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

Migration and Christianity

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When I wrote Principles of a Free Society, I hinted at a Christian case for open borders:

American Christianity has not been only a conservative force, fending off bad foreign ideas and keeping America true to its heritage of freedom. It has often championed reform, progressively realizing the latent imperatives of America’s founding ideals.

Nobel laureate Robert Fogel has argued that American history has followed a pattern by which the evolution of religion leads the evolution of political reform, with four “Great Awakenings” in religion– in 1730-60, 1800-40, 1890-1930, and 1960 to around 1990– leading to four great eras of political reform: the American revolution, the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War, the creation of the welfare state, and the civil rights movement; and finally the tax revolt of the Reagan era and the 1996 welfare reform.

Fogel’s periodization could be disputed; but the links he draws between religion and political reform are compelling. Churches enjoy no institutional representation in the American political system, nor do they typically instruct their members how to vote. Yet religion heavily influences voting behavior and other forms of political participation. Today, for example, one of the strongest predictors of voting Republican is church attendance.

In spite of the Republican bias of American Christians, however, and the anti-immigration bias of the Republican Party, I think there are signs that immigration (that is, support for immigration) is emerging as a distinctively Christian political issue. An immigration amnesty in 1986 was championed and signed by a born-again Christian president, Ronald Reagan. Another Christian president, George W. Bush, strove for and nearly succeeded in passing immigration reform in 2006 and 2007, with widespread support from churches.

The Catholic Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles compared a repressive anti-immigration law in Arizona to Nazism. Richard Land, president of the general conservative Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has advocated comprehensive immigration reform. Polls by Pew show that religious leaders and frequent churchgoers are significantly more pro-immigration than less frequent attenders.

Ultimately, I think the Bible, the New Testament, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and in particular one detail in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, will force Christians to turn against the world apartheid system of border controls. When the priest and the Levite see the wounded man on the road to Jericho, they do not just fail to help, they pass by on the other side of the road— that is, they deliberately create physical distance between themselves and the suffering man in order to avoid incurring the moral responsibility to help him.

But of course, this is exactly what migration restrictions do: they keep the world’s poor at a distance, so that we will not feel conscience-stricken and have to help them. But of course it is perfectly clear in the parable that the priest and the Levite only make themselves more culpable by trying to avoid moral responsibility; and so it is with rich countries that close their borders to poor immigrants. Christians cannot go on failing to see this indefinitely. Time for a Fifth Great Awakening?…

How would church-state relations change if the conviction became widespread among Christians that to “love thy neighbor” meant not collaborating with the enemies who want to deport him? (Principles of a Free Society, pp. 189-191)

At that time, however, I had not read what the Old Testament specifically has to say about immigrants. When I did so, last May, for the post “The Old Testament on Immigration,” I was astonished at how thoroughly they confirmed my views. Again and again, the Bible stresses that foreigners are to be given justice, treated fairly, loved, and included in Jewish festivals and Sabbath observances. They were often grouped with widows and orphans as a protected class. In correspondence with readers after that post, I learned that there seems to be a distinction between a ger, which I’ve seen translated as “resident foreigner” but which means something close to “convert to Judaism,” that is, someone who has accepted the religious rules of ancient Israel, and a “foreigner at the gate,” zak or nekhar. Many of the Biblical passages which most strongly urge “foreigners” to be treated well use the word ger, and some argue that these exhortations do not apply to the zak or nekhar. I believe it is the latter, moreover, to whom the Mosaic law permits Jews to lend at interest and sell meat found already dead, which Jews are not allowed to eat. Some contemporary writers equate ger with legal immigrants and zak with undocumented immigrants. But this is certainly untenable, for several reasons. First, ancient Israel had no passport regime, and zak were not breaking the law by dwelling there: they were not illegal. Second, while the Bible does suggest that ger must obey the Mosaic law and thus shared the obligations as well as the privileges of Jews, there is no hint of some process of permission by Jewish authorities that had to take place for a person to become a ger. And in the story of Ruth the Moabite, no permission is asked. Ruth admittedly has a Jewish mother-in-law, Naomi, but her admission to Israel is not conditional on that. She simply comes, and gathers grain behind the reapers, taking advantage of a sort of ancient Jewish poor law. In short, there were open borders under the Mosaic law. And if that was the case even under the Old Testament law, which in many respects is rather harsh– a girl found guilty of premarital sex was to be stoned, for example (Deuteronomy 22:21)– then what about the New Testament, which often seems to endorse complete nonviolence…

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[a] But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” (Matthew 5:38-40)

… which pointedly softens the Mosaic law, e.g., when Jesus pardons the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11), and which is far more universalist in spirit, for example in eliminating the circumcision requirement so as to integrate Gentile converts? Surely it would be odd for someone to agree that the Old Testament called for open borders and then say that the New Testament offered a warrant for a harsher and more exclusionary migration policy than what the Old Testament allowed.

Given the comparative rarity of open borders advocacy among Christians, however– devout Christians are more likely to favor open borders than others, but it’s still a small minority view– I’m always interested in hearing the other side. What do Christian restrictionists have to say for themselves? Continue reading Migration and Christianity →

The conservative social welfare function

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“Social welfare functions” are a good example of the payoff to thinking abstractly. They are answers to a very large question, which might be put: How should human beings live together in society, and what should society’s goals be? If you want to focus on the government, you could frame the question as: What should the government’s objective be? How should it decide between alternative policies? Not every answer to this question lends itself to being summarized in a social welfare function, but many do, some rather precisely, some loosely.

Thus, the political philosophy of John Rawls might be summarized in the social welfare function V=min(U1, U2, U3, …, Un), where V is what society is trying to maximize, and U1, U2, … Un represent the utilities of individuals 1, 2, …, n, where n is the population. Similarly, the utilitarian political philosophy might be summarized in the social welfare function V = U1 + U2 + … + Un. From these social welfare functions, with a little bit of careful further thinking, one can make several deductions. First, both Rawlsians and utilitarians will tolerate some inequality, basically for the same reason: allowing some individuals to get ahead of others gives them the incentive to create wealth. A utilitarian values the self-enrichment of individuals per se. A Rawlsian doesn’t, but he will value it indirectly if the wealth creation spills over and benefits the poorest. Second, both Rawlsians and utilitarians almost certainly would support some redistribution. The Rawlsian does so because he only values the welfare of the poorest, and no matter how much he reduces the welfare of everyone else, if he can benefit the poorest at all, he will do so. The utilitarian will support some redistribution, even if, as is probably the case, it is inefficient and reduces the total wealth of society, because the marginal utility of a dollar is higher for the poorest individuals. But the Rawlsian will support more redistribution than the utilitarian. If we call the amount of redistribution T, there will be some T’>0 that maximizes total utility, and some T”>T’ that maximizes the welfare of the poorest. The utilitarian will prefer redistribution T’, the Rawlsian, T”.

There are more games you can play with social welfare functions (SWFs). You could call democratic any SWF that places equal value on all individuals’ utility, and aristocratic any SWF that places much greater weight on some individuals’ utility than others. (Both the Rawlsian and utilitarian SWFs are democratic, by this definition.) You could call an SWF relatively socialistic if it imputes to individuals highly risk-averse utility functions: that is, a socialistic society will tolerate fairly low average living standards, in exchange for an equitable distribution of income. By the same token, a relatively capitalistic SWF would impute to individuals utility function much closer to risk-neutrality, maximizing incentives for wealth creation while tolerating extreme destitution for some members of society. Now, I want to introduce the concept of a conservative social welfare function. While I thought it up myself, I’m not surprised that a Google Scholar search reveals it has been thought of before, and with the same motivation that made me think of it a few years ago: trade policy. The concept applies directly to immigration. But first, let me try to state it mathematically. Imagine a society which seeks to maximize:

(1)  V(t+1) = f(U1(t+1) – U1(t)) + f(U2(t+1) – U2(t)) + … + f(Un(t+1) – Un(t))

That is, in choosing how to allocate resources at time t+1 it takes into account how resources were allocated at time t. Thus the conservative SWF is backward-looking. But of course, you don’t really know anything about the conservative SWF until you know something about f(). So here’s a bit of characterization of f():

(2) (a)  f(0)=0, (b) f(x)>0 if x>0, (c) f(x)<0 if x<0, and most subtly, (d) f(x) + f(-x) <<0

Conditions 2(a) through 2(c) are rather obvious. Society likes it when people’s utility improves, dislikes it when people’s utility deteriorates, is indifferent when it stays the same. The really defining feature of a conservative SWF is condition 2(d), which implies that society is much more opposed to anyone seeing their utility fall, than it is in favor of seeing people’s utility rise. If a policy harms A while benefiting B by an equal amount, under a conservative SWF, the policy will be rejected. Even if a policy raises A’s utility by considerably more than it reduces B’s, the policy is likely to be rejected.

Now, if you believe that open borders would have an economic impact anything like what, say, John Kennan’s model predicts, then they should pass a Rawlsian or utilitarian test very easily. But open borders might still be rejected from the perspective of a conservative SWF, since in Kennan’s model it reduces wages of all non-migrant workers, while roughly doubling world GDP through huge gains to owners of capital and migrants. Whether this is the “real” reason (if that means anything) for migration restrictions, I don’t know. However, I do have a sort of hunch that conservative SWFs are an important part of the way democratic politics operate. Continue reading The conservative social welfare function →

The golden age of immigration and innovation

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Tyler Cowen writes, in The Great Stagnation:

The period from 1880 to 1940 brought numerous major technological advances into our lives. The long list of new developments includes electricity, electric lights, powerful motors, automobiles, airplanes, household appliances, the telephone, indoor plumbing, pharmaceuticals, mass production, the typewriter, the tape recorder, the phonograph, and radio, to name just a few, with television coming at the end of that period. The railroad and fast international ships were not completely new, but they expanded rapidly during this period, tying together the world economy. Within a somewhat longer time frame, agriculture saw the introduction of the harvester, the reaper, and the mowing machine, and the development of highly effective fertilizers. A lot of these gains resulted from playing out the idea of advanced machines combined with powerful fossil fuels, a mix that was fundamentally new to human history, and which we have since exploited to a remarkable degree.

Today, in contrast, apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch, even if dimmers are more common these days. The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass. You don’t have a jet pack. You won’t live forever or visit a Mars colony. Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.

It would make my life a lot better to have a teleportation machine. It makes my life only slightly better to have a larger refrigerator that makes ice in cubed or crushed form. We all understand that difference from a personal point of view, yet somehow we are reluctant to apply it to the economy writ large. But that’s the truth behind our crisis today– the low-hanging fruit has been mostly plucked, at least for the time being.

It’s worth noting that the period Cowen designates as the high-water mark of technological change has a very large overlap with the heyday of open borders, which extended roughly from the Civil War to World War I. (Prior to the Civil War, the borders were just as open, but transportation was a bigger barrier.) If you figure that open borders affect the rate of technological change / economic growth with a lag, the overlap is even more impressive.  And it makes sense that it would. After all, new ideas are like yeast: they take time to leaven the loaf of the economy. The automobile was invented in the 1890s and mass produced before World War I, but its economic growth payoff may have peaked in the 1930s and continued for decades after. The airplane was invented in 1903, but only in the past thirty years has long-distance plane travel become commonplace for the middle class. Flush toilets were still a novelty for many people in the 1930s: Steinbeck has a touching scene where two Joad children flush a toilet and are frightened, thinking they’ve broken it. Electrification was far from universal in the 1930s. It seems plausible to say that the technological momentum that carried the US forward through the first half of the 20th century was the legacy of the age of open borders.

From this list of inventors at Wikipedia, it doesn’t stand out that there are particularly a lot of immigrants: Nikola Tesla (and more recently, Sergey Brin) are the most important, and Andrew Carnegie is the outstanding example of an immigrant captain of industry. But the contribution of open borders to booming innovation may be more indirect. Henry Ford’s innovation in manufacturing was, it is too rarely observed, a human capital saving technology change: it allowed unskilled workers to make cars, and for that matter, to buy them, too. The car, actually, is among other things a human capital saving technology: it’s easier to drive a car than to ride a horse. Mass manufacture tended to aim at cheapness, at bringing things within reach of the masses, who in those days were just out in the streets. If you’re an innovator, your incentives to develop cheap vs. expensive innovations are much influenced by the volume of low-income people. If there’s a huge mass market of impoverished day laborers, cheap pays. Nowadays, we associate frugal innovation with India. But US firms could probably do it if they had the right kind of domestic market. Indeed, they could probably do it much better, since the US is a lot more productive, in general, than India.

Tyler Cowen isn’t the only economist to see a big historical slowdown in technological progress: Paul Krugman has been saying so since the 1990s; and there’s Robert Gordon’s well-publicized paper “Is US Economic Growth Over?” which includes the following intriguing suggestion:

Much more controversial is the question of unskilled immigration, which suggests a provocative question. Why was unlimited immigration into the US so successful throughout the 19th century, until it was stopped by restrictive legislation in the 1920s, yet could not be considered as a plausible public policy today? Unlimited immigration before 1913 did not cause mass unemployment. Immigrants were extremely well-informed about the availability of employment in the US economy. They arrived when the economy was strong and postponed their arrival (or returned to their home countries) when the economy was weak.16

This is one of the suggestions under the heading “What to do about it?” and Gordon, who is strongly of the opinion that the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century was the golden age of growth, seems to be suggesting that we might revive the golden age success in technological progress if we revived the immigration policies of the golden age. A very crude model of this is that you’re much likely to find the right man for the job if you can recruit from the whole world than if you can recruit from the, say, 20% of humanity that probably has real access to the US. But as I say, it doesn’t seem that the inventors themselves are particularly likely to be immigrants.

Just what moves the economic frontier forward is a vexed question. But past economic growth has consisted in large measure of making the goods enjoyed by privileged classes cheaper and available to the poor, and also, in destroying the jobs of the moderately-skilled through human-capital-saving machinery that allows the hardly-skilled-at-all to take their jobs. This suggests it might be technologically stultifying to have a society where everyone is middle class, so that there’s no further democratization of luxury to be done, nor any cheap unskilled labor to substitute for skilled middle-class workers by empowering them with the right gadgets. Open borders, if it could be combined with the euthanasia of the territorialist social safety net, might be just what is needed to launch a new golden age of immigration and innovation.

Arbitrariness

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A bemused Facebook post from Jose Antonio Vargas:

Numbers.

I’ve been thinking numbers since I read about the White House’s immigration plan.

So 8 years? Why not 10? Why not 7? Why not 5?

I grew up with the DREAM Act, when the age limit (per House and Senate versions) were 21, then 25, then 29, then 30, then 35, back to 30.

Numbers.

This should make people uneasy. These numbers have huge effects on people’s lives, yet they’re basically picked out of thin air. How can we avoid this kind of arbitrariness? By going back to first principles, and figuring out what, after all, justice demands.

Tyler Cowen’s not too convincing argument against open borders

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Tyler Cowen’s capacious mind prioritizes input over synthesis. He is a compulsive moderate, happiest in the mainstream, always glad to have an excuse not to rock the boat. I respect him tremendously. I am a happy user of his Principles of Economics textbook, and his blog, Marginal Revolution, is in my top five. Better yet is MR University. I haven’t listened to all of it yet, but I listened for hours last Friday to their brief profiles of many development economists, while doing the more mechanical parts of exam grading. I’ve rarely encountered such great content in a course distributed online, and never in economics. It’s amazing that this stuff is free. Three cheers for Cowen and Tabarrok’s two-man crusade to educate the world in economics. Cowen isn’t as dazzlingly lucid as Bryan Caplan as his best, but his judgment is probably more reliable precisely because of his prejudice for moderation. I sympathize with Cowen’s conservatism, his deference to consensus views. But of course, that’s also why I wouldn’t expect him to favor open borders, though he is pro-immigration. Open borders is too radical an idea for him. Still, he’s not one to dismiss a position without argument. Here’s Cowen on “Why open borders won’t work”:

The first issue is to pin down what we mean by open borders.

Land use restrictions are often a more important “”immigration policy” than border control per se.  It is not just how many people getin at what cost, but who can afford to live here.  This includes zoning laws, restrictions on the number of people allowed to live in an apartment, policies toward “squatters,” and rules for the homesteading of public property.  So by “open borders” I mean also liberal land use policies; nominally open borders would matter far less if unskilled laborers couldn’t also afford to live in the U.S.  (Note to anti-immigration types: you are focusing too much on the ease of crossing the border and not enough on the costs of living here.  How much the best immigration restrictions involve land use policy or border policy is a curiously underexplored question.)

Now, it’s true that immigration could be controlled indirectly through land use policies. But I think these questions are more separable than Cowen implies. Even if land use restrictions placed an absolutely binding ceiling on how many people could live in the US, so that even under borders no net immigration were possible, open borders would still make a huge difference. Land values would soar, and many US citizens whose value of living in the US is relatively low would sell out and emigrate. Since some of those who don’t own real estate would, I suppose, find themselves effectively evicted from the country, which is bad, but of course this whole scenario is counter-factual. In practice, whatever limit land use regulations notionally place on the number of people who can live in the US are not even close to binding, and if they threatened to become binding, they could be relaxed. A few metropolitan downtowns might be blocked by law from increasing their populations, and open borders would just drive up rents, but plenty of other places would allow developers to house the new people.

If both the border and land use were free, markets would be very powerful in organizing mass migration.  Consider Hyderabad.  Many of the very poor live either at or right next to garbage dumps.  They live in tents or ramshackle lean-tos.  Their jobs often involve scavenging the garbage dump for potentially useful scraps.  Why do they live there?  Do they like the short commute?  Is it because they love the Indian culture one finds right next to the garbage dump?  No, no, and no.  They live there because they will put up with almost anything to have a chance of survival.

How many of these people would book passage on a slow ship to Baltimore, with the hope of living in a richer garbage dump?  The ship would serve cheap rice and lentils, make them sew garments while sailing, and collect further payment five years after arrival, tagging them with GPS if need be or “monitoring” relatives back home.  Or perhaps the Indian government would pay their way.

How about the nine or so million Haitians — almost all living in extreme poverty — who face a much shorter and cheaper boat trip?

I like Cowen’s imaginative filling out of the picture of what open borders would look like. I think it would turn out something like this. But he hasn’t gotten to the downside yet. After all, probably these people would find a richer garbage dump to live on, and since he hasn’t given any reason to expect natives to be harmed by it, the changes envisioned may be Pareto-improving.

I can imagine the U.S. staying a high-quality capitalist democracy with some percentage of the population living in garbage dumps and shantytowns.  While I think we are underinvesting in shantytowns, the permissible percentage is not very high and almost certainly falls short of fifteen percent.  (Btw, there is much complaining about the Mexicans, but in fact we share a long land border with a relatively wealthy third world country; this is rarely appreciated.)

OK, but given how important the issue is, I’d appreciate a little more theory here. What exactly would prevent the US from being a high-quality capitalist democracy with 20% of the population living in shantytowns? Would the shantytown dwellers stage a revolution? Would they vote for redistributionist politicians? But of course, that assumes they’re given the franchise, and that doesn’t have to happen automatically. Cowen would be the first to agree that the golden age of US-led innovation was the golden age of open borders. Capitalist democracy was thriving then, too. Things have changed a lot since then, and yes, global income gaps are larger and the relative poverty of immigrants might be more severe than in the 19th century. But the world is also more Americanized, democratic, English-speaking, etc., than it was in the 19th century, and anyway, is there any evidence that America was pushing the limits of its absorptive capacity in 1914? With all due respect to Burkean conservatism and the precautionary principle, the humanitarian stakes are very high here. It’s fair to ask for a clearer argument of what exactly Cowen means by “high-quality capitalist democracy,” and how it’s threatened by open borders, and if so, whether “high-quality capitalist democracy” in Cowen’s sense (whatever that is) is really so valuable as to justify shutting out so many tens or hundreds of millions from a great chance at a better life.

That is why I do not favor unlimited immigration.  To the extent that nominally “open borders” would be tolerable, it is because we already impose implicit immigration restrictions through land use policies.

That all said, I will reiterate my view that we could take in many more immigrants than we are doing now, both skilled and unskilled.

Maybe Cowen and I aren’t so far apart. Cowen’s not sure what the upper bound on absorptive capacity is, but it’s certainly higher than what the US permits now. Raise it, see what happens, repeat. I wonder if he could be persuaded to position himself as an open borders skeptic rather than nailing his flag to “open borders won’t work.” Also, I wonder whether he’d endorse my DRITI scheme, which seeks to safeguard natives’ living standards and the integrity of existing institutions while retiring discretionary migration restrictions.