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

“The Christian Perspective on Immigration”

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I was struck by the beginning of this article published at the website of the anti-immigration group, Center for Immigration Studies:

What are They Thinking: A Look at the Roman Catholic “Doctrine” on Immigration

It takes little effort to notice and to conclude that the Roman Catholic Church has, in the past few years, intensified its lobbying on behalf of immigrants and thus has intensified its lobbying on behalf of “comprehensive immigration reform”.1 Indeed, it can be argued that “comprehensive immigration reform”, as envisioned by the Church and by those who stand in agreement with her, is designed primarily to benefit immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, more than it is designed to benefit the current national population.2

The Church’s lobbying stems from, dare I say, an erroneous application, in the political sphere, of the Christian perspective on immigration. The Christian perspective on immigration makes no distinction between legal and illegal. Actually, allow me to be more precise: the Christian perspective on immigrants makes no distinction between legal and illegal. The Christian perspective on immigrants makes no distinction between legal and illegal because the Christian perspective per se does not see “immigrant” but sees “child of God”.

St. Paul, in a letter to the Christian community in Galatia, dated somewhere between 50 and 58 AD, articulates well this deeper perspective: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” One could easily add: “neither legal immigrant nor illegal immigrant”.3 This is a properly Christian perspective, a faith perspective that considers each individual in the light of the One considered to be the God-man, Jesus Christ, beyond human categories. Edwin O’Brien, then-Archbishop of Baltimore, articulated this perspective in a letter4 about illegal immigrants dated July 16, 2008: “Dare we look at these human beings as made in the image and likeness of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ? Dare we look at them, in other words, with and through the eyes of Christ for whom no one is illegal, no one alien, no one a criminal who labors honestly to feed his family?”

Yet in spite of this, and of a lot of quotes illustrating the Church hierarchy’s fervor on the subject of immigration, the author of the article opposes the Catholic Church’s position. The author’s argument is difficult for me to follow, because some of it seems to rely on the reader to just dismiss the Roman Catholic view as absurd. I might do well to quote this paragraph, so that I don’t overstate the extent to which the Catholic Church agrees with me: Continue reading “The Christian Perspective on Immigration” →

Honduras

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Bad news from Honduras:

The Honduran Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional a project to build privately-run cities, with their own police and tax system.

The “model cities” project was backed by President Porfirio Lobo, who said it would attract foreign investment and create jobs

By 13 votes to one, Supreme Court judges decided that the proposal violated the principle of sovereignty.

Demonstrators celebrated the decision outside the court in Tegucigalpa.

“This is great news for the Honduran people. This decision has prevented the country going back into a feudal system that was in place 1,000 years ago,” said lawyer Fredin Funez.

The government proposal to create some 20 “special development zones – as the new cities were officially called – was approved by Congress last year.

The Supreme Court has now ruled that the law approved in Congress is unconstitutional, as it violates the territorial integrity of Honduras, as well as the sovereignty of the government.

“I am sad. All the Congress wanted was to give jobs to all Hondurans,” said Congress speaker Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Prior to this, there was a kerfuffle when Paul Romer, the great economic theorist and leading promoter of the idea of charter cities, made a stormy exit from the project which he had earlier been promoting, after a deal was made with a private development group without his knowledge. His complaint seems to be lack of transparency. For what it’s worth, that’s kind of my impression, too. MGK Group needed to proclaim to the world, and to Hondurans, what they were going to do, fill their minds with dreams of the future, sell the plan. Michael Strong, head of the MGK development group which would have built the charter cities, seems to have wanted to build a free-market paradise. But it seems to me they didn’t offer enough detail. Would more detail, faster, more publicly, have reassured the Supreme Court? What if MGK Group had managed to make the project popular enough to mobilize their own demonstrators in the street? MGK Group defends their lack of transparency thus: Continue reading Honduras →

Open borders and climate change

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Could climate change be good? Wikipedia’s article on “Regional effects of climate change” lists a wide variety of effects of climate change, all of which seem to be bad. That seems odd. Unless the world’s present climate system somehow represents the perfect ideal, presumably climate change should be good for some reasons. Why should we think the present climate system to be ideal? Is it because this is the climate humans evolved in, and humans are perfectly adapted to it? But that can’t be the case, because humans spread to most of the world rather quickly, and too recently for evolution to have altered us much. For the theistically inclined, one might say that God, in His wisdom, made the world ideal for man. But in the Bible, God tells Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” In other words, we have divine endorsement to alter the environment. We certainly have altered the environment greatly since we came on the scene. We’ve been doing that for thousands of years. We’ve already adapted to many environments, from tropical rainforests to arctic tundras. Why should it be a problem to adapt to a world a few degrees warmer? Studies show that global warming will benefit some regions. Some plants in arid regions might benefit. One supposes that places like Canada, Russia, even New England, which are uncomfortably cold, could flourish in a warmer world.

Aside from the ethics of whether we have a “right” to alter the natural environment (I won’t explore that), much of the problem with climate change is that even if it doesn’t reduce the capacity of Earth as a whole to sustain a growing population, it probably will make some regions less amenable to human flourishing. The most vulnerable country in the world to global warming may be Bangladesh, a country with a dense and rapidly growing population which could see 11 percent of its land inundated if seas rose by 1 meter. It seems likely that the burden of adapting to climate change will fall disproportionately on poor countries that played a rather small role in causing it. Suppose that, as seems likely, other countries are benefiting, in the sense that their environments are becoming more conducive to agriculture, more capable of sustaining large populations. If Bangladeshis were allowed to emigrate to these countries, that probably wouldn’t reconcile them to the loss of their homes, but it would do much to prevent possible humanitarian catastrophes.

It stands to reason that open borders should be part of the environmentalist agenda. If we are altering the climate, we need to adapt to that, and migration, moving from the areas most damaged by environmental change to the areas most favored by it, is one of the most powerful instruments of adaptation available. If we want to avoid altering the climate, there will be some regions where human beings can live with the least damaging environmental footprint. We should make it possible for them to do so (and then maybe arrange a Pigovian tax regime to encourage them to).

UPDATE: A column titled Moving to Greenland in the face of global warming by Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg for VOX makes some related points.

Rawlsian Locational Choice (a highly abstract open borders metric)

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I’ve been thinking more about how the openness of the world’s borders might be quantified (see here for the beginning of this topic). In that post, I suggested several criteria– right to invite, welcoming to sojourners, family values, social integration, refuge, opportunity, and civil rights– which might be evaluated separately, and then compiled into a single “index” value that purports to measure the openness of a country’s borders. The categories listed are not readily measurable, of course. Is a country “welcoming to sojourners?” Well, what kind of sojourners? What if Country A welcomes most aspiring sojourners, because mostly high-skilled sojourners happen to be interested in coming to it, while Country B rejects most aspiring sojourners because the only people who want to come are low-skill, angry young men from a country which is historically an enemy? Does it make a difference if Country B would be delighted to accept the kind of sojourners that go to Country A? Questions of this kind can be asked about all of the items in the list.

In general, there is an important distinction between rules and results. There are huge differences in demand for immigration to different countries. Generally, the United States and the Anglosphere, and probably to a slightly lesser extent Western Europe, are attractive destinations for migrants, while there are probably few who aspire to migrate to the world’s many impoverished and/or unfree countries. Simply to calculate the foreign-born share of the population would thus be a very mistaken way to measure and compare the openness of borders, because the countries with the highest foreign-born population shares are often the hardest to get into. Foreign-born share of population is a measure of results. An openness index should in principle measure rules. But rules are not inherently quantitative. Suppose a country only lets in people with a college education or more. That’s a rule. There’s no number there.

The following is an attempt to think clearly about how the openness of borders might be measured. It isn’t a practical program of data collection, and how to implement a data collection program that would achieve it, even approximately, is a further problem of some difficulty. It’s more like what economists call a “model.”

Suppose you are unborn. You don’t know where you’ll be born. You might be born in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, or a shantytown in Bangladesh, or the latest scion of the British royal family, or in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Of course, this is the famous Rawlsian “original position,” but where I’m going with it is a bit different. My question isn’t “how would you design the world?”– though that’s certainly an interesting question which, I think, must have a pro-open borders answer. What I want to ask, though, is different. Suppose you know enough about the world that you know where you’d like to live– America, Switzerland, China, Mozambique, Italy, whatever. The question is: What are your odds that you can get your wish? Continue reading Rawlsian Locational Choice (a highly abstract open borders metric) →

More responses to Caplan’s critics

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NOTE: All commenters are referred to as “he” in the text below. I did this because the only commenters whose pen names were gendered were male, and in my experience, most commenters on libertarian blogs seem to be male. I suppose I could have used the singular “they” but it seems ungrammatical when one is referring to a specific person. Apologies to any female commenters who might have been misidentified by my choice of pronoun.

Open borders is the most one-sided issue of our times. It wins the argument and to spare. That’s my position, and if there’s a certain bravado about it, that’s my way of daring those who disagree with me to justify themselves. I want to flush out the arguments against open borders, so I can refute them. Yet to argue with run-of-the-mill immigration critics is a tedious business, because their intellectual level is so low (see my dissection of Victor Davis Hanson) that the response could only consist in cutting through crude prejudices and elementary fallacies. Bryan Caplan’s Open Borders Persuasion Bleg a few days ago was useful because he evokes a more intelligent kind of critic. Indeed, as I noted in my previous response to Caplan’s critics, Caplan has managed to muster, in his comments section, the most clear-thinking group of critics of open borders on the web, because they’ve seen him make the case for open borders in its glittering clarity. They are informed dissenters. Though still mistaken.

Caplan started the thread with this invitation:

Immigration restrictions probably have bigger effects on the world’s economy than all other regulations combined.  As far as I can tell, virtually every moral theory – utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Kantian, Christian, and Marxist for starters –  implies that these effects are very bad.  As a blogger, I’ve tried (though perhaps not hard enough) to make open borders my pet issue – to convince as many people as possible that the cause of free immigration is of overriding value.

My question for you: How persuasive have I been?  In particular, how persuasive have I been for you personally?  Yes, polling your own blog readers obviously courts a strong selective bias, but I still want to hear your answers.

There were probably more positive than negative responses to this introduction, including some who were completely converted to the open borders cause from indifference or hostility. I’ll focus on the negative responses though because they show what we still need to work on. I’ll cover most of them, but skip the long comments from Ghost of Christmas Past because they would need their own post.  Continue reading More responses to Caplan’s critics →