All posts by Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith is an assistant professor of economics at Fresno Pacific University. He did his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University and has also worked for the World Bank. Smith proposed Don't Restrict Immigration, Tax It, one of the more comprehensive keyhole solution proposals to address concerns surrounding open borders. See also: Page about Nathan Smith on Open Borders All blog posts by Nathan Smith

Why Erasing All the World’s Borders Would Double World GDP

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The article below, by me, was published this morning at the Daily GOOD: http://www.good.is/posts/why-erasing-all-the-world-s-borders-would-double-gdp.

Economists have estimated that opening the world’s borders to migration could double world GDP. To get the gist of that number, imagine that your boss walked into your office tomorrow and said, “we’re doubling your salary”—and the same thing happened to everyone else, too.

What would we all do with the money?
Buy better food, more cars, better educations for our children, medical care, books, vacations, and other entertainment. We’d take more leisure and patronize the arts more, enjoy more of the charm of life and more of the latest technology, and lead happier, more fulfilling lives.
In short, higher standards of living.
These estimates, though admittedly speculative, are actually rather conservative. If the whole world population migrated to the U.S. and earned what Americans earn, world GDP would multiply more than four-fold. That isn’t actually possible, and researchers take that into account in various ways, thus bringing estimates of the impact of open borders down to a mere doubling of world GDP.
Poor countries aren’t poor because their people are defective individuals. The proof of that is that when they migrate to rich countries, they usually close most of the earnings gap quickly. Some countries are cursed by geography—it’s hard to be productive in malarial, landlocked regions of Africa—while poverty partly reflects a lack of capital, public (e.g., roads) and private (e.g., structures and equipment). Predatory, corrupt and/or foolish governments bear some of the blame. Many places are improving, but fixing countries is usually harder than moving people.
Open borders would be far more disruptive than everyone just getting a pay raise. They would probably lead in fairly short order to epic mass migrations. In the burgeoning cities of the United States and western Europe, there would be far more visible poverty than there is today. Of course, open borders would not create that poverty. In fact, they would improve it. But they would also make it visible to the rather complacent middle classes of America and Europe, for whom the border serves as a convenient blindfold.
The big gains probably wouldn’t show up in the average American’s paycheck, not according to the Revolut reviews we’ve studied. They’d come in the form of a surging stock market, soaring land values, and steeply falling prices of labor-intensive services and locally made goods and services.
If open borders are such a good idea, why haven’t they been tried already? They have. In the mid-to-late 19th century, the U.S. and most of the world’s leading nations had entirely or nearly open borders. How did that work out? Brilliantly. Open borders were a big reason why the 19th century was by far the most technologically progressive and politically liberalizing era in the history of the world up to that time, and maybe since, too.
Everyone knows that the 20th century witnessed a hideous descent into widespread totalitarianism and large-scale war. Recently, though, several economic historians have begun to argue that the period from 1880-1940, the era of open borders and its immediate aftermath, was the real heyday of technological progress, and recent decades have seen a “great stagnation,” though this is counter-intuitive, since we are more advanced than people a century ago (technology accumulates) even if the generations that introduced electricity and indoor plumbing and the automobile and the airplane and the assembly line and so on were more innovative. And while domestic inequality was greater in the 19th century than in the mid-20th century, global inequality was less.
Meanwhile, the 19th century puts paid to the panicky protests of people who think open borders will dissolve the nation-state and lead to anarchy. America in the age of open borders possessed and gloried in its distinctive identity and institutions at least as much as it does today. So did other countries in that time, for better or worse.
Open borders might threaten national identity today as they didn’t then, but it’s not clear why. Indeed, since American culture today is a global juggernaut, assimilating the world even beyond its borders; more foreigners than ever are prepared to fit into American life almost immediately, speaking English (probably more than a billion people speak it now), wearing blue jeans, listening to rock-n-roll, understanding and supporting democratic tolerance.
Under open borders, some would come who don’t want to be Americans. They’d stay a little while, earn some money, and go home. Nothing wrong with that. Others would want to stay, and, please note, they’d have made a positive choice to be Americans, as native-born Americans have not done. When you think about it that way, it’s not surprising that open borders never seem to have weakened anyone’s national identity much, just as a church doesn’t lose its distinctiveness by accepting converts.
The irony is that the people who complain about Mexicans not wanting to assimilate are usually the same people who minimize their incentive to assimilate by keeping them in the shadows, under the threat of deportation. Why invest yourself in a country that might deport you?
No less important than the economic benefits are the gains in freedom and respect for human rights that open borders would probably achieve. Open borders would represent a huge gain for freedom per se, opening up vast new opportunities for people to pursue their dreams and be the authors of their own lives.
But most crucial is the protection open borders would afford for basic human rights. There are still far too many countries where basic freedoms of speech, of the press, of religion, and from arbitrary arrest are not protected. It helps if people can get out from under regimes that abuse them. Those whose consciences compel them to practice the Bahai faith or criticize a Central Asian dictator should be able to do so at home, but failing that, they should be able to emigrate to somewhere that they can do so safely. Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the right to emigrate, and it really has become rare for governments to try to lock their citizens in.
The problem is that many have nowhere to go. We think of refugees, in particular, as victims of this or that dictator or episode of ethnic cleansing, but in an important sense they are victims of our entire world order, which partitions the surface of the earth among a cartel of sovereign states, who insist on the right to exclude people for every reason and no reason. It doesn’t have to be that way. It wasn’t that way in the past. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, it won’t be that way anymore.
Until then, refugees will suffer, as every pathway to some sort of normal life is blocked by closed borders. For those who want to do right by the world, open borders should be a high priority.

Nathan Smith vs. Hans-Hermann Hoppe

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When I wrote Principles of a Free Society, I believe that I very dimly had in mind Hans-Hermann Hoppe as an intellectual adversary, but for some reason– some stray remarks at the Cato Institute which I over-interpreted, I think– I had the impression that Hoppe was so disreputable that it would be a kind of sin to mention him or read him. Thinking it over now, that’s hardly fair! My views on the Iraq War would, I suppose, make me at least as heretical from a Cato Institute perspective as Hans-Hermann Hoppe for his views on immigration (and homosexuality, but that’s not relevant here). Hoppe seems, like me, to aspire to a thoroughgoing rationalism, and to like Lockean homesteading as an origin for property rights. We have enough in common to provide the basis for an argument. Moreover, what I realize now is that even before I wrote Principles, I had heard a rumor about Hoppe’s argument for migration restrictions, guessed the nature of the argument from that rumor, and wrote Principles, among other things, to refute it. But since my argument against Hoppe is spread out throughout Principles and does not explicitly mention Hoppe, it seems worthwhile to bring Hoppe’s argument and my refutation together in one place. This is my contribution to the debate summarized at our anarcho-capitalist counter-factual page.

First, Hoppe’s argument, from “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem.” Hoppe starts by suggesting, without really arguing for it, that:

People of one ethno-culture tend to live in close proximity to one another and spatially separated and distant from people of another ethno-culture. Whites live among Whites and separate from Asians and Blacks. Italian speakers live among other Italians and separate from English speakers. Christians live among other Christians and separate from Muslims. Catholics live among Catholics and separate from Protestants, etc.

Well, no, they don’t tend to, really, except when the government compels them to. Segregation occurs often in history, but so does integration. And anyway, given that the suggested groupings of people overlap greatly– there are white, Asian, and black Christians; there are white Christians and Muslims and atheists; there are people who speak both Italian and English– the proposed regime of spatial segregation doesn’t seem to make sense (unless the segregation is very fine indeed, e.g., “only Italian-speaking white Catholics in this neighborhood”… but that’s hardly typical). But Hoppe’s next move is what makes his argument distinctive:

Let us take one more step and assume that all property is owned privately and the entire globe is settled. Every piece of land, every house and building, every road, river, and lake, every forest and mountain, and all of the coastline is owned by private owners or firms. No such thing as “public” property or “open frontier” exists. Let us take a look at the problem of migration under this scenario of a “natural order.”

First and foremost, in a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property. Essentially, a person can move only if he is invited by a recipient property owner, and this recipient-owner can revoke his invitation and expel his invitees whenever he deems their continued presence on his property undesirable (in violation of his visitation code).

Given this assumption, the rest of the argument is rather predictable, at least to me. Still, we may as well follow Hoppe a little further. First:

In a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property.

Second, on roads and other transportation:

There will be plenty of movement under this scenario because there are powerful reasons to open access to one’s property, but there are also reasons to restrict or close access. Those who are the most inclusive are the owners of roads, railway stations, harbors, and airports, for example. Interregional movement is their business. Accordingly, their admission standards can be expected to be low, typically requiring no more than the payment of a user fee. However, even they would not follow a completely non-discriminatory admission policy. For instance, they would exclude intoxicated or unruly people and eject all trespassers, beggars, and bums from their property, and they might videotape or otherwise monitor or screen their customers while on their property.

To this we will return. Finally, it is in residential property where Hoppe expects to see the highest degree of segregation:

It is in the residential housing and real estate market where discrimination against and exclusion of ethno-cultural strangers will tend to be most pronounced. For it is in the area of residential as contrasted to commercial property where the human desire to be private, secluded, protected, and undisturbed from external events and intrusions is most pronounced. The value of residential property to its owner depends essentially on its almost total exclusivity. Only family members and occasionally friends are included. And if residential property is located in a neighborhood, this desire for undisturbed possession—peace and privacy—is best accomplished by a high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity (as this lowers transaction costs while simultaneously increasing protection from external disturbances and intrusions). By renting or selling residential property to strangers (and especially to strangers from ethno-culturally distant quarters), heterogeneity is introduced into the neighborhood. Transaction costs tend to increase, and the peculiar peace-and-privacy-security—the freedom from external, foreign intrusions—sought and expected of residential property tends to fall, resulting in lower residential property values.

Many very interesting things to note here. First of all, Hoppe’s scheme must create a strong bias in favor of the right to invite. Second, Hoppe’s scheme justifies not only immigration restrictions but also domestic residential segregation of the kind that existed in the US before the 1960s. I suppose one must give Hoppe credit here both for consistency and for political incorrectness. Hoppe does not presuppose the moral relevance of countries and assume a right to free migration within but not across national boundaries. He explicitly envisions a society of ethno-culturally homogeneous neighborhoods, based on a generalized preference that he seems to regard as an indelible human propensity to stick with one’s own kind. Though Hoppe is much too complacent about this, Robert Putnam’s work probably demands that this view be taken more seriously than political correctness might admit. Hoppe goes on to introduce the state, and argue that the lack of freedom of migration that, he supposes, would prevail in a “natural order” should cross-apply to a society ruled by a state. Even then, the right to invite persists:

If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited).

It’s not clear to me that VDARE restrictionists are right to claim Hoppe as an ally within the libertarian camp. After all, an unlimited right to invite might not look much different from open borders– many US natives would quickly learn to sell their rights to sponsor immigrants to the highest bidder– and limiting the right to invite violates Hoppe’s principles. But I’m not not too interested in how to apply Hoppe’s argument at this stage, because my dissenting argument branches off at the stage in the argument where Hoppe defines the “natural order.” Continue reading Nathan Smith vs. Hans-Hermann Hoppe →

Someone should write A History of Borders

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A task for the industrious, or perhaps for us here at Open Borders, only we would need a lot of help: write a history of borders. When did the concept of a border appear? How has it evolved? What did borders mean at different times in history? My/Bryan Caplan’s/Steve Camarota’s Huffington Post TV interview last week (also see here and here) featured this exchange:

STEVE CAMAROTA: Well right, I mean, obviously, the fraction of the American people or even public officials who think we don’t have a right to control our borders and regulate our borders and control who comes in is trivially small, it’s a marginalized position. From that perspective, but in academia, and among a lot of the groups that pressure for high levels of immigration, this is a kind of mainstream perspective, that people have a right to come into our country. The only way you could do that would be to push it down the throats of the American people. All societies, all sovereign states throughout all history have always had the idea that they can regulate who comes into their society–

NATHAN SMITH (interrupting): Well, that’s not really accurate, but–

Here’s what I would like to know, and am not enough of a historian to say for sure: is Steve Camarota more like 70% wrong, or more like 90% wrong, setting to one side the issue of armed invasion? Unfortunately, “setting to one side the issue of armed invasion” is not so easy, because Camarota and other restrictionists tend to try to confuse the obviously different issues of how one deals with hostile armies intending to kill and plunder by superior strength, and peaceful migrants asking nothing but to be left alone or to be allowed to offer their wares or their skills. Of course, if the mistake has been made often before, Camarota’s claim would still be true. I’m pretty sure it’s not generally true, but just how often past societies have dealt out to peaceful migrants treatment appropriate to armed invaders would be an interesting historical question to answer. Again, has the right to emigrate, or the right to invite, been widely recognized? What of hospitality, the obligation of hosts to guests? What is the history of that? What made a person a guest? I’ve been reading The Odyssey, and one of the most persistent moral themes in it is hospitality. The good characters are invariably distinguished by their kindness to guests, not simply invited guests by any means but even and especially wayfarers, wanderers and beggars such as Odysseus is in most of the places he goes throughout most of the epic. The bad characters are marked, above all, by their harshness and violence against the same. Was this peculiar to the Greeks or is it universal? Walls have occasionally been built: the Great Wall of China, or Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, but of course they are more often not built. How have borders been guarded? How often have they been unguarded? How often have they been undefined? When they are defined and guarded, what kind of traffic has been stopped, and what allowed through? And in the shadowy background of all this, perhaps never very well-defined even to the actors in history let alone in written records that can be discovered later, what ideas about borders existed in people’s minds? To what extent did they feel that they, or their rulers, had a right to control who entered and who exited the territory associated with this or that polity? What motives were appropriate for such regulation, and what were the limits of it?

The project would require a lot of assistance from historians, but from other specialists, too, for historians tend to be good with documents and dates but can’t be relied on to think through the issues carefully and abstractly. Historical studies often help people to escape the ideological parochialism of their own times, but in a patchy and idiosyncratic fashion. Social science abstractions such as the concepts of economics can blind their adherents in certain ways, but can also enable them to overleap the narrow certainties of a particular time or country or class. I suspect that the result would be quite useful to the open borders cause, because it would reveal that something like open borders– not precisely in the sense advocated by myself or the other bloggers here, of course, but still– has been the norm in human history, while the Passport Age (1914-present, roughly speaking) is an aberration. But if it did turn out that the Passport Age is less distinctive than I thought, that probably wouldn’t affect my support for open borders much, nor, if open borders were the historic norm, would that necessarily force the restrictionists could back down. They could argue that immigration restrictionism (it’s too bad the phrase world apartheid sounds polemical: it seems like a more cogent and specific description of today’s migration regime) is a novel invention indeed, but a beneficent one. But, advocacy impact aside, I’d simply like to know.

UPDATE: More resources: a quick summary post by Vipul, my devastating takedown of the claim that Rome fell because of open immigration (that one’s worth reading!), this post, my post on metics in ancient Greece, and my long Old Testament post. Also see our page on the “alien invasion” metaphor; Vipul’s post on why immigration was freer in the 19th century, and Bryan Caplan on “The Golden Age of Immigration.”

Why open borders are the solution to brain drain

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I’m intensely ambivalent about the new book by Paul Collier, Exodus, that’s scheduled to come out in October of this year. Of course, I don’t know exactly what’s in it. But I know the author: Collier is a respected development economist and author of The Bottom Billion, one of the best books on the world’s poorest people and the causes of the world’s direst poverty. And Amazon provides a preview of the contents of Exodus.

More than ever before, those in the poorest countries-the bottom billion-feel the lure of greater opportunities beyond their borders. Indeed, the scale of migration driven by international inequality is so massive that it could make nations as we know them obsolete.

In Exodus, world-renowned economist and bestselling author Paul Collier lays out the effects of encouraging or restricting migration in the interests of both sending and receiving societies. Drawing on original research and numerous case studies, Collier explores this volatile issue from three unique perspectives: the migrants themselves, the people they leave behind, and the host societies where they relocate. As Collier shows, those who migrate from the poorest countries, primarily though not exclusive the young, tend to be the best educated and most energetic in their cultures. And while migrants often benefit economically, the larger impacts of mass migrations remain unsettling. The danger is that both host countries and sending societies may lose their national identities– an outcome that Collier suggests would be disastrous as national identity is a powerful force for equity. Collier asserts that migration must be restricted to ensure that it helps those who remain in sending countries and also benefits host societies that make the investment on which migrant gains rely.

Sharply written and brilliantly clarifying, Exodus offers a provocative analysis on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Interestingly, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution linked to the Amazon page and apparently quoted it, except with slightly different words:

…bestselling author Paul Collier makes a powerful case for the ethical legitimacy of restricting migration in the interests of both sending and receiving societies… [the rest is the same]

I don’t know where Cowen got the text he quoted, which makes the book sound a little more restrictionist than the book description that actually appears at Amazon. Will Collier “make a powerful case for the ethical legitimacy of” migration restrictions, I wonder? Or not? Still, the Amazon book description still says that “Collier asserts that migration must be restricted to ensure that it helps those who remain in sending countries and also benefits host societies,” etc.

Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here, but it does seem to matter whether Collier is simply arguing that it would be in poor countries’ interest to restrict certain kinds of migration, and lazily advising this as good economic policy without inquiring into whether it’s ethically legitimate or not, or whether Collier is actually going to try to defend the ethical proposition that it is licit for countries to cage their citizens inside and not let them leave. If he is going to argue that, he is, I think, breaking somewhat new ground. Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Soviet restrictions on their citizens’ right to travel abroad or emigrate were long recognized as a violation of fundamental human rights. The Berlin Wall was built for the purpose of violating East German citizens’ right to emigrate. I don’t know as much about this as I would like to, but other than North Korea, how many states today attempt to prohibit emigration? Certainly a lot of people lack the right to emigrate de facto because nowhere will accept them, and this is one of the systemic abuses that open borders advocates want to overcome; but how many states curtail the right to emigrate per se? Or is Collier simply going to argue that other countries should cage citizens of poor countries at home so as to promote the development of their homelands, thus backing into the curtailment of the right to emigrate without attacking it head-on? Continue reading Why open borders are the solution to brain drain →

Huffington Post

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Bryan Caplan, Steven Camarota (of CIS) and I were interviewed at the Huffington Post this morning (http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/open-borders-immigration-poverty/517aa4a078c90a08c500032e). Talking head was never a career ambition of mine, and I don’t consider myself particularly gifted at extempore public speaking, but if it can help, I’ll do it. Comments are welcome as always, but in this case, I’d be particularly interested in tips on how to make the case to a different audience than the readership of Open Borders: The Case. From the point of view of the average viewer, are there elephants in the room that I’ve left unaddressed? Am I gratuitously opening up big new vulnerabilities for my own side? Am I missing easy ways to score points with the median viewer?