All posts by John Lee

John Lee is an administrator of the Open Borders website. Liberal immigration laws are a personal passion for him. See all blog posts by John.

Jason Riley makes the case for half-opening the US borders, but not a case for true open borders

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A year ago, co-blogger Vipul briefly reviewed Mark Krikorian’s The New Case Against Immigration and Jason Riley’s Let Them In. I have not yet read Krikorian’s book, but I have finished Riley’s. Overall, I second Vipul’s sentiment that despite the radical book cover (the book’s full title is Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders), Riley’s book is incredibly weak because:

  1. It is overly focused on the US (I cannot think of a special reason why the US should be the only or first country to open its borders)
  2. It is overly focused on citizenist and territorialist arguments for immigration (while I think one can make a case for open borders using a citizenist or even nationalist worldview with appropriate moral side-constraints, the book does a poor job of confronting the inherently unethical tensions of these philosophies when they are used to justify closed borders)
  3. It really does not consider more than briefly the tremendous economic harm or moral injustice created by closed borders (Riley trots out the usual arguments about how immigrants benefit the US economy, but there is no reference to the true size of the closed borders problem — when closed borders is halving world GDP, this is a glaring weakness, although to be fair to Riley, I don’t think these estimates were available when he wrote this)

I don’t want to sound overly harsh; I actually would recommend Riley’s book if someone has already exhausted the most basic open borders literature. So if you’ve finished Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come (I would say that if you can only read one book about open borders, you need to make it Pritchett’s), maybe consider reading Let Them In. The main selling points for Riley:

  1. He comprehensively covers all the problems with current US immigration policy (its injustice from even citizenist and territorialist standpoints, its economic inefficiency, etc.)
  2. He does an excellent job of laying out the history of US anti-immigration activism (it will probably be news to many that Benjamin Franklin was complaining almost 250 years ago that low-quality German immigrants were refusing to assimilate and destroying the US)
  3. He uncovers some interesting historical facts about US immigration policy which really need to be widely known (for instance, he reveals that the problem of Mexican “illegal immigrants” in the US was virtually non-existent prior to the mid-20th century, because many immigration laws simply didn’t apply to Western hemisphere nationals until 1965 onwards)

In his conclusion, Riley states:

My primary goal in writing this book was to offer a rebuttal to some of the more common anti-immigrant arguments that I’ve come across while covering the issue as a Wall Street Journal editorialist.

Once I read this, I understood why Vipul and I felt the book had oversold itself as a case for open borders. Riley’s true intention was never to make such a broad case in this book. (In fact, Vipul goes as far as to characterise Riley as a political moderate — this is true of the book’s tone, but from its content, I would say Riley probably is pretty close to the liberal extreme on immigration.) If you’re looking for some good rebuttals to common mainstream anti-immigration US-specific arguments, I highly recommend Let Them In. But if you’re looking for the case for open borders, I would without hesitation point you to Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come.

The Lebanese diaspora, and victim-blaming of immigrants

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The Economist recently ran an article about the Lebanese diaspora and its entrepreneurial bent. There are some interesting factoids in there I wasn’t aware of. Take the size of the diaspora for example:

More people of Lebanese origin live outside Lebanon than in it (perhaps 15m-20m, compared with 4.3m).

I am not sure what proponents of closed borders would have preferred to do about the Lebanese in the past century or so of human history. It is not quite enough to simply say “Let them alone in Lebanon,” when restrictionists quite clearly want to enact active policies to keep immigrants, Lebanese or otherwise, away. Given some Australian experiences with racial rioting, one can contend that there are restrictionists who would personally use physical force and abuse against the Lebanese.

But as the article notes, for all the “takers” in the Lebanese diaspora, there are plenty of makers (some of whom I did not realise were of Lebanese descent):

Carlos Slim, a Lebanese-Mexican telecoms tycoon, is the richest man in the world. Carlos Ghosn, a French-Lebanese-Brazilian, is the boss of both Renault (a French carmaker) and Nissan (a Japanese one). Nick Hayek, a Swiss-Lebanese, runs Swatch, the biggest maker of Swiss watches.

I am not sure if there are any panel or longitudinal studies which have been done on the Lebanese immigrant population anywhere, but it would be interesting to see the statistics. It would be especially interesting to see if they are bearers of “political externalities” or otherwise import arguably negative cultural/institutional aspects of their homeland. After all, Lebanon the state has not been faring the brightest:

In the past century and a half, waves of Lebanese have left for the Americas and west Africa. Lebanon’s long civil war prompted many more to pack. …the market is tiny. Lebanon’s GDP is about $42 billion, less than Rhode Island’s. Second, it is unstable. Conflict with Israel in 2006 temporarily shut down many of Ms Sfeir’s restaurants; the takeover of parts of Beirut by Hizbullah militants in 2008 disrupted them once more. … As if that were not enough, the Lebanese government chokes businesses with red tape. On average it takes 219 days to obtain a construction permit—assuming nothing goes wrong—and 721 days to enforce a contract in a Lebanese court, according to the World Bank. Patronage is pervasive and the internet is sluggish.

Gee, sounds like letting the Lebanese into my country would be a pretty bad idea, unless I happen to have worse institutions than they do. But the one meaningful statistic about Lebanese immigrant performance which The Economist cites is the Lebanese-American median household income of $67,000 (which is well above the median household income in the US; a rough approximation of that would be about $50,000, depending on how you slice it/round it).

To be explicit, a key assumption I often see in restrictionist arguments is that immigrants will import the “bad institutions” or “bad culture” of their homeland. True, sophisticated advocates of closed borders make more subtle versions of this argument, or avoid it altogether in favour of more defensible ones that barely bear it any resemblance (such as risk of technological slowdown). But it is this argument that often pops up as a reason to justify closed borders: people who are kept out get their just deserts because:

  1. Their country’s bad institutions are their personal fault
  2. They will inflict institutional harm on an ostensible superior country by virtue of simply living or working there

The Lebanese case is a concrete counter-example. How is the individual Lebanese seeking a better life outside his or her country personally responsible for any, let alone all of the following?

  1. The Lebanese civil war (and all its future repercussions for the state of the Lebanese socioeconomic environment)
  2. The small Lebanese market
  3. The Lebanese conflict with Israel
  4. The Hizballah insurgency
  5. Lebanese red tape

Perhaps via some roundabout way one can find a way to blame the typical Lebanese for some or all of these: in some sense, Lebanon has a participatory or democratic form of government, and so surely the individual Lebanese voter must bear some blame. On this basis, I suppose the rest of us trying to avoid getting sucked into horrible geopolitical conflicts, government bailouts of automobile manufacturers, or legislative gridlock should be doing our darndest to restrict immigration from the US then.

(As a sidenote, one can argue that the real reason Lebanon collapsed was because it permitted Palestinian and other insurgents to cross its borders, thus directly leading to the civil war, Hizballah insurgency, and conflict with Israel — i.e. loose Lebanese immigration policy created this problem. But as far as I know, no advocate of open borders endorses government inaction in the face of invaders bearing arms and ill intent. This seems to me akin to tarring a free trade advocate with the accusation that she supports unrestricted trade in assault rifles and nuclear weapons.)

The story of the Lebanese people and their diaspora is clear: open borders makes the lives of immigrants better. And by creating a global network, they make people in their country of origin better off too — and that’s assuming zero remittances, which is an unrealistic assumption. There may be good reasons for restrictionists to advocate keeping immigrants like the Lebanese out — but these good reasons need to be more clearly specified than some ridiculous assignation of blame to immigrants for the situation they are in. And restrictionists need to quantify just what’s being lost from potentially keeping out the next Carlos Ghosn, or the next immigrant demographic that actually raises the average household income.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open borders: the solution to conflict in the Middle East

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What international evidence exists for adverse impacts from illegal immigration or amnesties for immigrants?

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In the US, California is every restrictionist’s (and fair-minded skeptic’s) example of how badly things can go wrong if you mismanage immigration policy. I have not yet seen someone cite country-level evidence of poor immigration policy’s impacts: given that Italy and Spain have given multiple amnesties to unauthorised immigrants over the last 3 decades, and the current state of their economies, this seems surprising. Does anyone know of a comprehensive analysis that looks at jurisdictions outside the US?

To be clear, I often see specific references to how life in California is now terrible because of illegal immigration. Commonly-cited examples are the problem of the state government’s debt, a dysfunctional state government, soaring crime rates, deteriorating levels of social trust, a collapsing public school system, the high level of unemployment…I could continue on. I often see references made to California as the ultimate end-state for any jurisdiction that permits a large amount of illegal immigration, and would like to understand if this conclusion has been validated or supported by analyses that look at other jurisdictions with large amounts of illegal immigration. A previous post considered this question in the context of comparisons between the US states, but for this post, I’m interested in international comparisons.

I’m fine with somewhat unsophisticated stabs at this analysis: breadth can be just as important as depth, and given the rather poor state of knowledge about the ultimate impacts of high levels of immigration, any research or analysis can prove valuable. My understanding is that France and Germany both have ongoing processes for unauthorised immigrants to regularise their status, and considering the widespread use of discrete amnesties in other European countries’ immigration policies, it would be interesting to see if there are any different impacts, and what people’s thoughts are on the impact of either option has been relative to a counterfactual where these European countries did not regularise any unauthorised immigrants whatsoever.

The US has only implemented one amnesty of note, in 1986. In Europe, amnesties are much more common. Poland for example announced in 2011 its third amnesty since 2003 (though to be fair, Poland has much fewer unauthorised immigrants than the US). Surely there has been some study of the impacts of these amnesties, or even some informal comparison that correlates the number of unauthorised immigrants to various socioeconomic indicators at the country level. And I’m only really somewhat aware of amnesty policies in Europe: I’m not even sure what arrangements, if any, exist in other continents.

And going beyond amnesty, large numbers of unauthorised immigrants exist in various countries. The number of unauthorised immigrants could similarly be correlated to various indicators, as informal analyses in the US often do with California. If we rank countries by the percentage of their population that is present without legal authorisation, how would that compare to the ranking of countries by GDP per capita, or public debt per capita, or rankings in international educational aptitude surveys like PISA or TIMMS? What about ranking countries by the number of previously unauthorised immigrants whose legal status has since been regularised? Here are two charts (from link #3 at the end of this post) which rank EU countries:

EU-27 regularizations through programsEU-27 regularizations through mechanisms

A quick glance suggests that some of the worse-performing Eurozone economies have been much likelier to offer larger-scale regularisations. However I’m not sure what to make of Germany and France coming in right behind four of the PIIGS on this scale, or of Germany and France topping the list when it comes to mechanism-based (i.e. ongoing) regularisations. Moreover within the PIIGS it also seems quite clear that Italy and Spain are performing better than Greece (I am not sure where Portugal stands). So the correlation, if there is one, does not appear to be that strong.

(Something else that may be food for thought: according to the source for these charts, France once insisted that the EU adopt a continent-wide ban on mass regularisations of the “amnesty” type currently being discussed in the US. This idea was dropped because Spain vetoed it. It would be fascinating to learn what’s driving the different approaches here.)

If anyone knows of material that might be pertinent to the issues I’ve raised here, I would love to hear about it in the comments of this post. We can compile a compendium and document it on an Open Borders page about illegal immigration, and/or the regularisation of unauthorised immigrants. This compendium would be a useful reference for future discussions and blog posts on this site.

I’ll start by listing out some documents I’ve been able to find, and will add to this list as people post in the comments:

  1. Why Countries Continue to Consider Regularization, Amanda Levinson (2005) — a good summary of how different countries approach regularisation/amnesty, and where volumes stood as of 2005
  2. Regularisation programmes in France, Amanda Levinson (2005) — a good summary of the French approach, but no contextualisation with respect to how it compares to elsewhere
  3. Regularizations in the European Union, Kate Brick (2011) — probably comes closest to what I’ve been looking for, has excellent comparisons of different countries’ approaches to regularisation