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Peggy Noonan

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Among other things, she writes:

Finally, Republicans should shock everyone, including themselves, by pushing for immigration reform—now. Don’t wait for the president, do it yourselves, come forward individually or in groups with the argument for legalization of who lives here now. Such bills should include border control and pathways for citizenship, but—and most important—they shouldn’t seem punitive or grudging and involve fines and lines and new ways to sue employers. The world has changed. Ease up now. In the past 10 years immigrants, legal and illegal, have fought our wars. We need to hurry in those who are trying to bring gifts we need into the USA. Whoever comes here learns to love our crazy country, or at least appreciate it. If we do a better job of teaching them why the goodness we have even exists, we will do OK.

Let’s hope.

With Friends Like These

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The New York Times last month ran a series of viewpoints on immigration. Now, as much as finding ways to argue against restrictionists can be enlightening (and maybe fun as well) today I’ve set out on a different task: pointing out bad arguments/strategies coming from a more pro-immigration (though not quite a pro-open borders) angle. To that end, Gary Segura’s article “Path to Citizenship Must be Included” is the target for today.

In this piece, Dr. Segura sets out four “must have” points for any immigration reform bill in the United States. I’ll take these from the least problematic to the most (a clever ruse to get you to read the whole post). To that end, we’ll start with demand number two:

Requirements and penalties for seeking legal immigration status should not be so onerous or punitive that they render the reform pointless. High fines or “touchback’’ rules that require immigrants to return to their home countries before applying would render status adjustment unattainable for many. Any reform that does not actually improve the lives of those affected is not acceptable.

This demand more or less works from my perspective, and to show why let me restate it: “immigration reform that is effectively not immigration reform is pointless.”

Now this isn’t to say that gradualism isn’t acceptable. On the contrary, gradualism may be the only way to actually eventually achieve any kind of open borders policy. But if a reform results in the vast majority of currently illegal immigrants staying in that condition then there is little progress achieved while potentially slowing the pace of future reform. A bad reform bill might still convince people that there does not need to be immediate action right afterwards. The real key is what constitutes restrictions so heavy that the bill is no longer worthwhile. Some level of fines, though perhaps not ideal, could still be better than nothing. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act required back taxes and some fines for legalizing many illegal immigrants and yet legalized three million immigrants. While making the fines and limitations as limited as possible will help more immigrants and create closer steps to open borders, a “no-limitations-or-no-deal” stance could derail even otherwise moderate reform. Personally I might like to see immigrants legalized with as few fines or limitations as possible, but that doesn’t mean that legalizing several million immigrants isn’t worthwhile. For this point, my main concern is just to avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good, a fault that seems to occur often in this piece.

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An interesting piece of anonymous feedback

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A few months ago, Open Borders got an interesting piece of anonymous feedback from somebody who’d filled the effect on you survey. I’ll quote the feedback in full, with minor spelling and grammar fixes and some links added.

It actually didn’t change my mind in any way. The great effect was caused by reading Econlog, where Bryan Caplan recommended Michal Clemens’ article. When I first came here, I was already convinced that open borders was by far the most important issue in the world agenda. I do think, however, that the blog has many powerful arguments which I try to convey to other people, which is the main reason I am a regular reader.

I would like to use this space to make a topic suggestion: a discussion about economists priorities, bearing in mind the recent Economics Nobel Prize to Roth and Shapley. The last Nobel Prize is being regarded as one which was awarded for real impact in the world. Although I think that is the best standard for a Nobel Prize award, I disagree that the work of Roth and Shapley meet this standard. However important the facilitation of kidney transplants may be, and it indeed is important, it bears no comparison to doubling the world gdp. That made me think about how inefficiently economics, which is supposed to be the science of allocating scarce resources, allocates its scarce resources. It has been almost a year since a respected economist wrote that opening borders might double world gdp. There hasn’t been any reaction near to proportional. When it was reported that neutrinos might have traveled faster than the speed of light, all newspapers in the world had extensive coverage. The scientific community rapidly reacted, doubting it could be possible. With regard to migration, most economists never cared to address the paper. My suggestion, then, is this: you should not focus on converting non-influential people to the cause of open borders. You should focus on making economists speak about migration. Maybe post report cards of every economics blogger you can find on his/her stance on migration. If I were doing it, I wouldn’t even address whether or not the blogger supported open borders or not, but whether or not he gave proper attention to the issue. These people, like everyone else, are vain, and probably will read what you say about them. If they respond, their readers will become acquainted with your compelling case. Thank you very much.

Some thoughts on this:

I broadly agree with the fact that it’s disappointing that few economists, even labor economists, devote their energies to studying the global impact of migration. Despite the fact that there is an economist consensus in favor of at least somewhat expanded migration, there is not much interest in the empirics of radically more open borders than the status quo. Often, the energies of economists who study migration are devoted to more narrow questions, such as whether immigrants suppress the wages of natives, framed and addressed using an analytical nationalist perspective. In his paper (linked above), Michael Clemens suggested an agenda for research into migration that would be focused on people rather than statistical categories such as nations, and that would pay more attention to the overall effects of migration both as immigration and emigration. Clemens has co-authored papers on the place premium and income per natural, which are good conceptual tools for understanding migration. In his recent open borders autobiography, Bryan Caplan wrote about how both his undergraduate education and his graduate school training failed to convey to him the magnitude of the economic impact of immigration restrictions:

By the time I started my undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, then, I was a staunch yet shallow devotee of free immigration. I simply lacked the knowledge base to understand the magnitude of the issue. My subsequent coursework did nothing to alleviate my ignorance.

After finishing at Berkeley, I moved on to Princeton’s Ph.D. economics program. Although Princeton is known for its labor economics group, I learned virtually nothing about immigration from the Princeton faculty – or my fellow students. The budding labor economists were far more interested in estimating the effects of education on earnings than the effect of immigration restrictions on global prosperity.

Adam Ozimek also made the same point in the context of economics bloggers in a blog post on Forbes, to which my co-blogger Nathan Smith responded.

Although I personally haven’t discussed economists’ lack of focus on migration, I have dealt with a related issue: libertarians’ lack of focus on open borders advocacy (see part 1 and part 2 of my planned three-post series on the subject).

So I’m already quite sympathetic to this piece of feedback.

The suggestion to create “economist report card” suggestion is an interesting one, and one that Open Borders might pursue at some point in time, but we don’t quite have the manpower yet. But perhaps some other enterprising individual or group could do this, or point to a simple way of doing this.

The parallel with Roth and Shapley’s Nobel Prize on kidney donations is also interesting. As my co-blogger John Lee has pointed out in private correspondence, bans on legal sales of kidneys, just like immigration restrictions, prevent people around the world from engaging in mutually beneficial win-win transactions that save lives. Roth and Shapley figured out an innovative partial workaround that would help some kidney donors match some kidney recipients. Perhaps there is an economist, entrepreneur, or philanthropist who will similarly find more creative workarounds to help undo part of the damage caused by immigration restrictions, and will be admired in a later era for his or her contribution to humanity.

Should we call them “undocumented immigrants”?

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We’ve given some thought to nomenclature for illegal immigrants on this site, but there are some salient points which ought to be made from an open borders advocacy standpoint. Personally, I don’t have a problem with most terms normally used for illegal immigrants, other than simply calling them “illegals” or “criminals” (which for I hope obvious reasons seems dehumanising; the term “criminal”, at least under US law, is actually completely erroneous, though it may be technically accurate elsewhere). But on reflection, I do think there are reasons to prefer a term like “undocumented immigrant” and to shy away from “illegal immigrant” — not necessarily from a standpoint of morality or dignity, but more from simply taking the right and fair rhetorical approach. Many immigrant rights activists have a questionable stance on open borders. But in using the term “undocumented immigrant”, they are not overly favouring their side, but rather adopting a term that most law and order-abiding folks, regardless of their stance on illegal immigration, should be fine using.

This is an area where I think open borders and immigrant rights groups should be able to share common ground. Indeed, I would say that given the way immigrant rights groups interpret this term, it’s incredibly pro-open borders of them, because they don’t buy into the common narrative that the problem with “illegal immigration” is entirely with the immigrant, instead of the legal system sharing some blame. From an immigrant rights or open borders standpoint, the issue at stake is that the immigrant did not properly document their arrival with the authorities. Even if you don’t go through the standard legal channels, your breaking the law need not define you any more than a speeding driver’s breaking the law ought to define them; what defines you is that you consequently don’t have the legal documentation or approval you might want or need to go about your business.

At the same time, “undocumented immigrant” does not preclude the possibility of blame attaching to the immigrant himself. Especially in the US, but in many other countries too, immigration is a matter of administrative law, not criminal or civil law. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are not an illegal earner; you are a tax evader. It may seem overly pleasant to refer to an undocumented immigrant as such, when they have no doubt broken the law. But to do otherwise strikes me as equivalent to going out of one’s way to find the most vicious term possible to describe someone driving without  insurance or a valid licence. We describe such drivers as unlicensed or uninsured, not as illegals. Moreover, the typical undocumented immigrant poses less of a threat to life and property than the typical unlicensed or uninsured driver!

The adjective “undocumented” is fairer to both the cases for and against more immigration by keeping the possibility open that the legal system shares some fault for what has happened. This language declares that what’s wrong is not that someone chose to immigrate — it’s that someone chose to immigrate, but couldn’t or didn’t obtain the appropriate papers to do so. “Illegal driver” would after all imply that driving by itself can be an illegal act — but it is not the act of driving that is illegal any more than the act of immigrating is. It is the act of doing so without the proper papers that is the problem — and this can be the fault of the person who breaks the law, or the fault of the law for making it impractical to comply. “Undocumented immigrant” is significantly more agnostic about the legal process for immigration than the term “illegal immigrant” — and rightly so, I dare say.

After all, the legal processes for immigration in most countries mean that most people around the world, no matter how much they may be acting in good faith, have near zero legal chance of immigrating via lawful channels to the country of their choice. In many cases, they have almost just as little chance of even visiting or studying in the countries they would like to. The workings of the legal processes for immigration in many countries are opaque, arbitrary, and absurd; it’s not hard to find examples of contradictory instructions from immigration bureaucracies, or “obvious” good-faith immigrants (like a white girl from the UK who grew up in the US) facing deportation proceedings. One recent change in US immigration law allows certain people who are already entitled to a US visa to apply for it without leaving the country — prior to this change, roughly half of those who left and applied for it got it quickly, while the other half faced waits measured in years.

For this reason, to focus on the term “illegal” when discussing such immigrants is to I think prevent the attachment of any blame or fault to the legal system, even though a very reasonable case may exist for such blame. Even a good deal of people who complain about illegal immigration focus on the fact that undocumented immigrants immigrated unlawfully — it’s not the act of immigration by itself that they take issue with. But the term “illegal immigrant” favours the presumption that this is mostly or entirely that immigrant’s fault for not “waiting their turn” or what have you. It implicitly assumes there is no chance the legal system could share some blame, for failing to offer such immigrants practicable legal avenues to cross the border. The term “undocumented immigrant” is more agnostic about who might get the blame.

Because it is agnostic, “undocumented immigrant” is a more favourable rhetorical term for open borders advocates. After all, “illegal immigrant” favours a presumption that there is (and perhaps ought to be) no legal right for such immigrant to be here, and that any authorisation such immigrant receives is a gift at the behest of the natives or authorities. “Undocumented immigrant” does not militate against any such presumption that a right to migrate might exist. “Undocumented immigrant” reminds us that the focus ought to be on the immigrant’s entry not being appropriately documented by the authorities as required by law — and that how we apportion blame for this between the immigrant and the legal system is a subjective question.

I don’t object to the term “illegal immigrant” on grounds of morality or dignity, but I do think it has a tendency to lower the societal status of undocumented immigrants relative to how society actually views them. Thomas Sowell approves of the view that “undocumented immigrant” is about as appropriate a term as “unlicensed pharmacist” would be for a drug dealer. This neat analogy is not nearly so neat as it first appears — something I plan to briefly discuss in a future post. But for now, open borders advocates and those looking for a less-charged term to discuss illegal immigration might remember that undocumented immigrant is no less an appropriate — and actually, I would contend, a far more appropriate — term than illegal immigrant.

Open Borders Questionnare: Nathan Smith’s answers

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This post is intended to initiate a “tournament” in which regular bloggers at Open Borders: The Case as well as guest bloggers will answer a brief but challenging questionnaire. Unsolicited submissions will be considered for publication, and not only from those of the pro-open-borders persuasion, though they should meet the high standards of rigor, with regards to facts, logic, and moral sincerity, which Open Borders: The Case tries to maintain. There is no particular time limit for submissions, which will be posted as they are received/approved.

The questions are:

1. How might the world move to open borders? Describe the most realistic process by which we might get from here to there over the next thirty to fifty years. What are the odds of this happening? And by the way, clarify what you mean by open borders.

2. Are you in favor of open borders? Why or why not?

3. How do you think open borders would affect people currently living in developing countries?

4. And how do you think developed countries would be affected by open borders?

5. What are the political ramifications of open borders, e.g., for national sovereignty, social solidarity, and global governance?

6. What is the meta-ethical standpoint from which you evaluate the issue of open borders?

Think about how you would answer these questions. Here are my answers.

1. How might the world move to open borders? Describe the most realistic process by which we might get from here to there over the next thirty to fifty years. What are the odds of this happening? And by the way, clarify what you mean by open borders.

I envision a convergence of several processes. Though for convenience I’ll sometimes use the future tense in the projections below, I’d actually place the odds that we’ll get to (approximate) open borders in the next half-century at no better than 20% or so. I’d say it’s more likely than not that at least some of the trends below will cause immigration laws to be somewhat more open, and immigration restrictions to be seen as somewhat less morally legitimate. By “open borders,” I mean that a large majority of people will be able to move at will to a large majority of places, weighted by area, GDP, or population, to live and work, subject at most to slight fees ex ante and modest surtaxes ex post, and enjoying ordinary protection of their rights– but I do not include protection against private discrimination under this heading– upon arrival. Continue reading Open Borders Questionnare: Nathan Smith’s answers →