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

Immigration, emigration, and the rule of law

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Large numbers of people in the United States (and possibly elsewhere) draw a sharp distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Common refrains include, “I have nothing against immigration, only illegal immigration.” Prospective immigrants are urged to get in line. Illegal immigrants are called “illegals” and questionable analogies are drawn with hostile alien invasions. Crossing borders without authorization is considered so fundamentally immoral that people who do so are punished more harshly than sex offenders. The kinder, gentler opponents of unauthorized border-crossing go far enough to concede that deporting millions of people isn’t practical, and instead favor attrition through enforcement, aka self-deportation.

For the moment, I’m interested specifically in those opponents of illegal immigration who explicitly argue that they have nothing against immigration per se, even dramatically increased immigration, but illegal immigration is bad specifically because it undermines respect for the rule of law. And given that people don’t have enough respect for US law (or the laws of the country they’re immigrating to) to immigrate legally, why would they respect the laws of the land once they have settled there?

This argument can be, and has been, critiqued from many angles (see the legal versus illegal page for more). Here, I’m going to critique it by contrasting it with emigration. A number of regimes, mostly communist, explicitly forbid people from leaving the country (fortunately, this number has been dwindling over the last few decades, with Cuba’s lifting of its travel embargo being the latest positive development). And yet, we know that emigration has been crucial for people escaping communist and other tyrannical regimes. And these people have helped shed light on the crimes of these regimes and helped end some of the worst practices of these regimes. Today, the only country that’s really hard to leave due to government restrictions is North Korea.

My question: when people illegally smuggle themselves out of North Korea to go to Mongolia and then to South Korea, or Cubans illegally escape their country to come to the United States, or East Germans cross the Berlin Wall to get into West Germany, why aren’t restrictionists equally worried about the lack of respect these emigrants display for the “rule of law” in their countries? After all, they are explicitly and clearly violating the laws of the country they were born into. If so, why should we expect them to follow the laws of the country they are migrating to?

You’d probably say I am attacking a straw man here. Clearly, the emigration laws of these countries are so depraved that it is morally permissible to break them, and morally impermissible to actively try to enforce them. And if somebody violates these laws, it does not mean that the person is likely to violate generally sensible laws in other domains of life.

But this raises the question: are immigration laws also sufficiently unjust that it is morally permissible to violate them? Although restrictionists often use the killing versus letting die distinction, the truth is that considerable violence is necessary to close borders — whether you’re closing them to prevent entry or to prevent escape. And does people’s violating immigration laws mean that they have no respect for the rule of law in general, or just that they simply don’t see immigration law as being on the same moral plane as, say, laws against murder and theft, or simple rules about what side of the road to drive on?

Now, my goal in this blog post is not to argue that opposition to immigration is obviously or always immoral, or that these moral considerations override the real-world costs of immigration (I do obviously believe that — or I wouldn’t have created this site and wouldn’t be blogging here — but that is not the purpose of this blog post). Rather, what I’m claiming is that people who specifically object to immigration because it’s “illegal” while claiming no objections to legal immigration are ducking the hard question of whether, in fact, immigration laws are sufficiently morally justified to make their violation immoral. Honest opponents of immigration would do better to actually engage the moral and practical considerations surrounding immigration rather than claim that their “only” problem with immigration is that it’s illegal.

Open borders and the libertarian priority list: part 2

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This is the second of a planned series of three blog posts regarding where open borders fit in the libertarian priority list. In part one, I laid out the overall agenda of the series:

I aim to consider three aspects to this issue in three separate blog posts. In the current blog post, I consider the extent to which libertarians do advocate for open borders, relative to many other libertarian causes (my conclusion: not much). In the next blog post, I will consider how much energy I think libertarians should devote to open borders (my conclusion: probably more than they currently do). In my third blog post, I will consider the reasons behind what I perceive as the under-supply of open borders advocacy from libertarians.

I’m glad to see that my first blog post sparked off a lot of debate. Bryan Caplan responded here. Perhaps coincidentally, a number of non-libertarian bloggers have recently blogged about the importance of pro-immigration advocacy. These include Matt Yglesias here and Adam Ozimek here. My co-blogger Nathan responded to Ozimek here.

This blog post will focus on the extent to which I think libertarians should focus on open borders advocacy. Prior to getting into the details, I want to clarify what I mean by the “should” here. My intuitive three-tiered view of ethics says that there are three tiers to ethical obligations:

  1. Negative rights ethics (don’t kill, steal, etc.)
  2. Contract/responsibility ethics (fulfill your contractual responsibilities, be honest, etc.)
  3. Excellence ethics (be nice, do a great job, give to charity, etc. — this is largely supererogatory).

When there is a conflict, negative rights ethics wins out over contract/responsibility ethics — for instance, it is immoral to be a contract killer, and if you did agree to kill somebody, it would be more moral to break the contract and not kill than to fulfil the terms of the contract. Both negative rights ethics and contract/responsibility ethics win out over excellence ethics, which are largely supererogatory.

Open borders advocacy, like most libertarian advocacy, falls outside the realm of negative rights ethics. For some people, including people hired by libertarian think tanks or advocacy groups, libertarian advocacy falls under the realm of contract/responsibility ethics — but whether or not that libertarian advocacy specifically includes open borders advocacy is a matter between them and their employers. So, my discussion of how important open borders advocacy should be within the context of libertarian advocacy is largely a discussion that’s part of the supererogatory framework of excellence ethics. The key point, therefore, is that I do not claim that libertarians as individuals have a personal moral obligation toward open borders advocacy. When I say that libertarians should engage in open borders advocacy, that’s just my shorthand for saying that engaging in open borders advocacy is the best use of libertarian resources based on my understanding of libertarianism, not that libertarians qua individuals are morally obligated to engage in such advocacy.

I will also repeat the scoping I did back in part 1, to circumvent the problem of libertarians (such as those who subscribe to the anarcho-capitalist counterfactual) who simply reject the case for open borders. The question I specifically consider is:

For a libertarian who is broadly convinced by the case for open borders, primarily from the libertarian perspective (but also based on other aspects of the case), how important should support or advocacy for open borders be, relative to other libertarian causes?

With the scoping done, I now proceed to make my case: open borders advocacy “should” be quite high on the libertarian priority list.

The law of large proportions

The law of large proportions says, somewhat unsurprisingly, that the same proportional change in something bigger is larger than the same proportional change in something smaller. (This is not a very standard term, and doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page, but see for instance here and here). In fact, even a much smaller proportional change in something bigger could be larger than a much bigger proportional change in something smaller. This term is used in the context of energy conservation. If private automobile transit causes ten times as much pollution as mass transit, then a 10% reduction in pollution from private automobile transit constitutes as much of a reduction in pollution as a complete elimination of pollution from mass transit. In particular, a 10% reduction in pollution from private automobile transit is twice as much as a 50% reduction in the pollution from mass transit. Continue reading Open borders and the libertarian priority list: part 2 →

“Pro-immigrant” restrictionists — the fine print

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NOTE: This post is mostly US-specific, but some of the observations may also apply in other countries. I don’t have enough knowledge to comment about other countries.

The US’s leading restrictionist think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies, describes itself on its website as “low immigration, pro immigrant.” NumbersUSA, another restrictionist group focused more on having a grassroots influence and affecting the decisions of policy makers, also makes it clear that it opposes immigrant-bashing. And John Tanton, the man who helped found and raise funds for CIS, NumbersUSA, and FAIR, clearly describes himself as “pro immigrant” on his website.

Clearly, the Southern Poverty Law Center is skeptical of such claims, as they note here:

Although the think tank bills itself as an “independent” organization with a “pro-immigrant” if “low-immigration” vision, the reality is that CIS has never found any aspect of immigration that it liked.

Nonetheless, having read the book The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal by CIS director Mark Krikorian (which I blogged about earlier here), I think that some restrictionists (though not all) are pro-immigrant. For instance, I was impressed by Krikorian’s thoughtful and detailed response to the civil rights implication of state-level immigration crackdowns. Clearly, Krikorian, and his colleagues at CIS such as Steven Camarota, take seriously the concern that crackdowns on illegal immigration might hurt recent legal immigrants who share the ethnicity of the majority of illegal immigrants.

But they are “pro-immigrant” only in a very specific sense of the word. There is some fine print there, that may not be that obvious to many people who first hear the term “pro immigrant.” In the rest of this post, I will elaborate on the fine print. Continue reading “Pro-immigrant” restrictionists — the fine print →

How persuasive are open borders advocates? The case of Bryan Caplan

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To make any comment about the extent to which resources should be devoted to open borders advocacy, and the way the resources should be allocated, one must have at least some idea of how effective various forms of open borders advocacy are. One of the most admirable proponents of open borders is Bryan Caplan. Caplan has called open borders the most important issue of our time (here and here) and his writings are linked to and quoted all over this website. But just how effective is he? How many minds has he changed? How many hearts has he won to the cause of open borders? I emailed Caplan, asking him to post this question as a bleg to his commenters, a group that includes both a number of passionate pro-open borders people (like John Lee, whom I recruited to the Open Borders blog after discovering him in the EconLog comments) and some of the most articulate restrictionists of open borders, as Nathan has pointed out.

Caplan was kind enough to do an Open Borders Persuasion Bleg, and Nathan has since written a blog post responding to some of Caplan’s critics. My focus here is not to respond to the critiques of Caplan (a job that Nathan has already done, with the exception of taking on Ghost of Christmas Past). Rather, my goal is to do a quick quantitative and qualitative analysis of the comments, and then to use these to pontificate on the future direction and focus of open borders advocacy.

Quantitatively measured conclusions: some evidence of effectiveness

I have a quick summary of the responses here. For each commenter, I tried to identify the commenter’s stance on open borders pre-Caplan and post-Caplan. For commenters where the stance was unclear, I selected all possibilities that were consistent with the comment. Here’s what I took away from the analysis:

  • About half the commenters (46/90 in my count) were influenced toward more open borders. 10/90 were influenced toward more closed borders, and the rest were either unaffected or their comments did not make it clear how they were affected. Note that my count of unaffected people includes people who were already so pro-open borders that their conviction couldn’t be strengthened further.
  • The overall mix of commenters’ positions pre-Caplan and post-Caplan has changed to some extent to the pro-open borders position. Support for closed borders (i.e., more closed borders than the status quo) decreased, and support for radical open borders increased. There was a shift all along the chain from closed borders to the status quo to moderately more open borders to radically more open borders. The most dramatic shift, though, was the shift from moderately more open borders to radically more open borders. Caplan seems to be most convincing in this group.
  • About 60% of the commenters (54/90 in my count) said, directly or indirectly, that Caplan had persuaded them about the importance of the issue. This includes some people who were already so radically pro-open borders that they couldn’t move further in that direction — Caplan influenced these people to attach a greater priority to open borders. It also includes people who aren’t completely convinced by Caplan, but think that this issue is important and deserves more attention, and appreciate Caplan’s efforts to address the issue.
  • There were a bunch of people (16/90 in my count) who said that Caplan had successfully addressed some, but not all, of their concerns about open borders.
  • Among the specific points where commenters considered Caplan unconvincing, political externalities was the most significant. Other issues raised by the commenters included IQ deficit, dysfunctional immigrant culture, and the welfare state/fiscal burden objection. Unsurprisingly for an economically literate group of commenters, the suppression of wages of natives issue was raised by almost no commenter.

Qualitative nature of complaints

The gist of the qualitative pushback that Caplan received from commenters was that he didn’t take restrictionist concerns seriously enough for them to be convinced that his advocacy of open borders had adequately taken these objections into account. Now, prima facie, this objection seems weird, because Caplan has spent more time than almost any other open borders advocate I know trying to address restrictionist arguments such as IQ deficit and political externalities (though I hope that the coverage of these topics on the Open Borders blog will soon outstrip Caplan’s coverage). He has been willing to consider keyhole solutions as an alternative to closed borders. Yet, commenters are not satisfied with Caplan’s efforts. Continue reading How persuasive are open borders advocates? The case of Bryan Caplan →

An offbeat argument for immigration restriction

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I’m always on the lookout for new, innovative arguments against immigration. Restrictionists tend not to disappoint in coming up with creative arguments, but usually these are modest permutations and perturbations of existing arguments. Recently, however, I encountered an honestly creative, offbeat, and mind-blowing argument for immigration restriction. If I had to classify it, it would come under political externalities or under second-order harms. But neither classification does justice to the sheer creativity of the objection. The credit goes to none other than restrictionism’s most creative proponent, Steve Sailer.

Sailer makes the argument in this EconLog comment, which I’ll take the liberty of quoting in full (emphasis mine):

92% of elected Hispanic officials are Democrats. So, self-appointed Hispanic leaders tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. One reason is affirmative action. Most of these self-annointed leaders are affirmative action beneficiaries, and they have two self-interests: preserve ethnic preferences for Hispanics and increase the number of Hispanics in the country to make themselves appear more powerful.

The way out of this trap is for Republicans to eliminate all affirmative action (including disparate impact discrimination lawsuits) for Hispanics and to close the borders. After a period of wailing and gnashing of teeth, new Hispanic leaders will arise who actually represent the interests of Hispanic voters, not of themselves.

I vaguely recall reading a similar argument by Sailer elsewhere, but I can’t find any other link at the moment. Let me abstract Sailer’s framework. Some Hispanics immigrate to the United States. They increase the total number of Hispanics. Sailer is not concerned (in this comment) about whether these particular Hispanics agitate for affirmative action, or for any of the policies Sailer disfavors. He is not complaining about their actions, either in the economic and social realm or through the political channel. His complaint here is that their sheer existence in the United States makes it easy for self-appointed Hispanic representatives (who are often natives, not immigrants) to point to their numbers and make the case for certain policies (such as affirmative action) which Sailer considers harmful to the United States. And note that the people to whom they’re making the case are also usually natives, not immigrants. In other words, the existence of immigrants makes it easier for some natives to convince some other natives of policies that Sailer considers harmful to the United States. This, according to Sailer, is sufficient justification “to close the borders” as Sailer puts it.

Frankly, Sailer’s argument is a trump card, and there really isn’t much I can say in response. If people’s mere existence inside of a border, rather than what they do or don’t do, is sufficient grounds for closing a border, then it’s time for open borders advocates to pack up. Restrictionists win hands down, just as they do when they use pure racialist arguments.