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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

IQ and double counting the harms of immigration

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Nathan just published a lengthy and detailed critique of various critics of open borders. I think he gets many things right, but in some ways he underestimates restrictionist arguments. This isn’t entirely Nathan’s fault — restrictionists often don’t frame their arguments cogently and clearly, and it’s extremely hard to understand their arguments without spending considerable time going through them. I want to talk about one particular restrictionist argument — the IQ deficit argument, and what I think an appropriate response to this argument is. This post is not intended to address specific restrictionist critiques of IQ. I’ll do that in subsequent posts. For now, my main goal is to explain my overall position.

Now, some open borders advocates find the entire discussion of IQ off-putting and are quick to make accusations of racism and invoke negative stereotypes for restrictionists. (To take just one example of where this came up, consider the comments section of this blog post where I came under fire for engaging IQ-based arguments in the context of immigration). I do not adopt this approach for multiple reasons, most important of which is that I think some of the basic premises underlying the IQ deficit concern are valid. And, my goal in this blog post is to address IQ-based objections, not to dismiss them.

I’ll state the IQ deficit argument for immigration to the United States, though the general framework is applicable to immigration to other countries as well.

  • IQ is meaningful, measurable, and correlated with a number of real-world performance metrics. Higher IQ people tend to be more cooperative, less criminal, more innovative, better and more informed voters, etc. These correlations hold even after we control for other things such as education levels. A high IQ person without much formal education would tend to be more cooperative than a low IQ person with a similarly low formal education: Basically, I think this is correct. It seems to agree with the Mainstream Science on Intelligence and Intelligence: Known and Unknowns. Recent work by Garett Jones has strengthened economists’ appreciation of the link IQ and cooperation and its role in economic development, something whose implications I considered in this blog post.
  • Adult IQ is fairly stable (though it can go down with head injuries and certain illnesses). It cannot usually be made to go up significantly. Childhood IQ may be malleable, but we don’t quite know how to manipulate it much on the positive side, though probably malnutrition and childhood disease affect it on the negative side. I think this is broadly correct too. This also agrees with the two consensus statements above.
  • Under open borders, the average IQ of immigrants to the United States is lower than the average IQ of current United States residents: International IQ data comparisons are not very solidly established, but the preliminary evidence suggests that this is likely to be true. If Lynn and Vanhanen’s data are to be believed, then the average world IQ is about 2/3 of a standard deviation below average US IQ. I’m not very confident about this, but it’s plausible.
  • The stability of adult IQ means that even after migration, the lower average IQ of immigrants will pull down the average IQ of the United States. This seems fairly plausible to me.

At this point, Nathan jumps in and says, “Ah! Even if correct, this is not as relevant as you think. You’re committing the maximize the average fallacy and refuse to understand the comparative advantage concept.”

Not so fast, restrictionists would say. As Richard Hoste puts it, the comparative advantage argument works in the context of pure economics, but once we bring in crime and political externalities, it starts to falter. If crime rates go up, then your chance of being a crime victim goes up, all else equal (there are caveats to be added, but I’m using a simplistic picture of crime). Comparative advantage doesn’t come to the rescue here. And if low IQ means voting for bad policies (something that’s supported by Caplan’s research) then low IQ immigration would lead to negative political externalities.

So, I don’t think the comparative advantage argument is quite the right way to tackle the IQ deficit concern. So what is? I think we need to step back a bit and be clearer about how IQ matters to the moral and practical considerations that come up with respect to immigration and its effect on natives and immigrants. Does IQ matter in and of itself (as some indication of moral worth or desert), or does it matter because of its correlation with things like crime or political beliefs or social capital or what-have-you? It’s only the rare IQ elitist who argues that IQ is morally significant in and of itself. Most people who believe in the importance of IQ believe in it because it’s correlated with a lot of other things like crime, political beliefs, etc.

This brings me to the crux of my objection to the IQ deficit concern. If lower immigrant IQ raises concerns about higher immigrant crime rates or wrong political beliefs, then that should show up in the evidence on immigrant crime rates and political beliefs. If it does show up there, then great, score a point for restrictionists, and now that we’ve done that, what additional information does immigrants’ IQ deficit give us? By saying that immigrants commit crime and that immigrants have a low IQ which means they would commit more crime, it seems like restrictionists are double counting crime.

What if restrictionists are unsuccessful in demonstrating higher immigrant crime? That does seem to be the case with current levels of immigration to the United States. As things stand today, the foreign-born have lower crime rates than natives both in total and for every ethnicity and for every combination of ethnicity and high school graduation status.

Some restrictionists look these data in the eye and say, “Immigrants have lower IQ, therefore they must be committing more crime, no matter what the data say.” I think the data on crime rates aren’t wrong, so let me engage restrictionists by offering alternative explanations within their explanatory framework of low IQ being correlated with higher crime rates. The first possibility is that the restrictionists may be wrong about their claim of lower IQ of current immigrants to the United States. The second possibility is that there may be certain other differences between the foreign-born and native-born Americans that compensate for the lower average IQ to push the overall averages in the other direction. Those differences may be in terms of the culture or in terms of the structural incentives and constraints faced by the foreign-born relative to natives. But whatever the story, I think that when restrictionists find that a particular predicted ill-effect of low immigrant IQ fails to materialize, then they should give up on that and concentrate on the other claimed bad effects. And, perhaps, also double-check their claim of lower immigrant IQ while they’re at it.

So my overall claim is that restrictionists who think the IQ framework is a good overarching framework within which to fit their objections can certainly offer this framework. But they should not double count harms by both including the harm itself and the IQ deficit channel for the harm as separate harms. And if a harm predicted by IQ deficit fails to materialize, they should sportingly concede the point and move on. Which means that IQ deficit ultimately serves only as a framework, not as an argument in and of itself.

I will now address a few possible objections that restrictionists might raise to what I’ve said above. Continue reading IQ and double counting the harms of immigration →

Crime in the US under open borders

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Crime is a common concern regarding immigration among US restrictionists. The statistics on immigration and crime in the United States show pretty clearly that as things stand today, the foreign-born have lower crime rates than natives both in total and for every ethnicity and for every combination of ethnicity and high school graduation status. Nathan recently blogged about how immigration might also indirectly reduce native crime rates. So, restrictionists need not be worried about immigrant crime under the status quo.

But there’s still the concern about radical open borders to contend with: even if restrictionist concerns about immigrant crime are misplaced at current rates of migration, the concern may still be valid for truly open borders. Is it? It’s hard to say anything definitive, so if you believe in the precautionary principle, this is a slam dunk argument against open borders. However, I will try to argue in this post that there is no strong reason to believe that open borders would lead to a significant upward trend in US crime rates. In fact, I would say that the odds of crime rates going up versus down are about even, and they almost certainly will not explode.

The first point I will make is that even under the current highly restrictive immigration laws, there is some immigration, including “low-skilled” immigration, to the United States from all parts of the world. While border-crossing from Mexico forms the lion’s share of “low-skilled” immigration to the United States, there are also a few low-skilled work visas and, more importantly, a diversity visa that is not designed to pick out high-skilled workers but rather favors countries that send few immigrants to the United States. Thus, the current data on immigration and crime in the United States does shed some light on what might happen under a radically freer migration regime.

However, I will, for the moment, set this point aside. Assume for the moment that current immigration from a country is completely unrepresentative of what immigration from the country would look like under open borders. What method can we then use to approximate crime rates for immigration from that country? We could look at average crime rates in the sending country. I would argue that this would overestimate their crime rates in the United States for three reasons: Continue reading Crime in the US under open borders →

Why are academia and Silicon Valley pro-immigration?

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Restrictionists often argue that immigration suppresses native wages. How, then, do they explain the significant economist consensus in support of more expanded immigration? They rely on a mix of arguments such as the economist blind spot, elite conscience salve, and other attacks on advocates. The subtext of these, particularly the elite conscience salve, is that most open borders advocates don’t have to live the adverse effects of immigration. In this telling, open borders advocates, safe in their ivory towers from the unwashed masses, can declare open borders and shrug their indifference to the annihilation of their less fortunate fellow nationals.

As a factual matter, George Borjas (the man most quoted by restrictionists on economic matters) found that in the short run in the US, college graduates lose more from immigration compared to ordinary Americans, and lose less only compared to high school dropouts. I’m personally unconvinced by Borjas’s pessimistic estimates, and find the more optimistic estimates of the impact of immigration more convincing. However, that’s not a topic I want to get into in this blog post. Rather, in this blog post, I want to consider two stereotypically high-skilled profession types where people within the profession (including many who aren’t open borders advocates) actively advocate for more immigration of people who would specifically compete with them for jobs. I’m talking about academia and Silicon Valley, both in the United States context.

The case of academia

In the United States, academia is one realm where the current immigration regime is closest to free migration. Student visas are not always granted, but it’s easier to get a student visa than a H1B visa, and it’s definitely way way easier than getting an unskilled work visa (the H2A visa category). For post-doctoral and tenure track positions, academia has successfully been able to exploit a loophole in the H1B regime. The H1B regime states that a H1B work visa can be granted only if it’s convincingly demonstrated that no qualified American could be found for the job. In academia, it is usually pretty easy to set forth a collection of job requirements (such as papers on a specific subset of topics) that are satisfied by only one person on earth. It’s much harder to use this trick to hire people in other high-skilled jobs, and nearly impossible to use the trick for “low-skilled” jobs like restaurant worker or farm worker. The point is not just that the law has a practical loophole, it’s that immigration officials generally let people get away with it. Bryan Caplan explains this between 22:30 and 25:00 of his immigration restrictions video. And Caplan also notes in this blog post that academia already has de facto free immigration. Continue reading Why are academia and Silicon Valley pro-immigration? →

Benefits and harms to migrants: a meta-response

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I just published a blog post titled gains from migration: GDP versus surplus where I make arguments similar to those in the blog post by Michael Clemens titled Do the Gains from International Migration “Go to the Immigrants”? But in true Caplanian fashion, I think it may be better to step back a bit and offer a meta-counterargument to people who use “all the gains from migration are captured by the migrants” as sufficient grounds to dismiss the huge benefits from open borders. And while I’m at it, I want to consider its mirror image argument, which is also offered by many restrictionists (though I haven’t yet seen a restrictionist offer both arguments simultaneously).

  • Benefits go “only” to the migrants: The claim here is that the benefits of open borders are huge, but they go “only” or “largely” to the migrants. Once we subtract off the benefits to the migrants, the benefits to the rest of humanity are miniscule, zero, or negative. So, open borders aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
  • Open borders hurt the very people they’re intended to help: This argument has a few respectable versions, such as the killing the goose that lays the golden eggs formulation and the cheap labor leading to a technological slowdown argument. But, there are a lot of other versions of the argument, and the version I want to address here builds upon the analogy between immigration restrictions and apartheid in South Africa. The claim is that the end of apartheid spelled disaster for South African whites and blacks. If immigration restrictions are like apartheid, then open borders might lead to the very same problems globally that we currently see in South Africa. Typical for this line of reasoning is this comment by egd on Bryan Caplan’s blog post:

    Do you seriously believe that open borders would lead to such an outcome for you?

    No, but that’s not the right question, is it?

    Even in South Africa, treatment of whites after apartheid is far better than treatment of blacks under apartheid.

    Has ending apartheid made whites better off?

    Has ending apartheid made blacks better off?

    The answer to both of these questions is pretty clearly “no”: more poverty, more income inequality (to the extent it’s bad), reduced life expectancy, and other problems have developed in South Africa.

    The root cause isn’t desegregation, the root cause is political externalities associated with desegregation. Political externalities matter.

    James A. Donald, in a further comment on the same blog post, writes:

    It is glaringly obvious that not only are whites far worse off with the end of Apartheid in South Africa, blacks also are worse off.

    The flood of illegals from neighboring black countries has ended with the end of apartheid, and in many cases reversed. Blacks are voting with their feet that black South Africa is no good, after previously voting with their feet that white South Africa was good.

    Electricity has become intermittent, water is dangerous, and the higher stories of tall buildings have become uninhabitable

    Black incomes have fallen dramatically following the end of apartheid

    http://www.nber.org/digest/jan06/w11384.html

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/economic-and-social-crisis-in-post-apartheid-south-africa/

    When the superior rule the inferior, it is not only better for the superior, it also better for the inferior.

    Even if blacks had the same income, that would be no substitute for the lack of clean water, lack of reliable electricity, and lack of law and order.

    And that is what America will become in due course with current levels of immigration of inferior people.

Continue reading Benefits and harms to migrants: a meta-response →

Gains from migration: GDP versus surplus

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A couple of days back, I wrote a blog post titled the story behind the “double world GDP” estimates. Yesterday, I chanced upon a blog post by Michael Clemens titled Do the Gains from International Migration “Go to the Immigrants”? (do read that — it makes a lot of points which I make in a slightly different way in this post). And reading that, I now think that some of what I said in my original blog post was, although not quite wrong, misleading.

GDP is roughly calculated by adding up the (price times quantity) of all final goods and services produced within a country’s domestic territory in a calendar year. World GDP is the sum of the GDPs of all nations. In the previous blog post, I tried to get into the story behind the double world GDP estimates. My overall statement was that the gain is seen largely through a direct effect in an increased value of production of the migrants themselves. This increase is not due to an increase in the skills of the migrants (though that might also eventually occur) but rather, is due to the place premium, whereby the exact same worker with the exact same skills produces more values, and gets paid more, in some places than others. That “more value” could be due to higher total factor productivity. Or it could simply be because the job the migrant does is more valued. For instance, a nanny in the United States may earn more than a nanny in India, because parents in the United States have more to gain by leaving their babies in a nanny’s hands and going to work instead.

On the other hand, a utilitarian or welfare-based analysis looks, not at price times quantity, but at the social surplus: difference between the reservation prices of buyer and seller, multiplied by (or rather, integrated over) the quantity. Graphically, it’s the area of a certain “triangle” between the demand and supply curves. Part of the social surplus is captured by the buyer, and part of it by the seller.

For any individual economic transaction, the social surplus can tell a very different story from the “GDP contribution” of that transaction (examples below). At a macro level, I think GDP offers a reasonable approximation to “utility” concepts, but it’s mathematically different.

Why is this relevant? As I said in my previous post, most of the GDP gain from migration is due to the increased value of production of the migrants — though there are also secondary occupational mix effects (see this paper by Dixon and Rimmer, for instance, or more general discussion at the suppression of wages of natives) where natives are relieved of some aspects of their jobs by immigrants and can switch to other jobs that create more value. However, even ignoring the occupational mix issue for the moment, the claim that the GDP gain is mostly registered to the migrant is quite different from the claim that the social surplus is largely captured by the migrant. Certainly, the claims are related, but they aren’t the same. I will make four points to clarify this.

  • Consumer surplus: When Apple introduces a new iPhone, the gains in world GDP are registered to Apple and their suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, and employees. There may also be some compensating losses as other phone manufacturers lose out on buyers. However, the welfare gains are experienced not just by phone producers, but by phone consumers — aka all iPhone users. They’re the ones, after all, who are buying the phones, which means that they value the phone at least as much as Apple prices them. It’s the same story with migrant labor — the welfare gains go to the migrants, their employers, and all the customers of their employers who benefit from the employer’s ability to hire better or cheaper labor in the form of better quality or lower prices.
  • Shifting of non-economic activities into the economic realm: This is a somewhat complicated point. The key idea is that part of the gain to world GDP will happen because non-economic activities return to the market. For instance, suppose I value my time spent cleaning up my apartment at $18. I value a clean apartment at $20, but the cheapest cleaning service costs $25. So, I choose to clean my apartment myself, getting a private surplus of $2, but there is no economic transaction. Now, suppose an immigrant arrives, who would be willing to clean my apartment for $11 or more. We negotiate and agree to a price of $14. The immigrant gets a surplus of $3, and my surplus is $6. My surplus has gone up by $4 (from an original of $2). But the GDP shows a gain of $14 corresponding to the shifting of the activity into the market realm.

    A slight variant of this example — one where I value my own time spent cleaning the apartment more than $20 — would result in a situation where an apartment I would leave dirty getting cleaned up, so my social surplus went from zero (leaving the apartment dirty) to $6. In this variant, non-activity is replaced by activity. But in the original example, non-economic activity is being replaced by economic activity.

    In both versions, though, we see that the GDP gain is much larger than the social surplus created. Does this mean that “double world GDP” estimates are gross overstatements? Not quite. Social surplus as a concept here makes sense for a single transaction with a fixed backdrop, and it’s not easy to generalize macroeconomically. Further, the “double world GDP” estimates are proportional estimates, and so even if you say that GDP vastly overstates social surplus, the overstatement is prima facie likely to be proportional. To actually provide an argument against, you’d need to show that the kind of gains to world GDP that would accrue from migration are not the kind that tend to increase social surplus that much in proportional terms.

  • Occupational mix: Combining the occupational mix idea and the “cleaning my apartment” hypothetical: whether there are further increases in GDP depends on what I do with the time I’ve freed up by having somebody else clean the apartment. Do I use it for activity that would show up as economic production? Do I use it to consume more goods and services that would show up in somebody else’s production statistics? Or do I use it to just relax without producing or buying anything? In the first two cases, there will be a secondary effect of GDP gain from whatever activity I undertake instead of cleaning my apartment. In the third case, there is no secondary effect on GDP.
  • Intra-family transfers: If the income of the parents in a family goes up, does that mean that the gains go “only to the parents” and not to the children in the family? Probably not. The increased parental income probably means gains for the children as well in material and other terms. The key here is intra-family transfers. Certainly, many parents are not completely altruistic regarding their children (though some are more than altruistic), so the extent of intra-family transfers can be debated, but the phenomenon does exist. The same argument can be made regarding cases where only one parent is earning an outside income — in this case, increases in this parent’s income are likely to improve the standard of living of everybody in the family, and the way in which the gains are distributed remains an empirical question. The analogous phenomenon in the context of migration is in terms of remittances. Note, however, that as far as the GDP gain is concerned, the gain is registered only to the person who actually works and/or migrates, not to the other family members who share in the benefits.

So the overall welfare analysis, as we’ve just seen, is a lot more complicated than the GDP contribution analysis. Again, even in a welfare analysis, I think it would still be true that “most of the gains go to the migrants” — though less sharply so than for a GDP contribution analysis. The benefits to migrants are at the heart of the utilitarian case for open borders. However, even after you take out “most” of a doubling of world GDP, there’s still a lot left in terms of benefits to immigrant-receiving countries, benefits to immigrant-sending countries, and global benefits.