All posts by Vipul Naik

Vipul Naik founded the Open Borders website in March 2012. See also: Vipul Naik's personal statement Vipul Naik's description of open borders on his personal site Page about Vipul Naik on Open Borders

Are illegal immigrants job thieves?

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The nomenclature for illegal immigrants page on this site has a summary of the major terminological battles about the labeling of people who cross borders illegally or overstay their visas. Restrictionists prefer to use the term “illegal alien” which is sometimes shortened to “illegal.” Among the criticisms that have been raised regarding this term is that, even if you care a lot about the legal versus illegal distinction and are unimpressed by the moral and practical counter-arguments, it is still inaccurate to call a person an “illegal” because illegality refers to an action rather than to a person. The argument is made, for instance, in this article on Diversity Inc.

Sophisticated restrictionists would no doubt counter that, obviously, discerning thinkers on the issue can understand the difference between illegal presence in a particular country and being an illegal person. Thus, when language change advocates argue against the use of the word “illegal” they are underestimating the intellectual sophistication of the people using these terms. This may well be the case, but I find at least one piece of evidence that points in the other direction: the use of the term “job thieves” for those illegal immigrants who find jobs.

I first encountered the term in a fascinating and illuminative piece by the courageous anti-immigration activist Brenda Walker for VDARE titled Sign Of “Improved Economy”—Media Happily Proclaim Illegal Mexicans Are Coming Again. (Walker is an outspoken critic of murders and other crimes committed by illegal immigrants and maintains a website here that sheds light on this important issue. While I’m sympathetic to criticism of violent and property crime, and admire Walker’s courage in raising this issue, I’m more skeptical of her singling out immigrants, particularly considering that the statistics suggest that she could better achieve her noble goal of reducing crime by broadening her focus to include crimes by US natives. But that’s a minor quibble).

In her piece, Walker uses two interesting terms for illegal immigrants that I hadn’t encountered in the past: “pests” and “job thieves.” I was naturally curious about the extent to which this terminology was unique to Walker. Turning to Google, I discovered that “pest” as a synonym for illegal immigrant was quite rare. In fact, the only other use of this metaphor I could find was a Yahoo! Answers question. I will therefore refrain from critiquing this choice of terminology, because I share Bryan Caplan’s rule of thumb:

As a rule, I do not respond to positions that are neither plausible nor popular.

However, “job thieves” seems to be a relatively popular description of illegal immigrants, so it would be incumbent upon me to respond to this choice of terminology. A quick Google search reveals many hits for “illegal immigrants” “job thieves” and a cursory glance suggests that about half these hits are written by people supportive, rather than critical, of the term. Continue reading Are illegal immigrants job thieves? →

Six possible positions on a specific keyhole solution

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This post is more of a utility post that grew as a spinoff of another post I’m drafting, which is getting a bit long. I hope to refer to this post in that other (forthcoming) blog post and in other forthcoming blog posts. I’ll be using the term “keyhole solution” a lot in this post, so if you haven’t already, I suggest you read the keyhole solutions page to get an overview of the term, and also check out all blog posts with the “keyhole solutions” tag on this website.

Consider keyhole solution A that has been developed to meet a specific objection to open borders. Suppose you are asked to specify a rank-order preference between three options:

  1. Open borders without keyhole solution A.
  2. Open borders with keyhole solution A.
  3. Closed borders and/or status quo.

Now, there are six possible rank-order preferences for this set of three options (we get the number 6 by taking the factorial of 3). I want to discuss each of these, and the kind of people who might want to take that position.

Open borders advocates who prefer open borders without the keyhole solution: rank-order (1) > (2) > (3)

These open borders advocates would prefer open borders without the keyhole solution. But, since the world is not an ideal world, they are willing to compromise and accept open borders with the keyhole solution. They are not genuinely convinced that the problem the keyhole solution addresses is a genuine problem that needs to be addressed through the keyhole solution. But they’re willing to go along with the keyhole solution as a form of dealism, or to placate existing interests and convert potential Pareto improvements into Pareto improvements.

John Lee seems to take this position with respect to the immigration tariffs keyhole solution. He writes in a comment on his own post:

Thanks Nathan. I think we agree on what’s probably the best achievable policy reform for now (immigration tariffs), but I am inclined to disagree with your moral preference for Pareto-improving policies here, as well as your characterisation of them as merely “a little unfair”. I think immigration tariffs would be a massive improvement, but remain a distant second-best policy (from a moral standpoint) to true open borders. I used to consider immigration tariffs the best policy here, but have been convinced by the economic evidence that I was placing far too much weight on natives’ welfare, and far too little on migrants’ welfare. (This change in my beliefs is something I plan to write more on, so I won’t elaborate too much on it here.)

The theme of compromise and the willingness to accept keyhole solutions to problems he’s not convinced are serious runs through John’s writings. For instance, in a comment, he writes:

Surely you’ve heard of the term “political compromise”? Keyhole solutions split the difference between restrictionists and hardcore open borders advocates. If you’re concerned about giving the other side a victory, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Open borders advocates who prefer open borders with the keyhole solution: rank-order (2) > (1) > (3)

Here, the open borders advocate would support open borders both with and without the keyhole solution — the case for open borders is too strong for a keyhole solution to make or break it. But the open borders advocate still prefers open borders with the keyhole solution. Many open borders advocates take concerns about political externalities seriously, and are willing to consider keyhole solutions that would limit voting rights for recent immigrants as superior to open borders with voting rights. But even if they’re not able to get that preferred policy, they would still support open borders. The same is true for making immigrants ineligible for welfare: a lot of libertarian supporters of open borders would prefer that immigrants be ineligible for welfare benefits, but would support open borders even if this were not possible. Continue reading Six possible positions on a specific keyhole solution →

Citizenism versus collective property rights, and voters versus representatives

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The term citizenism has been much in vogue lately. Sonic Charmer’s blog post I, Citizenist started the trend. My co-blogger Nathan wrote two blog posts on citizenism, one on the citizenist case for open borders and the other on Christianity vs. citizenism. I think co-blogger John Lee also has much to say on citizenism, though (as of now) he hasn’t published his thoughts on citizenism.

However, lest the term “citizenism” get bandied about too loosely, I want to clarify exactly what is meant by the term. The term “citizenism” was first introduced by Steve Sailer. References to and quotes from his writings on the subject are at the citizenism page. Here, I wish to highlight several different aspects of citizenism which are substantiated by quotes from Sailer:

  1. Citizenism places substantially greater weight on the rights and interests of citizens than non-citizens, though, as Nathan pointed out, it operates within moral side-constraints.
  2. Citizenism is about current citizens, not about the people who may become citizens as a result of immigration or deportation policy. Thus, unlike other forms of “analytical nationalism,” it is relatively immune to compositional effects paradoxes. For instance, if a new person were to join the country and earn a below-average income, but were to boost the incomes of all natives, a citizenist would have no problem with this at least from the income angle, but a “maximize-the-average” analytical nationalist would have a problem. On the other hand, a citizenist would object to the deportation of a current citizen with below-average income, despite the effect this may have on raising the national average. Thus, citizenists can calmly refute point (3) in Bryan Caplan’s list of questions in his Vronsky syndrome blog post.
  3. Citizenism, as conceived by Sailer, is both about the individual ethics of voters and about the responsibilities of elected representatives. Sailer is not merely arguing that governments should concern themselves only with the welfare of citizens. He is arguing that citizens, qua citizens, should be concerned primarily about the welfare of their fellow citizens. I am not sure if Sailer would go further and argue that citizens have a duty to favor the interests of fellow citizens even in their private lives, but it certainly seems like he would admire such behavior.
  4. Citizenism is about loyalty, not admiration, toward one’s fellow citizens. A citizenist does not claim that his/her fellow citizens are the world’s best, but simply defends their interests. I think of it as nationalism without romance. As Sailer puts it, a citizenist looks at his less-than-ideal fellow citizen and says, “he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

I think Sonic Charmer, and most other “moderate” citizenists, would have no trouble signing on to (1) and (2). (3) seems to me the most controversial, and Sonic Charmer’s logic for why governments should be citizenist does not (to me) seem to imply (3). My co-blogger Nathan seems to have most of his issues with (3), not with (1) or (2), as he writes in his most recent blog post:

[T]here is a difference between citizenism as a personal meta-ethics and citizenism as a political meta-ethics. Sorry for the jargon. What I mean is that there’s a difference between saying (a) “I only care about Americans” and (b) saying “The government should only care about Americans,” and while (a) is definitely un-Christian, (b) might not be. Someone who believed the US government should help Americans and put near-zero weight on foreigners’ interests, but who thought Americans as individuals are obligated to be generous to foreigners as well, and who is personally very generous, would probably not imperil her soul much by her political attitude, even if she is mistaken.

I want to explain a bit more about why I consider (3) to be particularly significant. To do this, I want to distinguish citizenism from another related idea thrown around by opponents of open borders: the idea of collective property rights. Collective property rights simply asserts that a nation-state has the moral authority to arbitrarily deny non-citizens entry, because the nation-state, as a representative of the people, has property rights over the land, particularly the publicly owned parts of the land (there is a variant of this logic, called the anarcho-capitalist counterfactual). I won’t attempt to rebut this logic here — the collective property rights page discusses various rebuttals. Rather, my goal here is to highlight the differences between collective property rights and citizenism.

Collective property rights is simply an assertion that the nation-state, via its elected government, can deny non-citizens entry. Claims of collective property rights do not, in and of themselves, offer any guidance on when and how these rights should be exercised. Continue reading Citizenism versus collective property rights, and voters versus representatives →

Are immigrant rights activists friends of open borders?

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NOTE: This article focuses on the United States, though some of its points may be more generally applicable.

In a blog post I’m currently drafting (which will hopefully be published shortly after this one) I note BK’s criticism of open borders advocates such as Bryan Caplan — pro-migration forces as they actually exist are opposed to all the keyhole solutions that might actually alleviate the concerns of moderate critics of open borders. By siding with these “pro-migration forces” open borders advocates make it appear that their advocacy of keyhole solutions to deal with the problems of migration is a mere rhetorical fig leaf offered to critics of open borders. Here’s an excerpt from BK’s comment:

Those changes [making keyhole solutions politically feasible] would require a big political effort, since pro-migration political forces are mostly very opposed to keyhole solutions since they expect to benefit politically from bringing in immigrants that will vote for them. And so, to implement a Singapore-style solution the key step would be to push to create the legal apparatus and will to enforce that apparatus *before* adding tens of millions of recent low-skill migrants to the electorate.

On the other hand, live immigration proposals of recent years have called for amnesty of all existing illegal immigrants in the U.S. with tens of millions more to follow via family sponsorships, and reduced enforcement to enable more low-skill migration. This would drastically change the political landscape, to the disfavor of keyhole solutions. Recall that support for immigration is the area where recent migrants are most different from locals.

So generalized pro-immigration ideological pushes strengthen the opponents of keyhole solutions more than they support keyhole solutions. And in practice Bryan and folk at this site do seem to use keyhole solutions primarily as a rhetorical fig-leaf to deflect opposition and shut down conversations.

Although BK doesn’t offer any specific links, I think he’s [NOTE: I have strong reason to believe BK is male, even though it’s not obvious from the comment text, so I’ll use “he” to refer to BK] mostly on point regarding the “pro-migration” and even more broadly the “pro-immigrant” forces (even if we ignore pro-immigrant restrictionists for the moment). Frankly, I think that a lot of the pro-migration and pro-immigrant forces aren’t interested in anything approaching open borders, and may not even be supportive of expanded immigration. In fact, I suspect that a lot of what motivates immigrants’ rights activists is territorialism, an ideology that, unlike citizenism, is interested in the welfare and protection of rights of all people who are within the geographical area of the nation, regardless of their citizenship status and of whether they are authorized or unauthorized. Added: A lot of immigrant rights’ activists are also susceptible to local inequality aversion, another obstruction to keyhole solutions.

I will look at a few groups that are often (rightly or wrongly) labeled as pro-immigrant and study how their efforts might help or hurt the development of keyhole solutions.

American Civil Liberties Union

A classic example of territorialism is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU is at the forefront of defending the rights of immigrants, including “illegal” immigrants, via their Immigrants’ Rights Project. I’ve read through a number of pages on the ACLU website, and it seems to me that the ACLU takes no position on what immigration law itself should be. In fact, they concede that the US has collective property rights and can set more or less any immigration policy. The only thing they object to is inhumane deportations. From their Immigrants’ Rights Project page:

Our nation has unquestioned authority to control its borders and to regulate immigration. But we must exercise the awesome power to exclude or deport immigrants consistent with the rule of law, the fundamental norms of humanity and the requirements of the Constitution.

And they seem to take no position on the civil liberties and human rights of non-US people when they are not in US territory.

Now, you might say that this is just part of the “division of labor” that Nathan highlighted in this post. The ACLU is the American (US) Civil Liberties Union, which means that their scope is explicitly limited to what happens within the territory and jurisdiction of the United States. This means that, definitionally, qua organization, they cannot be concerned about the violation of rights of people outside the territory or jurisdiction of the United States, even if individuals at the ACLU feel strongly about these issues. Fair enough. Continue reading Are immigrant rights activists friends of open borders? →

Place premium versus race premium

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Co-blogger John Lee has written an interesting post on the place premium — the extent to which a person’s current location affects that person’s earnings — and how it compares with various estimates for the “gender premium” — the estimates for how much less females earn than males with the same skills and qualifications. John focused on the gender premium, but pretty much the same observations can be made about the “race premium” — for instance, about the wage differences between whites and blacks in the United States with the same skills and qualifications. I was planning to write this current post before I saw John’s, but since he’s already written his, I’ll stick to a few points that I think are important but that I think were not salient in John’s post.

My main point is this: race and gender are intrinsic to a person’s identity. Sex change operations are rare, though not unheard of. Race change isn’t possible — though a person can change the race he/she self-identified with, the person’s race as perceived by others cannot be changed through an act of fiat. This is important in two ways.

Measurement uncertainty

The ideal way to measure a “premium” (place, race, or gender) is to take a fixed person, start that person in one place (respectively race, gender), then change the person’s place (respectively race, gender) and then measure how much this affected that person’s earnings. Now, in the case of race and gender, this type of ideal “controlled experiment” is almost impossible. In the gender case, it’s impossible unless you can persuade people to undergo sex change operations — but people who undergo sex change operations are likely to not be representative either before or after their operations. In the race case, it’s also impossible or nearly so.

There is considerable debate on the gender premium in the United States, for instance, largely because it’s very difficult to figure out what exactly it means for a female and a male to be identical in all respects other than gender. Are we accounting for various unobserved characteristics? Different choices of how to break the data down (by profession, sub-profession, years of experience) yield different estimates. Which of these choices is justified? The Atlantic interview that John linked to from his blog post highlights some of the points of contention. Bryan Caplan, who is skeptical of the existence of a huge gender premium or race premium in the United States, has lecture notes on the key points of contention. Continue reading Place premium versus race premium →