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

STEM visas and the planned economy mindset

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Matt Yglesias writes:

In my first read of the Octogang’s bipartisan immigration reform framework, I thought that making high-skill reform conditioned on receipt of a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics advanced degree from an American institution was too restrictive.

I stand by that… On the other hand, you can read this as a very lax provision. What it does, in essence, is create a huge incentive for foreign-born college graduates to apply to master’s programs in STEM fields. Or looked at the other way, it gives accredited American universities a license to print money by launching foreigner-friendly master’s programs in STEM fields. If an Indian computer programmer can increase his salary sixfold by moving to the United States, then why wouldn’t he take out $50,000 in loans to obtain a master’s degree in computer science from some random American university? The programs would have to be selective enough to avoid totally discrediting the university sponsoring them, but there’s absolutely no need for them to engage in any useful educating whatsoever for the value proposition to be enormous.

Exactly. At bottom, we should be regulating immigration by price, not quantity. It’s not really helpful to say we “need” more STEM graduates. If STEM specialists are expensive, they’re expensive. Some price will clear the market, or maybe we need to outsource some jobs. There may be local positive externalities to STEM graduates, but that’s highly doubtful; to the extent that there’s a fairly strong theoretical case that positive externalities from generating “ideas” are important, these are at the global level. Trying to import STEM graduates in particular smacks of economic planning, with all the accompanying stupidities and inefficiencies. Let the market decide what types of immigrants workers we need, or to be more accurate, what kind of foreigners US employers are willing to pay enough to compensate for any disutility that might be involved in moving. Not Congress. Get them out of it. I can easily imagine useless Masters programs springing up to exploit what Yglesias calls “the advanced degree immigration arbitrage opportunity.” That’s why DRITI is the right way to open the borders.

That said, I’d rather hand out licenses to print visas to random American universities that leave it with State Department consular officials. The less discretion, and the more decentralization, the better. If the right to migrate becomes law for one arbitrarily selected subset of people– those who have STEM degrees from American universities– that’s a small step in the right direction.

Rawls’ highly unpersuasive attempt to evade the open borders ramifications of his own theory

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Open borders advocates sometimes claim that Rawlsian ethics imply support for open borders. If this is an implication of Rawls’ theory of justice, however, it’s one that Rawls himself does not acknowledge, for reasons he mentions in passing in his book The Law of Peoples:

Concerning the second problem, immigration, in #4.3 I argue that an important role of government, however arbitrary a society’s boundaries may appear from a historical point of view, is to be the effective agent of a people as they take responsibility for their territory and the size of their population, as well as for maintaining the land’s environmental integrity. Unless a definite agent is given responsibility for maintaining an asset and bears the responsibility and loss for not doing so, that asset tends to deteriorate. On my account the role of the institution of property is to prevent this deterioration from occurring. In the present case, the asset is the people’s territory and its potential capacity to support them in perpetuity; and the agent is the people itself as politically organized. The perpetuity condition is crucial. People must recognize that they cannot make up for failing to regulate their numbers or to care for their land by conquest in war, or by migrating into another people’s territory without their consent.

How convincing is this argument?

Rawls’ suggestion that a people should be concerned about their land’s ability to “support them in perpetuity” exhibits a strange neglect of international trade. Almost no country today is economically autarkic. In that sense, no country’s land “supports” its people. Some countries, like the United States, could probably get by without international trade, albeit with a lower standard of living. Others, certainly including Hong Kong and Singapore, but probably Japan too, and many others, could not do so, or only with tremendous difficulty. But that’s not a problem, because they don’t need to. They can buy what they lack from foreigners. A primitive Malthusian notion of carrying capacity seems to be at work in Rawls’ mind, but Malthus has been wrong, most of the time, concerning human populations in the last 200 years. Moreover, if a country were really on the verge of a Malthusian nightmare of mass starvation, it would not be an attractive destination for immigrants. It seems safe to say that there is no country in the world today where existing migration restrictions could be plausibly justified by an argument from limited carrying capacity. Continue reading Rawls’ highly unpersuasive attempt to evade the open borders ramifications of his own theory →

Open borders and the viability of democracy

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Let me raise a very large question: Is democracy viable under open borders?

Of course the question has no single answer: terms need to be defined, for one thing.

Democracy nowadays is usually taken to mean “one person, one vote,” which in turn seems like a political expression of the claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” Yet in the US Senate, voters in small states have 10 times as much per capita representation as voters from large states, or more. Nonetheless, I think most Americans would regard with horror the idea that anyone could be given 2 votes, or 7, or 0.3. The clause in the Constitution which reads…

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

… is regarded with horror, rightly, but I think for somewhat the wrong reason. The right reason for horror is that the Constitution seems to be tacitly condoning slavery. Worse, the slaves’ weight in this count increased masters’ representation. The wrong reason to be offended by the clause is to assume that it implies that black slaves were only three-fifths of a human. Logically, this is a nonsequitur, particularly since the slaves didn’t get to exercise three-fifths of a vote. If the slaves had been able to vote, but their votes had counted only three-fifths as much as those of free whites, that would have been much better than the system that actually prevailed in the Old South.

In fact, I would raise the question: is there really anything so wrong with giving different people different numbers of votes? If a municipality gave long-term residents two votes, recent arrivals one, would there be anything especially wicked about that? What if an electoral system gave an extra vote to anyone who had voted for a losing candidate in the most recent election, as a means of preventing tyranny of the majority? If there is some reason to regard such practices as unwise or even immoral, should “one person, one vote” be considered part of the definition of democracy, or is it just a desirable feature that some democracies might have?

This is relevant to open borders, because one way to safeguard a country’s institutions while opening the borders to immigrants might be to let immigrants vote, but give them fewer votes than natives. That way, if a very large number of immigrants came, say 200 million in the US case, they could have a political voice while leaving natives secure in their electoral dominance, with possible benefits for institutional continuity. But whether this represents a way that democracy could be viable under open borders depends on whether “one person, one vote” is part of the definition of democracy.

Loosely speaking, democracy seems to mean everyone can vote, as opposed to, say, gentry or aristocrats or oligarchs. Nowadays Britain is usually considered to have become democratic only in the later 19th century as the franchise was extended to all or almost all adult males, but of course Britain had voting for centuries before that. So, for that matter, did ancient Sparta, after its own fashion. Indeed, while to say that ancient Athens was a democracy and ancient Sparta was not captures an important truth, it is not a truth easily defined, let alone reconciled with any modern definitions of democracy, for the Athenians had lots of slaves and there were also many metics (foreigners) in the city: by this estimate, less than one-third of the population were citizens, and of those only the males could vote. For citizens, though, Athenian politics was highly participatory and inclusive; much more so than any democratic polity that exists today. Sparta was also probably more participatory and inclusive than any modern democracy for the members of its fierce citizen-elite lording it over masses of helots with whom the Spartan state was nominally in a state of war for centuries, so as to absolve its Krypteia or secret service of manslaughter as they made routine killings of uppity helots. If you’re going to deny Sparta the status of democracy on the “one man, one vote” criterion, Athens fails that test, too. Bottom line: democracy means everyone can vote, but who is “everyone?” All “citizens”– however defined? All residents? All natives? All whom the state regards as subject to its authority? Probably no answer could be offered which would correspond with all our traditional intuitions and historical judgments about what polities qualify as democratic. Continue reading Open borders and the viability of democracy →

Newtown, availability bias, and why civil disobedience works

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It is a well-known pattern in human behavior that people tend to overestimate the probability or frequency of any event which easily springs to mind. For example, Americans tend to greatly overestimate the number of minorities in the US. Why? Probably because minorities stand out, are striking, and therefore attract attention, and are easier to recall, particularly if one is prompted to recall people on the basis of their race. Similarly, people wildly overestimate the number of gays, and think there are a lot more immigrants than there really are. Again: gays and immigrants are striking, therefore easy to recall. Very few people are afraid of driving, but some are afraid of flying on airplanes, for safety reasons. In fact, flying is far safer than driving, but plane crashes, when they do (rarely) occur, are striking, and easy to call to mind. This common cognitive error is called “availability bias.”

Lately, I’ve been reminded of this by the national furor over the killings in Newtown, Connecticut, or Sandy Hook, or wherever (link). I don’t know the details: I have no interest in them. You shouldn’t either. It’s 20-some deaths, in a country of 300 million, a world of 7 billion: far below the number of murders that happen in the US a typical day, let alone deaths from AIDS or malaria. It shouldn’t be considered news. But one of the nuisances in an age of mass media is that availability bias and the media’s quest for profits conspire periodically to waste the nation’s time on events which ordinary people’s statistical ineptitude fool them into believing are important. Of course, you can say that every human life is enormous value if you like– I won’t contradict you– but then (if you want to be consistent) every birth, every marriage proposal (a landmark in most human lives), every heart-warming death in the midst of a loving family ought to be news too. People should resolutely ignore stories like that out of Newtown. The media should refuse to report on it. Such stories actually make people more ignorant, because they reinforce availability bias. The most scrupulously accurate reporting on extremely unrepresentative events is, an important sense, misinformation: people think they’re learning something about how the world world works, when they’re not. “Why is our age peculiarly haunted by nihilistic violence?” people might think. It isn’t: on the contrary, it is amazingly peaceful.

But availability bias has an upside. If we give disproportionate attention to particularly striking instances of evil, we can also give disproportionate attention to particularly striking acts, or lives, or courage, self-sacrifice, and zeal for truth. Heroes, one might say, are a function of availability bias. The hero leads one life but his example, his memory, may resonate in millions of lives. Grisly crimes seize our attention to our detriment; but the examples of heroes edify us, more or less. Of course, a lot of heroes actually set rather bad examples. Alexander the Great was brave, no doubt, and had some other virtues; but there is much about him that ought not to be emulated. Napoleon’s example exerted a decidedly negative influence on the life of Europe. I think, in particular, that he left behind a widespread impression– on Hegel, for example– that it is okay for certain great men, because of their world-historic importance, to violate the moral law. Che Guevara was a bad man. King David had his virtues– and his crimes. It’s better to think about heroes like these than to think about Newtown. They are (most of them) a more edifying subject for contemplation than that, and they are more genuinely important.

Here the heroes of civil disobedience occupy a special place. The archetype here is not a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King: they matter, but not just for their civil disobedience, for they were also eloquent and held positions of leadership. Rather, take someone like Rosa Parks. She was not in (much of) a position of authority (she was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP). At any rate, it wasn’t by using her position of authority that she made a difference. She simply disobeyed the order of a bus driver to sit in the “colored” section in the back of the bus. Or Mohamed Biouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who by lighting himself on fire in protest of police abuse, catalyzed the Arab Spring revolutions that proceeded to topple the governments of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Or many of the otherwise obscure individuals who through Christian martyrdom became enrolled in the lists of Christian saints and inspired people for centuries or millennia thereafter. The influence of these people depends on availability bias. I would argue, if pressed, that one ought to ignore an event like Newtown, because it is not actually important to the lives of almost anyone– it shouldn’t induce you to modify your behavior, or your opinions– and it’s not edifying to contemplate. It is appropriate to contemplate Rosa Parks or St. Vincent, because their lives are edifying. But I don’t think people focus on them just for the sake of being edified. They focus on them because they are striking; only in this case, it just so happens that they are striking in a good way.

Availability bias helps to explain why civil disobedience works, at least sometimes. Much more often, at any rate, than the merely numerical weight of civil disobedients in the human population would warrant. (Also see my post Why Jose Antonio Vargas Matters.)

UPDATE: I suppose I should make it clearer why this is related to open borders. It’s because I think civil disobedience is likely to be one of the means by which open borders is established. A lot of people will start out by being against the deportation of Jose Antonio Vargas, or some similar figure. In the course of much debate and mobilization, they’ll realize that they can’t justify restricting the set of the non-deportable in any reasonable, non-arbitrary way short of making everyone non-deportable, which, after phasing out the anomaly of trying to bar entry physically, will end in open borders.

Communitarianism, open borders, and “prisoners of the food metaphor”

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Let me start by quoting a good article on deportation at Huffington Post:

The True Cost of Deportation (Marielena Hincapie)

Americans are learning about a reality that immigrant families and communities have known about for some time: there has been a monumental rise in policies to deport the men and women who are living, working, and raising families in this country. Earlier this week, the Migration Policy Institute issued a report that shined a spotlight on just how much our federal government spends each year to detain and deport immigrants. Their findings are staggering: funding for these programs, which are housed under the Department of Homeland Security, dwarfs spending on the FBI, the Secret Service, and all other federal law enforcement combined.

What the Migration Policy Institute did not, and could not, quantify was the societal cost we all incur when a routine traffic stop turns a worker’s commute into a one-way trip out of the country she has made her home. The study did not consider the psychological cost we place upon U.S. citizen children whose studies are adversely affected because they worry about whether their mother will be able to pick them up from school.

This report chronicled the rise of a formidable immigration enforcement machine that came to life as a result of the immigration laws of 1986 and 1996, and rapidly expanded in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. This machine has allowed the federal government to deport individuals at unprecedented levels; records show that more than 400,000 people were banished from the country in the last year alone. Among these are tens of thousands of parents, men and women who will now miss birthdays, Thanksgivings, and other celebrations with their children.

Those costs are impossible to estimate: how much is a mother’s presence at a birthday worth? What price would you put on a loved one’s participation in life’s daily challenges and celebrations? These costs extend beyond the immediate family. Each working parent who is deported takes her ability to provide economically for her children with her, removing dollars that would otherwise have been spent in communities and local economies across the country.

A $17.9 billion price tag on federal deportation policies is evidence that our taxpayer dollars are being misallocated and that our priorities as a nation are off. At a time when our nation is about to embark upon a serious immigration reform debate, we must acknowledge that the true cost of these deportation policies will only continue to grow unless we create a process for the 11 million aspiring citizens who live and work in this country to apply for citizenship. We now know what some people’s insatiable appetite for deportations costs, both financially and at societal level, and we should be shocked by the bill.

This is a good jumping-off point for a foray into a discussion that started when commenter BK responded to Bryan Caplan’s recent post by suggesting that a communitarian ethical perspective would provide a justification for migration restrictions. Caplan wrote:

Philosophers emphasize a menagerie of mutually incompatible competing moral theories: utilitarianism, Kantianism, Rawlsianism, egalitarianism, even libertarianism. On immigration, however, all serious moral theories appear to support open borders.

BK replies to this:

Suspiciously wrong. Communitarianism is more popular than libertarianism among philosophers.

John Lee and Vipul Naik both seem to concede the point (I wrote a brief dissent). And that brings me to the quote above. I’m not sure that $17.9 billion– a little over 0.1% of GDP– is too high a price to pay for deportation policies. That is, if someone thinks the moral cost is worth it, I’d be surprised (though glad, I suppose) if someone felt the financial cost was not worth it. Certainly, I’d happily sacrifice 0.1%, or for that matter, 10%… well, actually, since a moral imperative is at stake here, I might as well say, oh I don’t know, 80%… of GDP, to prevent these deportations from happening. The more powerful argument in the article pertains to the intolerable moral cost of separating families by force. And that seems to be precisely a communitarian argument. If anything, it is what I might call the communitarian case against migration restrictions that is the most urgent of all.

I don’t wish, however, to pose as an expert in communitarian philosophy. I assume I haven’t read enough of the relevant authors, though I have read Alasdair MacIntyre, and (not a philosopher exactly) Robert Putnam, on whose recent work I commented here. Yet I do have some communitarian sympathies, and I’ll use an essay I wrote seven and a half years ago as an EconLog comment as an idiosyncratic segue from the individualism characteristic of economics into a more communitarian view of the world. The point of departure is utility theory, of which the essay is both an extension and a critique. You might, if you like, characterize the essay as a communitarian critique of economics. (In those days, I was writing under the pen name “Lancelot Finn.”)

Someday I’d like to write a book entitled Prisoners of the Food Metaphor: Why Economists Misunderstand the World.

After laying the groundwork by reviewing the miraculous power of division of labor, specialization and trade, and economies of scale to better the human condition (an argument mimicking, and updating, that of Adam Smith); after arguing that economies of scale are more important than science in explaining improved human welfare; I then take my experience in the remote Russian republic of Tuva as a starting place for questioning whether we know that humans are better off at all. Continue reading Communitarianism, open borders, and “prisoners of the food metaphor” →