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Moral Intuition, Open Borders, and the Euvoluntary Principle

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This is a guest post by Sam Wilson, who writes for the Euvoluntary Exchange blog. His immigration posts can be found here. Sam Wilson also wrote a guest post for EconLog containing an empirical analysis of the political externalities of immigration to the United States.

I’d like to first thank Vipul Naik for offering me the opportunity to share some of my thoughts here. I am a proponent of free migration for all and I agree that border restrictions are among the most severe barriers to
prosperity facing humanity. Freedom of movement is both a matter of basic human dignity and a necessary check on the bloodlust of tyrants. Open borders advocates support the primary cornerstone of liberty: self-determination. I am proud to count myself among their number.

At the blog I regularly write for, Euvoluntary Exchange, we spill quite a bit of digital ink investigating the intersection of everyday morality and market exchange. Needless to say, this can cover a lot of ground. Morality suffuses the whole of humanity, and the exchange relation elevates our species from scattered clusters of extended family bands to complex societies where stranger can live alongside stranger in peace and prosperity. The overarching puzzle for a euvoluntaryist like me is to identify instances where moral intuition leads ordinary people into supporting policies that undermine or thwart others’ natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange. Deontological concerns conflict with consequential outcomes, and part of the euvoluntary project is to catalog and describe these conflicts in the hopes that we can help people to see how a quotidian morality can be antithetical to the human endeavor of peaceful cooperation.  Here are some of my previous thoughts on how euvoluntary exchange relates to the issues of immigration.

Keyhole solutions are the topic for today. Naik described three options:

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

From these three primary positions, we can map six sets of rank-ordered preferences:

  1. (1)>(2)>(3)     open borders → keyhole → status quo
  2. (1)>(3)>(2)     open borders → status quo → keyhole
  3. (2)>(1)>(3)     keyhole → open borders → status quo
  4. (2)>(3)>(1)     keyhole → status quo → open borders
  5. (3)>(1)>(2)     status quo → open borders → keyhole
  6. (3)>(2)>(1)     status quo → keyhole → open borders

Naik provided an excellent descriptive analysis of each of these rank orderings, including examples where examples were to be found. I’d like to extend this a bit to plumb the moral intuitions underpinning (4)-(9).

Effective advocacy must be predicated on mutual understanding. What moral principles do open borders advocates share with the median voter? How are open border policies consistent with these moral principles? How can we prompt people to closely examine their positions in light of commonly-held moral principles? How shall we coordinate a consistent message?

Let’s start by parsing anti-foreigner bias. Documentarian Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) has a show called 30 Days where regular folks do something unpleasant for a month to see if they change their mind at the end of the treatment. Episode 201, “Immigration” put a gentleman who was a strong (9) in a household of undocumented workers. By the time he was done, he was either a weak (9) or maybe a (7). Why the change of heart? Judging by his comments, I think it was a confluence of at least two factors: (A) legislative bias and (B) construal-level error. Legislative bias economizes on scarce attention: elected representatives are the presumptive experts in policy formation, so if a “law” is on the books, it (presumptively, of course) represents careful deliberation and is quasi-panglossian. Furthermore, the experiences of foreigners are processed in far mode, highly abstract, liberated from concerns of detail. It’s fairly easy to see how this confluence of cognitive shortcuts can contribute to support for the status quo. Note that this result is robust even in the absence of aesthetic objections to immigration. You don’t have to be a nationalist to trust your politicians and to glaze over the challenges of living in poverty.

I suspect that aesthetic objections define the boundary between short- and long-term coalition possibilities. Convincing (5)s or (8)s of accepting keyhole solutions as a morally acceptable improvement seems straightforward: the immense inequality imposed by strict immigration restrictions swamps the inequality that would arise from red card solutions and the regulatory apparatus needed to administer keyhole solutions will likely be less onerous than attempting to patrol expansive geographical borders. These are folks for whom the barriers to changing immigration policy are technical matters: how will the welfare state accommodate an influx of newcomers? How will the political and bureaucratic process manage the administration of the keyhole solution? I am inclined to dismiss the ethical objections grounded in claims of potential exploitation because of reasons examined in great detail at my home blog: any potential exploitation introduced by a keyhole solution will enter immigrants’ decision calculus; those that still elect to come do so with the understanding that life after migration beats their alternatives at home. Nobody is being tricked here. If they choose to come, it’s because it beats the alternative. Forcing someone to accept a relatively worse alternative to satisfy a sense of moral smugness is immoral.

But how should an open borders advocate negotiate with both the keyhole-averse and the keyhole-first people? (7)s and (5)s appear to have mutually exclusive moralities: one is so against paying for social services for immigrants they’re willing to consign peaceful people to lives of poverty, the other so adamantly against re-crafting second class citizenry that they’re willing to do the same. Deontology triumphs over consequences yet again. I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to this dilemma. At home, we in the euvoluntary crew make our bones by showcasing the monstrous consequences of interventions and hope that our arguments are sufficiently convincing. For grown adults with myelated frontal cortices, I worry that it isn’t, but I don’t know for sure what else to do. Suggestions are welcome.

A related, minor point concerns disingenuousness. (8)s and (9)s may claim to be (6)s or (7)s in the abstract, but if it looks like the status quo is actually under threat, they may revert to near-mode objections to immigration. This is a perpetual challenge to anyone attempting to overcome atavistic biases. There’s some literature on truth-revealing institutions, but these are typically used to solve local, small-scale public-goods provision problems. Raising exit costs ex ante will do little but ensure a coalition never forms in the first place, particularly since the narrowly self-interested people (the immigrants themselves) are expressly disenfranchised. Dishonesty is an existential risk. Account for it. Lame advice? Perhaps. I’m not sure what else to say though.

Some objections to immigration are taste-based. Aesthetic arguments are generally more immune to reasoned debate. You can’t just tell George Bush about the health benefits of broccoli and expect him to overcome his atavistic childhood revulsion. No, he just hates broccoli and he won’t eat it, and that’s that. Even the most brilliant elocutionist is going to have a hard time changing an individual’s values. It might be possible to form a coalition with folks naturally amenable to welcoming immigrants, but the enduring challenge is to build a larger constituency over the long run. Think of this as a plank in the larger platform of the liberty movement. The heavy lifting is to convince people that plebeian dignity is a worthwhile goal, that self-determination is the birthright of all people. If we can figure out how to do this, concerns about faction alignment will be trivial.

As for specific advice on how to swell the ranks of folks who appreciate the dignity of the fourth estate? I’m no marketing expert, but consistency, professionalism, and integrity have served me well in the past. Many people seem to be averse to monstrous outcomes, so a touch of consequentialist reasoning probably isn’t out of order. Discerning and redirecting deontological objections is probably important too. I find it encouraging that blatant racism has become unpopular in the US; if the same can be done with nationalism, that might be a step towards a more universal equality of opportunity. I welcome ideas about how to do this. More importantly, we should be diligent about how we raise our children. Part of the Socialist Party’s Fabian strategy was (is?) to pre-empt public education. Guiding the mind of the future median voter may be a matter of hoisting the yoke of state-approved education. Like all good economists, we know to set marginal cost to expected marginal benefit. It seems to me that we’ll be able to get more bang for our buck by sharing classical liberal values with folks who aren’t already set in their ways.

Introducing Grieve Chelwa

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We’re happy to announce that Grieve Chelwa will be joining Open Borders as an occasional blogger. Grieve Chelwa is currently a PhD student in economics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Grieve has worked and lived in 5 African countries, in four of those as an immigrant. He is originally from Zambia.

Grieve believes strongly in the ability of open borders to transform lives just as his eventual immigration to South Africa transformed his. Grieve’s posts for Open Borders will focus on writing about immigration from a non-US perspective.

Citizenism and open borders

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This is a guest post by Michael Huemer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Huemer’s webpage is here. His paper Is There A Right To Immigrate? has been referenced at many places on the Open Borders site, particularly on the starving Marvin page. Huemer’s most recent book, The Problem of Political Authority, argues against political authority and for the proposition that anarcho-capitalism is a superior and feasible alternative to the status quo of nation-states. It received a rave review from fellow anarcho-capitalist and open borders advocate Bryan Caplan.

 

Vipul Naik invited me to contribute a post, and he suggested (among other possible topics) addressing the citizenist argument against open borders. As most readers probably know, this argument claims that the state is justified in closing its borders to foreigners because the state has special duties to promote the interests of its own current citizens, duties that it does not owe toward anyone who is not presently a citizen.

This citizenist argument has three main problems. First, it’s unclear why we should think the government has these special duties. Second, even if the government has special duties to its citizens, the citizenist argument requires arbitrarily privileging some citizens over others. Third, even if we ignore the previous two problems, the citizenist argument doesn’t work because one’s having special duties toward certain people does not make it permissible to violate the rights of other people.

I. Does the State Have a Duty to Benefit Citizens?

To begin with, then, why do citizenists believe that the government has special duties to its current citizens? Some just assert this without argument (see, e.g., Steve Sailer). Others appeal to the social contract theory (see, e.g., Sonic Charmer): maybe the social contract requires the government to serve the interests of its own citizens.

Sonic Charmer also pointed out the most obvious problem with this argument (though it doesn’t stop Sonic from embracing the argument anyway):

[A]ll Smart People think the ‘social contract’ is nonsense and couldn’t possibly imagine anyone with a brain believing in it. The whole idea that the basis and legitimacy of a government comes from anything resembling a ‘social contract’ is totally out of favor, and indeed is considered to have been long ago fully and definitively discredited by (whoever … some professor I think).

I could not have said it better. I know of no living person who works on political authority and thinks that we actually have a valid social contract. And I say that after having just written a book on political authority that contains 359 references.

Very briefly, contracts, in any other context, satisfy at least the following four principles: (i) all parties to a contract must have a reasonable way of opting out (without being forced to give up things of great value that belong to them), (ii) explicit, up front statements of non-agreement should generally be recognized as a way of not accepting a contract, (iii) an action cannot be interpreted as signaling agreement, if the terms of the contract would have been imposed on the agent regardless of whether they performed that action or not, and (iv) contracts generally require both parties to undertake enforceable obligations to each other, and if one party repudiates or simply fails to uphold its obligations under the contract, the other party is no longer bound to hold up their end either. The “social contract” violates all of these principles, and blatantly so. This is discussed at length in my recent book, The Problem of Political Authority, chapter 2. This is why I say that the “social contract” bears no resemblance to real contracts, as understood in any other context. If you took someone to court for an alleged “breach of contract”, no court in the world would recognize a claim of contractual obligation if you had nothing better than the sort of arguments that social contract theorists have relied upon.

But let’s say you don’t care what those annoying egghead intellectuals say. They’re always trying to convince us of ridiculous things, like that the Earth is round and that we came from monkeys. There’s a social contract, arguments to the contrary be damned! Okay, but what does the contract require? Here are two views: Continue reading Citizenism and open borders →

Arbitrariness

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A bemused Facebook post from Jose Antonio Vargas:

Numbers.

I’ve been thinking numbers since I read about the White House’s immigration plan.

So 8 years? Why not 10? Why not 7? Why not 5?

I grew up with the DREAM Act, when the age limit (per House and Senate versions) were 21, then 25, then 29, then 30, then 35, back to 30.

Numbers.

This should make people uneasy. These numbers have huge effects on people’s lives, yet they’re basically picked out of thin air. How can we avoid this kind of arbitrariness? By going back to first principles, and figuring out what, after all, justice demands.

Tyler Cowen’s not too convincing argument against open borders

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Tyler Cowen’s capacious mind prioritizes input over synthesis. He is a compulsive moderate, happiest in the mainstream, always glad to have an excuse not to rock the boat. I respect him tremendously. I am a happy user of his Principles of Economics textbook, and his blog, Marginal Revolution, is in my top five. Better yet is MR University. I haven’t listened to all of it yet, but I listened for hours last Friday to their brief profiles of many development economists, while doing the more mechanical parts of exam grading. I’ve rarely encountered such great content in a course distributed online, and never in economics. It’s amazing that this stuff is free. Three cheers for Cowen and Tabarrok’s two-man crusade to educate the world in economics. Cowen isn’t as dazzlingly lucid as Bryan Caplan as his best, but his judgment is probably more reliable precisely because of his prejudice for moderation. I sympathize with Cowen’s conservatism, his deference to consensus views. But of course, that’s also why I wouldn’t expect him to favor open borders, though he is pro-immigration. Open borders is too radical an idea for him. Still, he’s not one to dismiss a position without argument. Here’s Cowen on “Why open borders won’t work”:

The first issue is to pin down what we mean by open borders.

Land use restrictions are often a more important “”immigration policy” than border control per se.  It is not just how many people getin at what cost, but who can afford to live here.  This includes zoning laws, restrictions on the number of people allowed to live in an apartment, policies toward “squatters,” and rules for the homesteading of public property.  So by “open borders” I mean also liberal land use policies; nominally open borders would matter far less if unskilled laborers couldn’t also afford to live in the U.S.  (Note to anti-immigration types: you are focusing too much on the ease of crossing the border and not enough on the costs of living here.  How much the best immigration restrictions involve land use policy or border policy is a curiously underexplored question.)

Now, it’s true that immigration could be controlled indirectly through land use policies. But I think these questions are more separable than Cowen implies. Even if land use restrictions placed an absolutely binding ceiling on how many people could live in the US, so that even under borders no net immigration were possible, open borders would still make a huge difference. Land values would soar, and many US citizens whose value of living in the US is relatively low would sell out and emigrate. Since some of those who don’t own real estate would, I suppose, find themselves effectively evicted from the country, which is bad, but of course this whole scenario is counter-factual. In practice, whatever limit land use regulations notionally place on the number of people who can live in the US are not even close to binding, and if they threatened to become binding, they could be relaxed. A few metropolitan downtowns might be blocked by law from increasing their populations, and open borders would just drive up rents, but plenty of other places would allow developers to house the new people.

If both the border and land use were free, markets would be very powerful in organizing mass migration.  Consider Hyderabad.  Many of the very poor live either at or right next to garbage dumps.  They live in tents or ramshackle lean-tos.  Their jobs often involve scavenging the garbage dump for potentially useful scraps.  Why do they live there?  Do they like the short commute?  Is it because they love the Indian culture one finds right next to the garbage dump?  No, no, and no.  They live there because they will put up with almost anything to have a chance of survival.

How many of these people would book passage on a slow ship to Baltimore, with the hope of living in a richer garbage dump?  The ship would serve cheap rice and lentils, make them sew garments while sailing, and collect further payment five years after arrival, tagging them with GPS if need be or “monitoring” relatives back home.  Or perhaps the Indian government would pay their way.

How about the nine or so million Haitians — almost all living in extreme poverty — who face a much shorter and cheaper boat trip?

I like Cowen’s imaginative filling out of the picture of what open borders would look like. I think it would turn out something like this. But he hasn’t gotten to the downside yet. After all, probably these people would find a richer garbage dump to live on, and since he hasn’t given any reason to expect natives to be harmed by it, the changes envisioned may be Pareto-improving.

I can imagine the U.S. staying a high-quality capitalist democracy with some percentage of the population living in garbage dumps and shantytowns.  While I think we are underinvesting in shantytowns, the permissible percentage is not very high and almost certainly falls short of fifteen percent.  (Btw, there is much complaining about the Mexicans, but in fact we share a long land border with a relatively wealthy third world country; this is rarely appreciated.)

OK, but given how important the issue is, I’d appreciate a little more theory here. What exactly would prevent the US from being a high-quality capitalist democracy with 20% of the population living in shantytowns? Would the shantytown dwellers stage a revolution? Would they vote for redistributionist politicians? But of course, that assumes they’re given the franchise, and that doesn’t have to happen automatically. Cowen would be the first to agree that the golden age of US-led innovation was the golden age of open borders. Capitalist democracy was thriving then, too. Things have changed a lot since then, and yes, global income gaps are larger and the relative poverty of immigrants might be more severe than in the 19th century. But the world is also more Americanized, democratic, English-speaking, etc., than it was in the 19th century, and anyway, is there any evidence that America was pushing the limits of its absorptive capacity in 1914? With all due respect to Burkean conservatism and the precautionary principle, the humanitarian stakes are very high here. It’s fair to ask for a clearer argument of what exactly Cowen means by “high-quality capitalist democracy,” and how it’s threatened by open borders, and if so, whether “high-quality capitalist democracy” in Cowen’s sense (whatever that is) is really so valuable as to justify shutting out so many tens or hundreds of millions from a great chance at a better life.

That is why I do not favor unlimited immigration.  To the extent that nominally “open borders” would be tolerable, it is because we already impose implicit immigration restrictions through land use policies.

That all said, I will reiterate my view that we could take in many more immigrants than we are doing now, both skilled and unskilled.

Maybe Cowen and I aren’t so far apart. Cowen’s not sure what the upper bound on absorptive capacity is, but it’s certainly higher than what the US permits now. Raise it, see what happens, repeat. I wonder if he could be persuaded to position himself as an open borders skeptic rather than nailing his flag to “open borders won’t work.” Also, I wonder whether he’d endorse my DRITI scheme, which seeks to safeguard natives’ living standards and the integrity of existing institutions while retiring discretionary migration restrictions.