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.

Some absurdities of immigration policy

7 Comments
One oft-overlooked point about immigration policy is just how absurd and arbitrary it is, in any country you can name. One of the best prima facie arguments against the policy status quo is that it literally does not make sense: it is internally inconsistent, opaque, impossible to make sense of. A couple stories I have rounded up from friends (the VDARE link is courtesy co-blogger Vipul):

Co-blogger Nathan has dug up data suggesting that my fellow Malaysians are the most restrictionist people in the world. The absurdity here is both in public policy and public sentiment: 10% of Malaysia’s population (3 out of about 30 million) are immigrants and depending on how you slice it, 40 to 95% of Malaysians are descended from immigrants. The norm for middle-class Malaysians is to send their children for overseas education, and to encourage them to stay on and work for a time — if not indefinitely. Most of my friends from grade school (I attended public schools in a middle-class suburb of Kuala Lumpur) are currently studying or working in a Western country. When I went home last month for vacation, immigrants were everywhere, in every service job I encountered. The only complaints I heard about immigrants from any actual people was that government policy isn’t generous enough to high-skilled immigrants (the absurdity being that it is easier to hire a restaurant waiter from India than a college graduate from Italy).

Telling an absurd immigration story is like shooting fish in a barrel. One hot off the presses: a US government programme (“Secure Communities”) aimed at deporting illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds is now “optional” in California because a review found that 28% of the deportation victims in California actually aren’t criminals. So much for President Obama’s supposed amnesties (in the first place, this supposedly generous president has deported immigrants at a faster rate than any other president in history).

Finally, here’s the picture which Buzzfeed ranked 26 on its 45 most powerful images of the year:

I can’t even begin to start with the absurdities here:

  • The man and his family are Rohingya from Myanmar; he is begging the Bangladeshi Coast Guard officer to not deport them back to Myanmar, where he and his family are presumably fleeing recent “anti-immigrant” sentiment against the Rohingya, who the Burmese accuse of being “illegals” from Bangladesh
  • This man and his family are being treated like common criminals — clearly, their behaviour here screams “I am a selfish sociopath who hates the law” — and are literally on their knees, begging for mercy from the law for daring to get on a boat and go somewhere
  • In theory, international law ought to protect refugees like the Rohingya — in practice, good luck with that
  • If this family were fleeing crushing poverty or a natural disaster instead of persecution, even in theory international law doesn’t give a damn
  • Let’s not even talk about Bangladeshi or Burmese law — and who can blame these countries, when even most “civilised”, developed countries don’t give two hoots about most refugees?

Literally millions of Pakistani immigrants have risked being shot to death by border guards to get into Iran. The moral case for open borders (a concept no less crazy than free trade, and much more intuitively appealing to human moral sensibilities) demands the governments of the world explain themselves. I’ve used this quote from US Senator Marco Rubio before, but to me it sums up the case for open borders so well, I can’t help using it again:

If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here.

I certainly understand the pragmatic (and, I agree, almost just as intuitive) case for immigration restrictions in theory. But those making the restrictionist case need to face up to the exacting human cost of any immigration restrictions they propose. And more than that, there is incredible certainty about the human suffering immigration restrictions impose, but incredible uncertainty about the benefits they yield. Who is to say what the exact benefit of shooting one Pakistani in the head is to Iranians?

At the company I work for, various business programmes need to be reviewed and recertified annually by leadership, in order to ensure they are still serving their originally-intended purpose and are still desirable projects. The heritage of immigration restrictions is rooted in prejudice, bigotry, and racism, and they have rarely been audited or reviewed since — except on a piecemeal basis, where the human harm has been explicitly discounted, and the supposed benefits not explicitly considered beyond the vaguest terms (for instance, it is often declared that the goal of immigration policy is to reduce immigration — but with little actual valuation of different restrictive policy options).

The absurdity of the immigration status quo is I think morally indefensible and intellectually very unsettling. I would, with little hesitation, pronounce the immigration policies of most of the world unsound and morally wrong. I recognise it is impractical to do much about them in the short term, and I don’t know if I would recommend “no borders” as a superior option to be implemented tomorrow (if this were even feasible). But I don’t need to have a recommendation to know that closed borders are illogical and just plain wrong.

Canadian federalism applied to immigration

8 Comments

Bloomberg has an interesting piece today arguing that Canada shows the US a way forward on immigration policy: states should be allowed to sponsor any immigrant they like. Obviously there are reasonable bounds: the Canadian federal government performs basic health and criminal background checks on prospective immigrants. But beyond that, any province of Canada can invite anyone it likes to settle in it, up to a federally-determined quota.

The appeal of this is that states which don’t want immigrants don’t have to use their quotas. An interesting question is whether immigrants might settle in another state and later on internally migrate to more restrictive states, and the piece doesn’t address this. But given that people tend not to want to immigrate to areas that demonstrate they don’t welcome immigrants, I see no reason to believe this would be a major problem.

The other main point made is that this presents a tidy solution to the problem of determining how to handle skilled versus unskilled labour: there are no guest worker visas, and rather each province invites immigrants based on its own needs. In the US case, I take this to mean that New York would probably invite plenty of high-skilled finance workers, while Idaho might invite potato farmers.

A problem I see with this is that this doesn’t consider the fact that “guest worker” situations might apply reasonably well to some people. It’s quite common to want to work in another country for a few years, without actually desiring to settle there. One could just as easily make provision for states to sponsor easily-renewable work visas, in addition to regular immigrant visas.

In spite of this, it seems to me that Canada is on the right track: giving provinces a stake in immigration policy gives their governments additional levers to pull to support their economic and social progress. While the federal model may not work for all countries, those organised under a federal system of government should at least consider adoption of the Canadian model of state-sponsored immigration.

Aviva Chomsky on open borders: weak on economics, stronger on politics and history

3 Comments

I recently finished reading Aviva Chomsky’s They Take Our Jobs: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration (Amazon ebook). Like co-blogger Vipul, I did not find the book on the whole convincing. Chomsky’s grasp of economics is questionable at best, and her suggestion that poor countries became or remain poor primarily because of oppression from the rich world may be true in some cases, but is likely not a good general principle of development economics. She also unwittingly trivialises the place premium by accepting the mistaken belief that the only thing keeping firms in developed countries from paying their employees developing world salaries are things like minimum wage laws. In spite of this, I would actually recommend Chomsky’s book to the critical reader with an open mind: her grasp of economics may be weak, but her social and political history is on stronger footing — and the political arguments she makes from historical backing are worth considering.

One of the important issues Chomsky raises is the question of suffrage and enfranchisement. She notes that historically in the US, non-citizens have been entitled to vote, and this generally held true until the advent of closed borders in the early 20th century. She does not dive into this in detail, but it’s also noteworthy that this remains true in some countries today. Citizens of the Commonwealth (such as myself, by virtue of my Malaysian citizenship) are entitled to vote and sometimes even stand for elections in the UK and in a number of other Commonwealth countries, provided we meet certain relatively loose residency requirements (I know plenty of Malaysians who voted in the UK simply because they were studying there).

Chomsky argues that immigrants should of right be entitled to the vote, because in a democratic society anyone who enjoys the rights and responsibilities of residence should also enjoy the rights and responsibilities of the ballot. If you are a stakeholder in the policies of your community, it seems foolish to disenfranchise you because you happened to have been born elsewhere. I can see the appeal of this argument, even though it is not one that I would necessarily embrace.

Unlike Chomsky, I don’t place a huge priority on voting rights for immigrants. It seems to me that each society should be entitled to decide who should be able to vote, and it’s up to the US, as well as its individual states and localities, to decide which foreigners, if any, should be entitled to vote. A political right is not a fundamental human right. I accept Chomsky’s argument that we should not arbitrarily tie the vote to citizenship, but it doesn’t seem to me that the disenfranchisement of non-citizens is even close to being the worst thing in the world. It isn’t hard to see why even a liberal-minded person would be skeptical of allowing anyone from anywhere to vote in their jurisdiction (though I suspect most attempts to use immigration policy to address this are trying to tackle the problem with a very blunt instrument).

I do think it is harmful to perpetuate the disenfranchisement of non-citizens who indicate a strong commitment to their adopted society. One can demonstrate this commitment in many ways; military service, lengthy residence, marrying a citizen. It would seem arbitrary and unjust to me to declare that because you happened to be born a non-citizen, you can never aspire to become a citizen. Immigrants should be able to expect greater political rights as they integrate into their adopted societies. But again, though I would place great importance on there being a path to citizenship, it is not the most important thing.

Where I think there is a higher bar, and where societies need to be absolutely transparent in how they decide their rules, is the simple act of immigration. Morally, a society is more or less entitled to decide in any arbitrary way it wants who gets to vote in its elections. But morally, a society is not entitled to decide in any arbitrary way who gets to be with their family, and who doesn’t. It is not entitled to decide in any arbitrary way who gets to seek gainful employment, and who doesn’t. It is free to restrict these rights, but it needs to explain itself when it does so.

The other interesting point which Chomsky brings up is the importance of equal protection under the law for immigrants. A recurring theme is how whether explicitly or implicitly, US law has denied non-citizen workers certain rights which citizen workers take for granted. In many cases, because the immigrant workers are unlawfully present, their employers refuse to pay them the legal minimum wage or offer them other forms of compensation (e.g. safety equipment, etc.) which citizens might expect. Immigrant workers are also often limited in their “exit options” — either they keep working with their current employer, or they go home. This is often true not only of illegal immigrants, but legal ones as well: most US work permits, including the H-1B visa for professionals, link immigrants to specific employers, and have a lengthy process (if there is one at all) for the immigrant to change their employer.

Chomsky and other leftists deplore this as yet another instance of the capitalist class oppressing the weak and needy, but one does not need to be an all-out Marxist to see the injustice in this situation. One very understandable fear many activists have when it comes to keyhole solutions such as guest worker programmes is that by tying immigration status to a specific employer, a country would effectively legalise indentured labour. I think most open borders advocates would agree: we cannot meaningfully call an immigration policy one of “open borders” if it really is “you can cross the border, only as long as you work for this specific employer”. That may be an improvement on the status quo, but that speaks more to the foolishness of the immigration policy status quo than anything else.

The other points Chomsky makes are interesting, but certainly open to question. A major pitfall of the book is that although its primary focus is immigration, a secondary focus seems to be attacking almost any non-leftist political ideology. Chomsky is prone to digress into tangential topics which aren’t totally relevant to the subject at hand, and the connections she draws seem tenuous at best. She is strongest when she discusses the sordid history of immigration law in the US, and explicitly articulates the reason for attacking specific policies; even if I disagree with her, I can understand where she is coming from and why her views are important. For this reason, I would recommend Chomsky’s book to the interested reader, subject to qualifications I’ve discussed here.

Addendum: I am currently reading Teresa Hayter’s Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, which makes arguments similar to Chomsky’s from a left-liberal British standpoint, but with a much tighter focus on immigration — especially on the issue of refugees. I intend to review Hayter’s book as well when I am finished with it.

Milton Friedman and open borders

7 Comments

I’ve not posted recently because I am on vacation till the end of this week. However, while on my hiatus, I managed to finish Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose. It’s an interesting book from an open borders perspective, since although the Friedmans explicitly cite barriers to immigration as an arbitrary and unjust infringement of liberty, virtually all the book is devoted to other infringements of economic rights which an open borders advocate would likely consider milder, if they considered them infringements at all (since, after all, not every open borders advocate is as much an economic libertarian as the Friedmans were).

The only time immigration really appears as anything other than a brief throwaway topic is in Chapter 5: Created Equal, specifically under the subchapter Equality of Opportunity. The Friedmans say:

Literal equality of opportunity — in the sense of “identity” — is impossible. One child is born blind, another with sight. One child has parents deeply concerned about his welfare who provide a background of culture and understanding; another has dissolute, improvident parents. One child is born in the United States, another in India, or China, or Russia. They clearly do not have identical opportunities open to them at birth, and there is no way that their opportunities can be made identical.

Like personal equality, equality of opportunity is not to be interpreted literally. Its real meaning is perhaps best expressed by the French expression dating from the French Revolution: Une carrière ouverte aux les talents — a career open to the talents. No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from achieving those positions for which their talents fit them and which their values lead them to seek. Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person — only his abilities.

…

In respect of government measures, one major deviation from free markets was in foreign trade, where Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures had enshrined tariff protection for domestic industries as part of the American way. Tariff protection was inconsistent with thoroughgoing equality of opportunity and, indeed, with the free immigration of persons, which was the rule until World War I, except only for Orientals. Yet it could be rationalized both by the needs of national defense and on the very different ground that equality stops at the water’s edge — an illogical rationalization that is adopted also by most of today’s proponents of a very different concept of equality: equality of outcome.

You have literally just finished reading virtually all that Milton and Rose Friedman had to say about the freedom of movement and migration in Free to Choose. It’s obvious that in their framework, immigration restrictions are reprehensible, arbitrary, and inconsistent with both libertarianism and egalitarianism. It would be interesting to compare the Friedmans’ framework of equality of opportunity with similar approaches, such as Amartya Sen’s approach of maximising human capabilities. However, it is still odd why the Friedmans would virtually disregard immigration altogether, except for citing it as a brief example of restrictions on trade. If we value human life more than goods or services, immigration restrictions cannot be treated simply as another version of steel tariffs or automobile quotas.

My hypothesis is the Friedmans did not think immigration or labour mobility unimportant; rather they felt it impractical to pursue the extension of these rights, when there remained other battles to fight — battles more easily won. After all, if you can’t persuade Americans to end trade restrictions or end wage and price controls, in spite of all the evidence that this would actually benefit them, you’re not going to be able to persuade them to end immigration restrictions, where the benefits to natives are even less salient. Monetary policy also strikes me as another issue which a 1970s libertarian (Free to Choose was published in 1979) might justifiably argue superseded immigration in importance, and the Friedmans devote much of their book to this.

Going beyond Free to Choose, it’s also apparent that Milton Friedman believed open borders to be incompatible with the modern welfare state. Obviously he did not consider keyhole solutions or other policy reforms that would be concomitant with any opening of the borders, an odd oversight for a man who was so willing to push the envelope in other areas.

One possible reason for this reticence appears in Chapter 10: The Tide is Turning. Here, the Friedmans argue:

…those of us who want to halt and reverse the recent trend [towards expansion of government] should oppose additional specific measures to expand further the power and scope of government, urge repeal and reform of existing measures, and try to elect legislators and executives who share that view. But that is not an effective way to reverse the growth of government. It is doomed to failure. Each of us would defend our own special privileges and try to limit government at someone else’s expense. We would be fighting a many-headed hydra that would grow new heads faster than we could cut old ones off.

Our founding fathers have shown us a more promising way to proceed: by package deals, as it were. We should adopt self-denying ordinances that limit the objectives we try to pursue through political channels. We should not consider each case on its merits, but lay down broad rules limiting what government may do.

The merit of this approach is well illustrated by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Many specific restrictions on freedom of speech would be approved by a substantial majority of both legislators and voters. A majority would very likely favor preventing Nazis, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Ku Klux Klan, vegetarians, or almost any other little group you might name from speaking on a street corner.

The wisdom of the First Amendment is that it treats these cases as a bundle. It adopts the general principle that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”; no consideration of each case on its merits.

In short, the Friedmans might be skeptical of some keyhole solutions in part because they don’t see this as a sustainable policy in the long run. I think this objection applies particularly well to some keyhole solutions that might be floated from time to time: banning or severely restricting immigration from developing countries, severely limiting immigration or citizenship based on educational attainment, etc. More generalist keyhole solutions, such as a more carefully thought-out visa system that recognises diverse reasons for crossing borders (as opposed to treating all immigrants as either permanent settlers or temporary tourists/students/guest workers), or immigration tariffs, don’t seem quite as susceptible to this objection to me.

The Friedmans go on to propose an “economic bill of rights” that would circumscribe the US government’s ability to regulate the economy. Their proposed language for an amendment pertaining to international trade: “Congress shall not lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws.” This dovetails quite well with my personal ideal for open borders, given political constraints: government should not restrict movement across borders, except insofar as this is administratively necessary (e.g. to prevent an invasion, influx of criminals, influx of contagious disease vectors, etc. — all reasonable policy objectives).

The paucity of attention to immigration from the Friedmans remains puzzling to me, and I think points to just how radical the concept of open borders appears to many people. Even if you explicitly recognise the injustice of arbitrary immigration restrictions, as the Friedmans clearly do, it’s easier to ignore it than to say something about it, because it sucks you down a rabbithole of having to explain why you aren’t a crazy person (though that’s probably something the Friedmans already faced a lot, especially when justifying proposals such as the abolition of welfare or publicly-funded education).

To me, there’s nothing more crazy about open borders than there is about, say, free trade. Advocating free trade does not mean one would allow Mexican drug lords to cart in M16s or Taliban warlords to airdrop AK-47s over the US border. It does not mean one would gladly allow illegal goods such as narcotics or permit the illegal funneling of money, such as via money laundering, out of blind devotion to principle. What open borders advocates (or at least I) want is people who seek a better life, in good faith, to be able to do so as far as it is administratively possible to permit this. The Friedmans would have agreed.

What do governments owe non-citizens?

7 Comments

A common intuitive response to the case for open borders is, “What do I owe someone I’ve never met, who shares no creed, affiliation, or allegiance with me? What does my government owe someone who isn’t even a citizen?” Co-blogger Nathan has already addressed this line of thought in his own way, but I would like to further grapple with the assumptions underlying this citizenist logic.

The problem I see with this intuition about immigration is it totally denies the existence of any human rights. It presumes that all rights must flow from the existence of a nation-state, and that without the state, one would have no rights. From a law enforcement perspective, this is trivially true: the state is the instrument by which human beings mutually guarantee our rights. But from a moral standpoint, it hardly follows that states only owe anything to their constituents, and owe nothing to anyone else.

Suppose it is true that governments’ only role and mandate is to maximise the welfare of their citizens. Would that justify the hostile annexation of a neighbouring state? Would that justify permitting the theft of non-citizens’ property, or assault against non-citizens? Clearly not.

One can argue that the reason modern states prohibit crimes against foreigners is because of the threat of retaliation from foreign states. Does that imply that it would be fine for any one of us to rob, rape, or kill a stateless person, since we have no retaliatory threat to fear?

You could argue then that this would still be a net welfare loss for the nation, because other states might refuse to protect my nation’s citizens in their jurisdictions, unless they see that my nation too upholds the sanctity of human rights. Precisely! Many rights do not flow from the state; they flow from the innate worth and dignity of every human being.

When the topic of open borders comes up, skeptics are quick to say: “But we can’t let everyone in! What do we owe foreigners? We can’t afford to give everyone welfare! And look, not everyone is entitled to be a citizen of my country.” But welfare, suffrage, the privileges of citizenship — those are all political rights, which obviously and by necessity flow only from a state. Beyond political rights, there are fundamental human rights, which the international community and all reasonable human beings recognise derive from no earthly governing body.

Defenders of the status quo love to say “the law is the law; it must be followed” when it comes to immigration. When asked to defend the law on its merits, they insist there is no need to, because every sovereign nation is entitled to its own immigration policy. That may be true, but every human being is entitled to rights of their own too.

We accept that governments have the right to kill people. We accept that they have the right to coerce people. But we would not take it lying down if tomorrow our government told us “I’m going to kill 5,000 people, because I feel like it.” Americans would not be happy if their government said “I’m going to reinstate the draft, because I have the right to do that.” Even the most hardcore restrictionist would probably be unsure about defending the merits of an immigration policy that executes all illegal border-crossers on sight — even though illegal immigrants supposedly have no rights which a foreign state is bound to respect.

None of this is to say that human rights dictate that sovereign governments have no right to an immigration policy, any more than most understandings of international trade would suggest that sovereign governments have no right to a trade policy. But human rights create a strong presumption that governments must rebut before implementing policies that restrict human rights. If a government wants to conscript its residents, it needs to have a better justification than “Because I can.” And if a government wants to tear families apart, or prevent people from looking for gainful employment, it needs to have a better justification than “Because I can.”

When government policies destroy families and destroy jobs, there is a clear obligation to justify these policies. You can argue that the benefits of denying certain rights outweigh the costs. But you cannot suggest that the costs are irrelevant. It is amply evident that every human being has rights, and yet that all these rights can be infringed as long as nation states exist. But we must be clear about why we make the difficult choice to declare some human beings’ rights not worth respecting.

Were the UK and US right to deny visas to Jews fleeing the Holocaust? Is it right for the UK or US to prevent a native-born child from living with his mother, because she is an unauthorised immigrant? Maybe — there’s a plausible argument that what these governments did and do here is right. But it is not an easy, slam dunk argument to make. The conventional response is that there is no need to make such an argument: governments have no obligations to foreigners; foreigners have no rights or dignity as human beings that are worth respecting. I think this conventional response does not actually make the difficult questions around these policy decisions go away.