times the earnings from exports in 2012.”  Mr. Clemens concludes that “migration has been a principal cause of convergence, to date, between the incomes of Haitians and Americans.”  (He does suggest that the gains to migrants might be diminished under open borders.)

There are more than half a million Haitian immigrants in the U.S.  And many more Haitians want to come. A Gallup poll indicates that, if given the opportunity, about a quarter of Haiti’s adults would move permanently to the U.S.

However, under the status quo of border controls, the ability of Haitians to emigrate to the United States is limited. The U.S. has worked hard to keep many from coming. Since 1981 the U.S. Coast Guard has been interdicting, or intercepting, Haitian migrants traveling by boat to the U.S. Under a 1981 agreement with Haiti, the U.S. returns migrants to Haiti but ostensibly does not repatriate refugees. A study by the former Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First) found that from 1981 to 1990 almost 400 Haitian vessels were interdicted, 21,000 Haitians were returned home, and only six Haitians were allowed into the U.S. for a full asylum hearing, despite a “high incidence of serious human rights violations in Haiti during that period.” (from Stephen Legomsky, The USA and the Caribbean Interdiction Program, 2006) Since 1990, tens of thousands more Haitians have been intercepted and sent home. (See here and here.) It was reported  that as a group of Haitians was forced back to Port-au-Prince in 1995, one of the returnees, handcuffed and carried down the gangplank, moaned, with “tears streaming down his cheeks,” “’I don’t want to come back to a country like this and die in the streets.’” And the interdictions continue, as indicated by statistics for fiscal year 2014.

Even after the earthquake struck Haiti, the New York Times reported that a U.S. Air Force plane flew over Haiti broadcasting a message from the Haitian ambassador to the U.S., who said in the message, meant to dissuade Haitians from fleeing to the U.S. on boats, “’If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.’” The Times also reported that the Coast Guard patrolled Haitian waters, ready to intercept anyone trying to escape. Moreover, the U.S. denied many seriously injured people permission to enter the U.S. for treatment. Only 23 were allowed to enter the U.S. for treatment, as well as some orphaned children.

Many have sought a better life in the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Hispanola, but many have experienced hardship there. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians, both those from Haiti and their offspring born in the Dominican Republic, live there. Minority Rights Group International states that Haitians there experience discrimination based on their skin color and culture. In addition, “they earn 60 per cent less than average Dominicans. They often do not have access to proper nutrition or adequate health care due to poor pay, their illegal status and fear of deportation.” Most sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic are Haitian. Conditions for the workers are poor, and workers are sometimes coerced into working. Recently, the Dominican Republic has threatened to deport many Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent. A court ruling in 2013 took away Dominican citizenship from children of Haitian migrants. Similarly, the Bahamas requires noncitizens, including those born in the Bahamas, to have passports, “a rule that human rights groups say unfairly targets people of Haitian descent,” according to the New York Times, and there have been immigration raids in “predominately Haitian shantytowns.” (See also here.) Under open borders, Haitian migrants could avoid these inhospitable destinations, and these countries could not use immigration restrictions as a tool to discriminate against Haitians.

Beyond the tremendous good that could be realized for Haitians through open borders, an open borders policy would help redress the harm U.S. foreign policy has caused the country over two centuries. Haiti, a French colony largely populated by African slaves, won its independence from France in a bloody struggle in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Once independence was achieved, however, the U.S. and European powers were hostile to the new republic. Randall Robinson notes that after independence “the United States, France and western Europe would quickly join together in a program of measures designed to defeat the new black republic’s prospects for success. For the next two hundred years, Haiti would be faced with active hostility from the world’s most powerful community of nations. The new country endured a variety of attacks, some imposed concurrently, others consecutively, including military invasions, economic embargoes, gunboat blockades, reparations demands, trade barriers, diplomatic quarantines, subsidized armed subversions, media volleys of public traducement, and a string of twentieth-century U.S.-armed black dictators, beginning with Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier, who rose to power in 1957…” (p. 18, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2007) Mr. Robinson concludes that “the Haitian economy has never recovered from the financial havoc France (and America) wreaked upon it, during and after slavery.” (p. 22) Michael Falco, in a letter to the New York Times, similarly writes that “Haiti spent its early existence handcuffed by crippling reparations to France — a penalty for rejecting the shackles of slavery. At the peak of this debt, Haiti was paying 80 percent of its national budget to foreign creditors. After the debt was ‘paid off,’ a string of brutal dictators — many propped up by the United States — ransacked the country’s coffers. Haiti never had a chance…”

In summary, while foreign aid has achieved some good for the Haitian people, open borders has the potential to enormously help. Haitian immigrants in economically advanced countries could earn much more than they could in Haiti, remittances could benefit those who remain in Haiti, U.S. interdictions of migrants could stop, Haitian migrants could bypass countries that mistreat them, and the world could begin to make up for its historic abuse of Haiti. Of the groups that could benefit most from a world with open borders, the Haitian people are among those at the top of the list.

Why Many Jews Might Support Open Borders

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Which groups of people are most receptive to the open borders message? The list of individuals who have signed on to the recently posted Open Borders Manifesto suggests that academics may be especially amenable to supporting open borders. Another group that would be likely to support largely unrestricted immigration comprises those who are seeking to migrate to a new country but are unable to do so because of immigration restrictions, as would their family members already residing in the intended destination countries. Nathan Smith has argued that devout Christians are potentially a good source of support for open borders. At the same time, many secularists, who have been polled as having “the most favorable views of immigrants” compared with Catholics and Protestants, may be open to open borders as well.  Here I argue that Jews, especially American Jews, also could be a potentially strong source of support for open borders.

Nathan provides one reason why many Jews might support open borders: the Old Testament. He states that “from my reading of the Old Testament, it’s quite clear that the Bible supports open borders, full stop.”  For example, Nathan points out verses such as “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Exodus 22:21)” In 2008, the president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society echoed Nathan by writing that Jews “are taught to internalize the lesson that… we must ‘welcome the stranger,’ ‘not oppress the stranger,’ ‘protect the stranger,’ ‘have one law for the stranger and the citizen among you,’ because ‘you were strangers in the land of Egypt…’ it is neither moral nor practical to carve out a system that admits Jews but restricts others, slamming the door to America behind us.”(Jewish Review (Portland, Oregon) April 15, 2008) Nathan concludes that “Old Testament law is favorable to immigrants to the point that it could well be embraced by the open borders movement as a template of the kind of immigration policy we would want to see.” While many Jews don’t consult the Bible for guidance for their positions on public policy, its message on immigration may subtly point Jews towards open borders, as the aid society president suggests.

In addition, Jewish history may have imprinted upon Jews a tendency to support open borders. For the last two thousand years, many Jews have migrated from place to place, either because of expulsions, a need to flee oppression, or the desire for improved economic circumstances.  For example, Spain forced hundreds of thousand of Jews out of the country in 1492.  Even in 2015, given the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe, Jeffrey Goldberg asks, “Is it time for the Jews to leave?”  He also notes that “for millennia, Jews have been asking this question: Where, exactly, is it safe?”

The expulsions, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, “left their impress on the entire nation and its history, both materially and spiritually. They maintained and constantly intensified the feeling of foreignness of the Jews in the Diaspora.”  This was illustrated recently in an online comment responding to a study that found that many Jewish students have experienced anti-Semitism on American college campuses: “I repeatedly told my adult sons as they were growing up that we Jews are guests here in America, that even as we love this country, our birth here is an incident of fate. Too bad that so many Jewish families forget that we’ve lived in many lands with different degrees of acceptance. Our German brothers and sisters thought they were German until they were taken away in box cars, our French brothers and sisters thought they were French until the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, etc. etc. We Jews really need to awake from our delusions and tell our kids the ugly truth. Keep your passports current and your bags packed.”  This perception by some Jews of a tenuous status in their countries of residence and the implied understanding of the importance of having available places to which they can emigrate may lead to empathy for non-Jews who wish to migrate; if one senses that migration may be necessary at some time in their own life, one comprehends on a visceral level the need of others to migrate.

Based on their history, many Jews might support open borders today as they supported the civil rights movement in the U.S. The companion website to the film “From Swastika to Jim Crow” suggests that the historical oppression of Jews has made them sympathetic to the plight of African-Americans.  It notes that “in the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews’ escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South ‘pogroms’.” It also describes how Jews helped form the NAACP and the Urban League, how Jewish organizations played an important part in the campaign against prejudice, and how Jews monetarily supported civil rights organizations. In addition, it states that “about 50 percent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were over 50 percent of the Whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow Laws.”

The history of Jewish immigration to the U.S. in particular may lead American Jews towards supporting open borders. Thomas Sowell writes in Ethnic America that “The great majority of Jews in America are descended from the millions who emigrated from Russia, Poland, and other eastern European countries in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. In that period, one-third of all the Jews in eastern Europe migrated to America.” (p. 69) Why did they come? Maldwyn Jones, in American Immigration, explains that “the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 set off a wave of anti-Jewish riots and led to strict enforcement of the requirement that all Jews must reside within the Pale of Settlement, an area bordering on Germany, Austria, and Rumania. A year later came the notorious May Laws, which placed restrictions on Jewish worship, virtually debarred Jews from agriculture, industry, and the professions, excluded them from public office, and denied them educational opportunities. Persecution now became systematic, persistent, and ruthless; worst of all there were the frightful pogroms of 1881-82, 1891, and 1905-06 in which countless Jews were massacred. Largely in consequence, Russian arrivals in the United States rose from 5,000 in 1880 to 81,000 in 1892 and then bounded upward to a peak of 258,000 in 1907.” (pp. 201-202)

America turned out to be an excellent choice for these eastern European immigrants and their descendants. Mr. Sowell notes that “the overwhelming majority of these Jewish immigrants came to stay. The rate of return migration was lower among Jews than among any other large group of immigrants.” (p. 79) This apparently testifies to the appeal of being in America versus their homelands. While many of these Eastern European Jews came to America impoverished and experienced poverty and slum living in America (p. 83 and p. 85) “the upward movement of American Jews—across broad economic, intellectual, social, and political arenas—was unprecedented and unparalleled.” (p. 88) In addition, “American anti-Semitism has never reached the levels seen in Europe.” (p. 93) Furthermore, had the mass turn of the century Jewish immigration not occurred, those immigrants and their descendants would have perished in the Holocaust of the 1940s.

Many American Jews must understand that this immigration was able to occur largely because European immigration to the U.S. was generally unrestricted until the early 1920s. Notwithstanding his opposition to open borders, the economist Paul Krugman has noted that he is “instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration” and that “he is grateful that the door was open when my grandparents fled Russia.”  Jeffrey Goldberg has written that “… I am an American Jew–which is to say, a person who exists because his ancestors made a run for it when they could.”

Many American Jews must also grasp the negative consequences of the 1920s immigration restrictions on European Jewry. As I noted in a previous post,  the restrictions, together with other bureaucratic maneuvering, kept many Jews from fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. A dramatic example of this was the refusal of the U.S. to accept hundreds of Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis in 1939, even as the ship reached the Florida coast. Many of these refugees later died in the Holocaust. Furthermore, after World War II many European Jews languished in concentration camps taken over by the Americans, according to  Eric Lichtblau in The Nazis Next Door.  He writes that “… with Britain blocking Jews from going to Palestine and the United States closing its own doors for the most part, Truman agonized over the situation in the DP camps.  ‘Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has somewhere to go back to,’ Truman said, ‘but the Jews have no place to go.'” (p. 5) Former U.S. Representative Barney Frank understands the significance of immigration restrictions, suggesting that had immigration policies been more restrictive when his grandparents left Russia for the U.S., they wouldn’t have been allowed in and the family would have perished in the Holocaust. (Washington News Observer, 10/7/09)

When America had borders that were largely open to immigrants, it was a great refuge for Jews fleeing undesirable situations in other countries. Conversely, when this period of mostly open borders ended, restrictionist immigration policies had disastrous consequences for would-be Jewish immigrants. Many American Jews may recognize the value of open borders to their ancestors and may generalize this appreciation of open borders, applying it universally, just as their historical experience of oppression contributed to their support for the civil rights movement for African Americans.

One concern Jews around the world might have about open borders is that it would allow potentially greatly increased Muslim immigration to places where many Jews reside, such as the U.S., France, and the U.K.  In Mr. Goldberg’s article on rising anti-Semitism in Europe, he writes that “… the chief propagators of contemporary European anti-Semitism may be found in the Continent’s large and disenfranchised Muslim immigrant communities–communities that are themselves harassed and assaulted by hooligans associated with Europe’s surging right…” He adds that “the failure of Europe to integrate Muslim immigrants has contributed to their exploitation by anti-Semetic propagandists and by recruiters for such radical projects as the Islamic State…” (The unemployment rate among Muslims in France is higher than the rest of the population, and in some French suburbs with large minority populations, the unemployment rate, particularly among the young, is very high.  (See here and here and here.))  He notes that “in 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish.  Sale Juif–‘dirty Jew’–rang in the streets, as did ‘Death to the Jews,’ and ‘Jews to the gas.'”

However, it should be remembered that Muslims, like any group, should not be stereotyped.  In a previous post, I quoted Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them: “We should not fall into the trap of thinking that Muslims are a uniform and separate community whose identity is wholly defined by their religion, still less an inevitably hostile or violent one.” (page 304)  In addition, it appears that a contributor to Muslim anti-Semitic acts in Europe may be Muslims’ disenfranchisement and lack of integration in their host countries, as Mr. Goldberg suggests.  Mr. Legrain emphasizes that creating harmonious, ethnically diverse societies depends greatly on how citizens receive immigrants: “It’s not rocket science. Societies need to make every effort to ensure that everyone feels included and has an opportunity to participate fully in economic and social life. But they also need to accept the diversity of all their members—not just those of foreign descent—while insisting that all adhere to the fundamental principles on which they are based. The watchwords are tolerance and respect for the law. Learning the local language and how institutions work, and promoting cultural understanding are also important, without seeking to impose a uniform culture or behavioural norms.” (p. 288)  He highlights Toronto, Canada as successfully integrating its ethnically diverse population but cites France and Holland for failing to integrate its immigrants. (p. 265, pp. 272-273)

Mr. Legrain appears confident in America’s ability to integrate immigrants into society:  “Immigrants have to pledge their allegiance to the United States and sign up to the values in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, but they don’t have to adopt any particular cultural habits, Anglo-Protestant or otherwise. Over time, each influx of immigrants changes and enriches American culture, while they adapt freely to American ways, although they may retain some of their cultural heritage.” (p. 266) Clive Crook  argues in The Atlantic that America’s economic system is more effective at integrating immigrants compared to Europe.  He writes that  “America’s harsher insistence on work is not just economically advantageous (which is self-evident) but socially beneficial as well (which some may find surprising). Jobs alone are not enough to ensure successful assimilation of immigrants, but jobs are a necessary condition. By insisting that immigrants work, the host country attacks the incumbents’ intellectual and emotional resistance to immigration. The work requirement increases the dispersed economic benefits; it reduces or eliminates the net fiscal burden; and it lowers cultural barriers.”  He notes that higher unemployment among immigrants in Europe leads to native opposition, but it must also lead to frustration among immigrants, which in turn may lead to anti-Semitic acts.  I am not excusing these acts in any way, but the analysis by Mr. Legrain and Mr. Crook suggests ways to avoid the ethnic tumult that is occurring in Europe, even with high levels of immigration.  It will be difficult to reverse the situation in Europe, but the U.S. and city of Toronto appear to be structured to have mostly harmoniously societies with open borders. (See here and here for examples of Muslims who view the U.S. as an especially tolerant place to live.)

Dean Obeidallah, who is Muslim-American, wrote last year that at a Muslim-American event, Keith Ellison, who is a Muslim congressman, was heartily cheered when he said “‘There’s absolutely no place for anti-Semitism in discussing Israeli policy.'”  Mr. Obeidallah further noted that “that reaction is not atypical in my experience” at other Muslim-American events, although he acknowledges that there is some anti-Semitism in “my own community.”  Unfortunately, a study on Muslim anti-Semitism in North America did find higher levels among Muslims than Christians.  Overall, however, it is apparent that in the U.S., as a Vox article noted, “… Muslim and Jewish communities are on much better terms” than in Europe.  There is nothing in the U.S. like the volume of anti-Semitic acts committed by Muslims in Europe.

In summary, the historical memory of Jews, particularly American Jews, plus the pro-open borders message of the Old Testament, should make many Jews receptive to the open borders message. Open borders advocates are likely to convince many Jews to support open borders by reminding them of their history and the admonitions in their Bible.  They can also note that America in particular is structured to successfully integrate large numbers of Muslims into its society, thereby likely preventing widespread anti-Semitic acts by Muslims.

Paul Krugman and the Immigration Act of 1924

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In 2006 Paul Krugman, prominent liberal economist and New York Times columnist, expressed concern that low-skilled immigration could threaten the American welfare state.  Due to this supposed threat and the claim that the wages of some Americans were lowered because of immigration, he supported a reduction in the number of low-skilled immigrants entering the U.S. (See here for this site’s page on Mr. Krugman.)

So it wasn’t surprising when Mr. Krugman recently declared that he didn’t support open borders.  What was surprising was that he justified immigration restrictions that were enacted in the early 1920s. He stated that without those restrictions the New Deal in the United States “wouldn’t have been possible,” in part because “…there would have been many claims, justified or not, about people flocking to America to take advantage of welfare programs.” The New Deal of the 1930s, as many readers may know, involved the establishment under Franklin D. Roosevelt of government programs which continue to exist today, such as monetary support for the elderly (Social Security) and aid to poor mothers and their children.

The immigration legislation to which Mr. Krugman referred included the Immigration Act of 1921, which established the first numerical restrictions on European immigration.  It was followed by the longer lasting Immigration Act of 1924, which also involved numerical restrictions and a national origins quota system in which visas were apportioned predominately to immigrants coming from northwest Europe. Maldwyn Jones, author of American Immigration, notes that:

it was American policy which brought to an end the century-long mass movement from Europe. The adoption of the quota system… all but slammed the door on the southern and eastern Europeans who had formed the bulk of the arrivals in the prewar (World War I) and immediate postwar periods. The result was that European immigration slumped from over 800,000 in 1921 to less than 150,000 by the end of the decade. (page 279)

The legislation was in many respects the model for our current immigration system, with its numerical limitations on immigration from individual countries, numerical limitations for certain categories of immigrants,  use of preference groups within these categories, consular control over permission to immigrate, and the creation of the Border Patrol. From an open borders perspective, it was a disaster, ending a long period of generally open immigration from Europe.

Whether or not Mr. Krugman is correct or not that the 1920s immigration restrictions helped to provide a political environment conducive to passing the New Deal legislation, there are two reasons why his support for the restrictions are surprising. One is that the legislation was largely racist. The Immigration Act of 1924 was inspired by racist sentiment and, as noted, discriminated against the immigration of people from eastern and southern Europe, who were perceived by some to be racially inferior. As John Higham has written in Strangers in the Land, as the House of Representatives worked towards the 1924 legislation, the champions of the legislation:

now largely ignored the economic arguments they had advanced in behalf of the first quota law three years before. Instead, they talked about preserving a ‘distinct American type,’ about keeping American for Americans, or about saving the Nordic race from being swamped. The Ku Klux Klan, which was organizing a vigorous letter-writing campaign in support of the Johnson bill, probably aided and abetted this swell of racial nativism… (page 321)

The second reason why it is surprising Mr. Krugman would be supportive of the 1924 immigration law is that because it, combined with other restrictionist maneuvering, blocked many of Europe’s Jews from fleeing the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s. David Wyman has written in Paper Walls that,

if, in the crucial years from 1938 to 1941, the world had opened its doors to the victims of persecution, the history of Europe’s Jews from 1942 to 1945 would have been significantly different. Instead the barriers held firm and relatively few refugees found asylum. (page xiii)

Mr. Wyman also has noted that although America received more refugees (about 250,000) from Nazism than other countries during the period 1933 to 1945 (p. 209),  “the total response of the United States… fell tragically short of the need.” (preface) According to Mr. Wyman, it was the 1924 law that was the fundamental barrier to the people seeking refuge in the U.S., noting that “the quota limitations formed by far the most significant bulwark against large-scale American rescue of refugees.” (p. 210)

It is difficult to determine the number of would-be refugees who were killed because of U.S. immigration restrictions.  However, the following information from the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum site suggests the large numbers who were put at risk from the restrictions:

In late 1938, 125,000 applicants lined up outside US consulates hoping to obtain 27,000 visas under the existing immigration quota. By June 1939, the number of applicants had increased to over 300,000. Most visa applicants were unsuccessful.

The fate of 908 refugees aboard the ship named the St. Louis who were denied refuge in the U.S. in 1939 is more certain, with 254 perishing in the Holocaust.  Mr. Wyman also notes that other refugee ships, either without a place to land or planning to land illegally in Palestine, sank, drowning hundreds. (pp. 38-39)

Mr. Krugman must surely be bothered by the racist nature of the 1924 legislation and must certainly wish that the U.S. had been more welcoming to refugees during the Nazi period. Furthermore he has noted that he is “grateful that the door was open when my grandparents fled Russia.” Had his grandparents tried to enter America after the 1924 restrictions were in place, they may not have been allowed in and may have perished at the hands of the Nazis.

How does Mr. Krugman square all this with his support for the 1924 immigration legislation? Was the suffering associated with the legislation an acceptable sacrifice in order to ensure that the New Deal legislation could be passed? Mr. Krugman might respond to this question by wishing that the U.S. had adopted a more generous refugee policy during the Nazi period within a system of immigration restriction, but the fact is that the U.S. didn’t.

Of course, even setting aside the history of the American immigration system’s response to the refugees fleeing the Nazis, the suffering associated with immigration restrictions are immense. Co-blogger Nathan Smith challenges Mr. Krugman’s suggestion that the American welfare state is of higher moral value than open borders.  He writes that: 

Krugman wants a social democratic welfare state even at the cost of excluding most of mankind by force. I start from a utilitarian universalist ethics and conclude that its need for immigration exclusion renders the welfare state a moral travesty. 

Nathan argues that a truly moral anti-poverty policy would focus on alleviating the extreme poverty of the Third World rather than the poverty found in the U.S.:  “Domestic redistribution is at best from the very-rich to the relatively-rich.”  He writes that “the best thing America could do for the poor is to open the borders.”

I support both open borders and the welfare state.  Fortunately, perhaps with the use of keyhole solutions, countries may be able to have both. Mr. Krugman should explore this possibility, as well as reconsider his support for the 1924 immigration legislation.

Featured image: Paul Krugman’s press conference following his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics, by Prolineserver from Wikimedia Commons.

A Future Nobel Peace Prize for Open Borders: The Case?

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The Nobel Peace Prize was recently awarded to two individuals working to improve the lives of children in South Asia. The winners are Malala Yousafzai, a teenage girl from Pakistan who is an advocate for girls’ education, and Kailash Satyarthi  of India, who has worked against child slavery in his country.

These are undoubtably amazing individuals worthy of acclamation, including the Nobel Peace Prize, but if Open Borders: The Case plays a major role in achieving its objective of realizing universal open borders, it will be even more worthy. The magnitude of the improvement in the lives of people around the world under open borders would surpass the accomplishments of Ms. Yousafzai, Mr. Satyarthi, and other winners of the prize.

Let’s begin by examining the potential impact of open borders on the cause of eliminating child labor compared to the impact Mr. Satyarthi has had. Mr. Satyarthi’s organization has reportedly freed about 70,000 child laborers in India, which is impressive.  However, there are more than 150 million child laborers worldwide, so his accomplishments are dwarfed by the magnitude of the problem.

Open borders, on the other hand, offers a way to pull millions of child laborers out of their predicaments. Child labor appears to be largely a function of poverty.  The United Nations notes that “poverty emerges as the most compelling reason why children work. Poor households spend the bulk of their income on food and the income provided by working children is often critical to their survival.”  Open borders would allow these families to migrate to countries with more prosperous economies where the adults could earn enough to sustain the family, while well-funded educational systems could provide the children with an education. By enabling families to escape the conditions which lead to child labor, open borders may be the best way to transform the lives of a large portion of child laborers.

In the case of girls’ education, notwithstanding Ms. Yousafzai’s incredible story and worthy efforts, it is not clear how much of an increase in the number of girls receiving an education can be realized through her and others’ advocacy and charitable work. According to the Malala Fund, 66 million girls worldwide are not in school. The recently established Fund provides resources at the local level for girls’ education in developing countries. Hopefully over time it will have a great impact, but that remains to be seen. Open borders, by providing families in developing countries access to countries that provide education equally to both genders, would allow girls to quickly acquire schooling without waiting for changes to be made in their home countries. The increase in remittances through open borders could have a similar effect in home countries.(See my previous post on how open borders could benefit women more generally.)

Similarly, in the struggle against global poverty more generally, open borders would likely surpass the accomplishments of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winners Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank. Mr. Yunus won the prize for developing micro-credit, involving loans to poor people in developing countries, “into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty.”  However, as the BBC states, “the evidence for microcredit lifting people out of poverty remains highly contested.” While the BBC notes a report that found that 10 million Bangladeshis got out of poverty through microcredit over about a 20 year period, the poverty threshold was remarkably low: $1.25 a day.  Similarly, the New York Times reported that “most borrowers do not appear to be climbing out of poverty, and a sizable minority is getting trapped in a spiral of debt, according to studies and analysts.”

While the benefits of micro-credit are contested, open borders is potentially, in the words of Bryan Caplan, “the greatest remedy for poverty ever discovered.” One study suggests that under open borders, “there would be a 46% increase in wages for those who stayed in poor countries, and migrants to rich countries would see their wages rise by 157%.”  Another study suggests that open borders would increase world GDP by 50-150%, presumably with much of the increase flowing to migrants.  Migration helps migrants earn a higher income in developed countries than what they would earn in developing countries, even without a change of skills, and remittances also help.

Lant Pritchett makes a similar point when he compares microcredit and migration (as noted by Robert Guest):  “… as Mr. Pritchett points out, the average gain from a lifetime of microcredit in Bangladesh is about the same as the gain from eight weeks working in the United States.  After doing a quick calculation of the total benefit that Grameen Bank confers on its clients, he asks, mischievously: ‘If I get 3,000 Bangladeshi workers into the US, do I get the Nobel Peace Prize?'”

Open borders might also contribute to the “peace” part of the Peace Prize. Nathan Smith has argued that “open borders would facilitate world peace, by giving each nation a stake in the prosperity of other countries, where some of their own relatives live, by letting people from estranged nations meet on the territory of third countries and find out that they are not devils, and by reducing a bit the importance of just who controls what territory.”

If (hopefully when) open borders are realized, it certainly will have been the result of efforts by individuals and groups throughout the world, making assigning credit to one or two entities difficult. However, at this point in time, Open Borders: The Case is playing an important role as a repository of ideas for achieving open borders. If its work creates a chain reaction leading to open borders, it will be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Baby Boom and Open Borders

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In a post from earlier this summer, John asked, “Shouldn’t advocates of border controls who complain about population growth leading to more crime, more welfare payments, fewer jobs, and so on, be worried not just about immigrants but also newborns?”  He noted that, unlike for immigration, very few call for government restrictions on reproduction, despite the weakness of the arguments that restricting migration is moral while restricting reproduction is not.  He concluded that government interference with both the decision to have a family and the decision to migrate should be allowed only in exceptional circumstances.

John’s post led me to consider the Baby Boom in the U.S. and how it relates to open borders.  The Baby Boom refers to the large increase in the number of births from 1946 to 1964.  Almost 80 million babies were born during these years in the U.S., making Baby Boomers the largest generation of Americans ever (if immigrants are excluded from generational counts).  When the birth numbers are adjusted for the difference in overall population sizes between the Baby Boom years and today, the results are even more impressive.  Adjusted to the 2014 population, during most Baby Boom years there were 7.5 million or more equivalent births.  For example, the population in 1953 (about 160 million) was about half of today’s population (about 318 million). There were about actual 3.9 million births that year, but that would be the equivalent of about 7.75 million births in 2014, if the ratio of births to base population from 1953 is applied to today’s population.  In most Baby Boom years, the number of births adjusted for the 2014 population exceeded the 2013 number of births (almost 4 million) by more than 3.5 million.  Please see the table below.

Year Population Births 2014 Equivalent Population Growth Difference in Births Between 2013
1946 141,388,566 3.47 million 7,816,475 1.92 3,858,898
1947 144,126,071 3.9 million 8,618,226 1.72 4,660,649
1948 146,631,302 3.5 million 7,602,165 1.73 3,644,588
1949 149,188,130 3.56 million 7,599,967 2.05 3,642,390
1950 152,271,417 3.6 million 7,529,740 1.70 3,572,163
1951 154,877,889 3.75 million 7,711,503 1.71 3,753,926
1952 157,552,740 3.85 million 7,782,717 1.66 3,825,140
1953 160,184,192 3.9 million 7,754,276 1.76 3,796,699
1954 163,025,854 4.0 million 7,814,502 1.77 3,856,925
1955 165,931,202 4.1 million 7,869,569 1.78 3,911,992
1956 168,903,031 4.16 million 7,844,249 1.81 3,886,672
1957 171,984,130 4.3 million 7,962,982 1.67 4,005,405
1958 174,881,904 4.2 million 7,648,951 1.67 3,691,374
1959 177,829,628 4.25 million 7,611,688 1.59 3,654,111
1960 180,671,158 4.26 million 7,509,580 1.66 3,552,003
1961 183,691,481 4.3 million 7,455,468 1.54 3,497,891
1962 186,537,737 4.17 million 7,119,780 1.44 3,162,203
1963 189,241,798 4.1 million 6,900,213 1.39 2,942,636
1964 191,888,791 4 million 6,639,051 1.25 2,681,474
2014 318,490,000 3.9 million (2013) ——- 0.77 (estimated) ————

 

One observation is that the U.S. reaction to the Baby Boom supports John’s observations about generally laissez faire attitudes toward population growth through births.  Apparently there was little contemporary resistance to the Baby Boom’s production of huge numbers of humans.  Aside from eugenics programs targeting specific groups of people, such as the mentally disabled, which were adopted by many American states and which led to the compulsory sterilization of tens of thousands before, during, and after the baby boom, there appears to have been no government attempt to hinder the large number of births. There apparently also was no significant public movement against the surge of births. (I did find a contemporaneous article noting that more schools would have to be built because of the large number of births.)

This apparent lack of resistance is notable considering that, as previously mentioned, in most years of the Baby Boom more than 3.5 million additional people were being added to the population through births than are being added today, when adjusted for today’s population.  Imagine the outcry if 3.5 million additional immigrants were permitted to immigrate each year to the U.S.  It is true that even adjusting for base population, immigration levels were lower during the baby boom years than today, but this mitigates the difference in birth numbers only slightly.  (As the table shows, the difference in the overall population growth during the Baby Boom years and today (0.77%) is even more significant than the difference in adjusted birth numbers.)

A second observation is that the positive impact of the Baby Boom provides additional evidence that fears of swamping by large numbers of new people under open borders are unwarranted. The economist Peter Yoo looked at the economic impact of the Baby Boom on the U.S. economy.  Using economic models, he apparently found a positive impact: “… after a period of slow growth, per capita consumption increases.  Best of all, the models indicate such improvements in the standard of living occur as even aggregate savings drops.”  This finding echoes evidence that significantly increasing a host country’s population through immigration can have neutral or positive long-term economic outcomes.  It is notable that immigration has an advantage over reproduction from an economic standpoint, since a large portion of immigrants are ready to enter the workforce and contribute to the economy, whereas people born into the economy are dependent for many years before entering the workforce.

A related observation is that without population growth, whether through immigration or births, countries tend to founder. Jonathan Last, author of What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, states that “… growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation… Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down.”  He suggests that low fertility rates in Japan account for the country’s economic slowdown in recent decades.  Similarly, the U.S., with a fertility rate below the replacement level, faces decline, he believes.  Since Latin America is experiencing fertility decline, Mr. Last doesn’t believe that immigration can compensate for low fertility in the U.S., although it seems unlikely that the desire to migrate from Latin America to the U.S., or from any number of other poor countries throughout the world, will diminish any time soon.  Immigration appears to be an easier way to maintain population growth than attempting to persuade U.S. citizens to have more babies; Mr. Last notes that, aside from the Baby Boom, throughout American history the fertility rate “has floated consistently downward.”  An open borders policy, of course, would facilitate the immigration needed for population growth.

One downside of population growth is that it further strains the environment, as Philippe Legrain has pointed out.  Another is that if the growth later slows, the ratio of the number of retired people to those working increases.  This is a concern about the retirement of the Baby Boomers.  Given America’s low fertility rate and that people are living longer, Mr. Legrain states in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them that in order to maintain the 1995 ratio of working people aged 15-64 to people 65 and older, about 11 million immigrants per year would have to enter the U.S. through 2050.  (Immigrants tend to be younger than citizens of receiving countries.)  Since immigrants age too and since they probably would not have enough children to maintain the ratio, Mr. Legrain suggests that this would be “only a temporary fix” to an aging population.  However, he also suggests that combined with raising retirement ages , increasing saving rates, and higher taxes, immigration can help the U.S. deal with an aging population.  (See here for a  discussion of the impact of immigrants on the Social Security system.)  Plus, echoing Mr. Last’s connection between growing populations and innovation, Mr. Legrain adds that”if immigration also helps spur productivity growth, it will increase the size of the economic pie available to everyone.” (p. 160)

Vipul suggests that high numbers of immigrants could reduce host country birth rates by driving up the cost of housing, with its cost inversely related to birth rates.  This would weaken the positive impact of immigration on the aging problem.  However, it seems that a larger number of immigrants would be an improvement on the status quo, despite some resulting decrease in native births.

Without the Baby Boom, the U.S. may have suffered economically due to population decline.  Since another similar surge in births is unlikely, immigration, paired with policies to address larger numbers of older residents, will be a key component in maintaining America’s vitality by providing population growth.  An open borders policy would help ensure this population growth.