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

Double world GDP versus scope insensitivity

May 10, 2012 Vipul Naik 3 Comments

One of the things that puzzles me about immigration restrictionists is how minor the harms they think they need to establish from immigration to overcome the moral presumption in favor of immigration. Even for those who don’t have sympathy for the libertarian and egalitarian arguments for open borders, there remains an extremely strong utilitarian case for open borders, which includes the doubling of world GDP and the end of poverty.

One explanation for restrictionists’ reluctance to concede the strong utilitarian case is that there are various philosophical bases for anti-immigration arguments such as citizenism, territorialism, local inequality aversion, and nation as family, which fundamentally reject universalist morality and favor the interests of specific individuals.

In a blog post comment on EconLog, Evan offers a somewhat different explanation:

I don’t know what Bryan will argue, but I think you could make a good case by using “shut up and multiply” type arguments. I.E., immigration restrictions are such a horrible violation of ethics and liberty that they’re worth putting up with other violations in order to stop them.

I personally know that if I had a choice between the USA as it currently is, or a USA with no welfare state, but closed borders between states or counties, I’d pick the status quo. In fact, if I was forced to choose between doubling the size of the welfare state, or closed borders between states and counties, I’d probably pick the former. That indicates to me that closed borders are a monstrous injustice, and the only reason people don’t realize it is scope insensitivity, or by being lucky enough to not have personally been harmed by them.

Here’s a quick summary of scope insensitivity from this page:

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88 [1]. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved – the scope of the altruistic action – had little effect on willingness to pay.

Is Evan on to something? I don’t know. I suspect that scope insensitivity is a real phenomenon in immigration debates, but restrictionists are often quick to point out numbers when it comes to talking about natives hurt by immigration. So, my best guess is that restrictionists employ selective scope insensitivity. Another possibility is that they are using the logic in Roy Beck’s gumball video to dismiss the gains from open borders.

Jason Riley’s solution to the US immigration policy disconnect puzzle

May 10, 2012 Vipul Naik 5 Comments

Restrictionists in the United States often harp on one key aspect of the US immigration policy disconnect — specifically the part about how the immigration policies supported by US political leaders fall short of the preferences expressed by citizens for reduced immigraton. To open borders advocates, the difference may seem like a rounding error. But restrictionists are often quite exercised about the matter, and have come up with a variety of explanations for this, including ideological blindness and stupidity as well as self-interest accusations.

At a basic level, the complaint checks out: the US citizenry have preferred lower immigration levels than their political representatives. Setting aside whether this is a valid argument against open borders, it’s still interesting to ask why there is such a disconnect. My general theory is that when politicians support an unpopular policy consistently, the probable reason is that they know that the medium-to-long-term consequences of supporting the unpopular policy more than compensate for the short term damage. A politician might choose to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration because he/she thinks that the increased economic growth that would result from that, or the goodwill generated with immigrant citizens and their sympathizers, more than offset the unpopularity of the policies. Some of these benefits to the politicians are inherently zero-sum (more votes to one politician means less for the other) and don’t really constitute “benefits” of immigration in a global sense. Other benefits, such as greater economic growth, if true, do constitute benefits of immigration that the politicians may be able to see more clearly than their bosses at the voting booth (i.e., the citizenry).

Jason Riley, in his book Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders, provides a slightly different but compatible theory. Continue reading Jason Riley’s solution to the US immigration policy disconnect puzzle →

My thoughts on Jose Antonio Vargas and Define American

May 10, 2012 Vipul Naik 9 Comments

Jose Antonio Vargas (life story) is an illegal immigrant from the Phillippines to the United States. Vargas is also a reputed Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. In June 2011, Vargas outed himself as an illegal immigrant in the pages of the New York Times, and I learned about this when Bryan Caplan blogged about it. Vargas has also started a website called Define American, which “seeks to change the conversation on immigration reform.” Here’s his website and Wikipedia page.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Jose Antonio Vargas at the University of Chicago. UPDATE: Here is a news article about his talk and here is an interview with the author conducted during his visit for the talk.

Below are some of the thoughts I have about the talk and about Vargas’ views. [Caution: Since I didn’t take written notes or tape the talk, I might have misremembered some of Vargas’ statements]

Vargas spent a lot of his time talking about (illegal) immigrant rights, or about the plight of immigrants. But he spent very little time talking about immigration rights. Overall, his expressed moral philosophy seemed pretty territorialist — people don’t have a right to immigrate, but once they’ve done so, they acquire various rights and privileges, and become part of the moral sphere of natives. In Q&A, Vargas did say that he also supports expanded immigration rights for immigrants at all skill levels, but this wasn’t even mentioned (as far as I could make out) in his main talk. As the creator of the Open Borders website, I find the moral imbalance jarring. Of course, it’s possible that, as Bryan Caplan puts it, Vargas was simply engaging in understatement. But I wish he’d openly asked the question: Who’s worse off, somebody who foregoes the huge place premium of migration, or somebody who gets in, then has to put up with a low probability of deportation and harassment?
In fact, the various videos that Vargas showed seemed, to me at least ,decidedly un-sympathy-inducing. He showed the video below (or some variation of it) to indicate the plight of immigrants:

But in a world where large numbers of people are poor partly because of immoral restrictions on their right to migrate, the plight of the people depicted in the video hardly seems the worst thing in the world.
To be fair to Vargas, he did concede that he was better off immigrating to the United States. In fact, he admitted that both his mother and his grandfather agreed to have him sent to the United States, despite the risks of being undocumented, because they felt that even with those risks, he would have a better life in the United States than being documented in the Phillippines. And it seems, judging from his success as a journalist and now as an immigrant rights activist, that their judgment was correct. What Vargas didn’t do, though, was go the next step and say that immigration rights are a bigger issue than immigrant rights.

Continue reading My thoughts on Jose Antonio Vargas and Define American →

Efficient or artificial? Restrictionists versus open borders advocates

May 9, 2012 Vipul Naik Leave a comment

After reading books by both Krikorian and Riley, I am struck by the contrast in what they consider the natural/efficient state of labor markets to be.

Restrictionists like Krikorian view the “natural” state of the labor market as one with no immigrants. Thus, if large scale immigration increases the supply of labor in a particular labor market, Krikorian refers to this as an “artificially loose labor market” which he in turn blames for the suppression of wages of natives and slowdown in technological progress. This isn’t to suggest that Krikorian isn’t open to allowing immigration when it is helpful, but rather, he views any immigration as a distortion of labor markets that needs justification. Quotes are included below the fold.

On the other hand, moderate open borders advocates such as Riley, as well as more radical open borders advocates like Lant Pritchett, view local labor markets as inherently embedded in global labor markets, and the “efficient” state as one with relatively unrestricted labor mobility. To Riley, then, it is immigration restrictions that constitute a distortion of the labor market. Again, this is not to suggest that Riley would not be open to immigration restrictions under any circumstances, but rather, he would view them as a distortion of the labor markets that would need to be justified on other grounds. Quotes are included below the fold.

Is there a way of resolving the issue? Continue reading Efficient or artificial? Restrictionists versus open borders advocates →

Krikorian and Riley: quick comments

May 9, 2012 Vipul Naik 2 Comments

I’ve just finished reading Mark Krikorian’s The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal (Amazon hardcover) and Jason Riley’s Let Them In: The Case For Open Borders (Amazon ebook).

As the titles make clear, Krikorian (director of the “low immigration, pro immigrant” Center for Immigration Studies) wants immigration reduced, while Riley (a Wall Street Journal writer) wants it increased.

Nonetheless, I was struck by the similarities between the books:

Both books consider immigration from a highly US-specific perspective
Both books argue from the citizenist and/or territorialist perspective, i.e., they argue about the benefits/harms of immigration to current citizens and in some cases, to residents of the country post-immigration. Both books refrain from general discussions about the moral or philosophical issues surrounding immigration policy and its legitimacy, and also from the benefits and harms to immigrant-sending countries.
Both books cover roughly the same topic list: economic and fiscal (both the suppression of wages of natives and welfare objection), violence-related (crime and terrorism), overpopulation and environment, and assimilation problems. One global harm that both books discuss — cheap labor leading to a technological slowdown — is covered from a relatively citizenist perspective.
Both books avoid, or reject, discussion of the more controversial arguments for immigration restriction, such as the IQ deficit of immigrants, or the political externalities of immigration. They also give less weight to the second-order harms to immigrant-receiving countries.
Both books make moderate appeals to the United States of America’s founding virtues, but not so much as to distract or irritate people who aren’t impressed by these kinds of appeals.
Both book are politically centrist, in that they try to appeal to values held by (US) Americans within one standard deviation on either side of the political center. The books aren’t trying to appeal to libertarians or communists, but rather to people who are reasonably comfortable with the concept of free markets and with government intervention where justified.

Continue reading Krikorian and Riley: quick comments →

Open Borders: The Case