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

Self-driving cars and undocumented immigration

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Technology has altered migration patterns many times. New modes of transportation– railroads, faster and safer ships, cars, airplanes– made migration cheaper and easier. The internet and cheap international telephony have made it easier for migrants to stay plugged in to their home countries, and possibly discourage assimilation among migrants, though on the other hand, modern technology and cultural globalization probably encourage pre-assimilation. The internet also encourages international dating. What about the next transportation technology that seems to be in the pipeline, self-driving cars?

It’s always hard to foresee how new technologies will change society, the economy, and people’s way of life. But I’ll try. Self-driving cars probably won’t crowd out private car ownership anytime soon, but they will make it optional. A car sitting in a parking space is a waste. It’s a waste of both the car and the parking space. The taxi cab model uses cars and space more efficiently, but of course, it’s labor-intensive. Labor is expensive. That’s why even a short cab ride can cost $10-$15 or more. But a self-driving taxi cab could be much cheaper. In some ways, it would be more convenient as well. Presumably you could summon one with a smartphone, and order it to drop you off at the entrance of wherever it is you want to go. If you’ve been drinking, no problem. Also, you’re not require to drive the same car, day in, day out. Cab companies, with a much larger volume of business, could offer a large selection. Got a big load? Order a roomier vehicle. By yourself? Order a miniature one-car cab. Electric cars might benefit, because people wouldn’t suffer from “range anxiety.” Smartphones plus self-driving cars might allow for sophisticated forms of carpooling, with minivans planning out complex routes on the fly so as to serve many customers at the same time. Some parking lots would turn back into green spaces. It’s hard to say whether cities or suburbs will benefit more. Currently, it’s suburbanites who have to bear the burdens of car ownership. City dwellers can do without them, relying on public transit instead. On the other hand, city dwellers may be very glad to be able to get out of town at will, and to take a self-driving cab when they’re in a hurry, or late at night, instead of navigating buses and metros.

What does this have to do with immigration?

1. If long-distance cargo transport came to be dominated by self-driving trucks, that might complicate border control. Currently, it’s probably not too difficult for a US citizen to bring someone in by car across the Mexican border, hiding them in the trunk, say. But it’s risky, because if the driver gets caught, they can be punished. (I can’t seem to find out what the punishment is, but I think it’s pretty serious.) But what if there’s no driver? Maybe you could punish the owner, but what if you can’t find the owner, or can’t find out who the owner is? Or what if the owner says the illegal immigrant was there without his knowledge or permission?

2. Once undocumented immigrants arrive, one of the things that makes life difficult for them is that they might not be able to get drivers’ licenses. But in the age of self-driving cars, drivers’ licenses will no longer be a sine qua non of modern life, even in the suburbs. Many natives may not bother to get them. Undocumented immigrants will do just fine without them. They’ll have an unprecedented range of movement, without needing the fake papers.

3. Professions that involve home visits may be especially facilitated by self-driving cars. In jobs that involve a lot of time on the road, not having to be behind the wheel will be an immense blessing. The stressful and boring time spent watching the road can be spent socializing on Facebook, or studying, or watching movies, or taking classes, or maybe even doing some kind of paid work that can be done on a smartphone. Since undocumented workers seem disproportionately to be involved in driving-intensive jobs– housecleaning, landscaping, etc.– self-driving cars will make their lifestyles pleasanter. Perhaps that will even lure more of them to come. Those professions will also be easier to get into when one will no longer need a car, or a driver’s license.

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.