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Robert Putnam, social capital, and immigration

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So I just read Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century.” (links to related material are available on this site at the social capital decline page).  Before I comment, let me give a personal note, which will explain the angle from which I’m looking at this.

I can get along with almost anyone, quite happily. Naturally, there’s a special edge to conversations with attractive young women (of all races), but for almost anyone, there are interesting details of their lives to explore. In the extensive travels of my younger days (“seeing the world,” as the saying goes), I interacted with tour guides in southern China, the daughters of illiterate peasants; Chinese girls selling paintings on Tiananmen Square; huge crowds of Chechens, mostly vacationing teachers, in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria in the Russian North Caucasus; a Buryat or Mongoloid ethnic in Sibera; Tuvans; Malawian peasants; Malawian government bureaucrats, and teachers; Rhodesian exiles scattered around Malawi; backpackers in Europe who came from Australia, Poland, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Japan, Korea, Germany; talkative Italian old men on the streets of Rome; vendors all over the place; taxi drivers all over the place; students of English; grad students of many fields; the congregation of a certain black Baptist church in Northeast DC; college students of all majors; former prisoners of conscience sitting next to me on a bus in Tajikistan; singer-songwriters at a festival in Dombai in the Russian North Caucasus… the list goes on and on.

I can get along with almost anyone, quite happily. But I can even more happily immerse myself in writing or reading books. A few years ago, I discovered audiobooks. It was just after my divorce, so I was glad to be distracted from my own thoughts at the time, but the habit stuck, and I soon noticed that my long-standing dislike of eating alone had been reversed. On a certain day, I suppose it must have been in early 2007, a girl from Harvard, quite attractive, was to meet me for lunch. I was working at the World Bank, and she wanted advice on how to get a job there. During the morning, I found I was resenting it. Why? Because I was in the middle of a brilliant novel, which I would have been able to “read” (listen to) during my lunch break, but for her. Then it hit me. Wait a minute, I thought. Am I actually resenting the chance to go to lunch with a cute girl? Well, yes, I was. It sounds rather brutal, but in the past six or seven years, the conclusion is undeniable that few people can compete with an audiobook for entertaining, enlightening, and edifying me. There are some: many friends, all far away alas, for ten minutes of whose company I’d go ten hours without any entertainment at all. Bluntly put, everyone else is (at least as a conversational companion) an inferior substitute for having the best thoughts of mankind fed into my ears via wires. I was grateful for their company in my younger days only because the iPod hadn’t been invented yet. (That’s not the insult it may seem to be, because I am not denying their inherent value, which is very great. But the value of my casual interaction with them is limited.)

These experiences color my reading of Robert Putnam’s work. For Robert Putnam, “social capital” is good. When I eat lunch with someone, he’d nod his head in approval, especially if that person is as different from me as possible. When I eat lunch alone with an audiobook, he would shake his head with dismay. He could doubtless understand the logic of “revealed preference,” i.e., if I could have invited people to lunch but chose to eat alone instead, I must be happier that way. But I suspect he wouldn’t believe it. And it’s true, of course, that revealed preference can’t be applied straightforwardly to social capital issues, which always involve the interests and choices of multiple people. A decline in social capital might reflect that (a) we’ve found something to do that we like better than interacting with each other, or that (b) we’ve gotten worse at solving the coordination problems involved in interacting with each other. An economist would say that (a) is unambiguously good, while I think Robert Putnam, a bit paternalistically, would object; but even an economist would agree that (b) is bad. Putnam is aware of some potential downsides of social capital– gangs, for example– but I don’t think he adequate appreciates the scarcity of time. Continue reading Robert Putnam, social capital, and immigration →

The poverty of language/concepts in the migration debate

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Victor Reppert is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, a philosophy book I read a few years ago that develops the Argument from Reason, a refutation of materialism, in C.S. Lewis’s Miracles and elsewhere in his writings. I just discovered Victor Reppert’s blog Dangerous Idea, and this post on immigration:

Do I support open borders?

Bill Vallicella asked me.

No. But I strongly suspect that barriers to legal immigration are probably excessive. We do have to keep out people with criminal records.

I think it’s probably a false dilemma, or a straw man, to claim that anyone who wants to reform the immigration system simply wants open borders. It also doesn’t follow that all “path to citizenship” programs are simply amnesty. Those that I have heard proposed involved paying a penalty, and earning citizenship. (I realize there are a wide range of fairness issues involved in all of this, but the idea that such plans involve our just forgetting that people are here illegally doesn’t seem right to me at all).

This is an Ed Montini column which discusses the effort of Tyson Nash, the hockey player (not related to the Suns Steve Nash, apparently), who, in spite of being a model citizen, came close to being deported. It seems to me that I could ask whether we could make immigration easier without advocating open borders.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2010/05/21/20100521Montini0521.html

I am also convinced that we’ve have to combine a partial immigration reform with an increase in border security. I’d rather stop them before they come in than send them back after they’ve settled in and started contributing to our community.

As for the [undocumented] immigrants that are already here, there are questions in my mind about what the economic impact of their removal from our community would be. The departures from Prince William County in Virginia, which was the basis for the movie 9500 Liberty, showed that it resulted in a lot of economic harm, and an increase in the rate of foreclosures. In short, [undocumented] immigrants are a mixed curse, since they become part of our community and do contribute to its economy, pay taxes, etc. I’m not even sure it’s physically possible to deport all of them, anyway. That flaming liberal Michael Medved said that in order to send all of the back you’d need buses that, laid end to end, would stretch from Tijuana to Seattle. On the other hand, the people that actually do transport these desperate people over the border are, so far as I can tell, the worst sorts of criminals, and surely we can hit them as hard as possible.

I seriously doubt that 1070 is going to result in very many deportations. The cost in ill will between the Hispanic community and the rest of us, to my mind, far outweighs the improvement in will provide in law enforcement, which I suspect will be minimal.

So, without actually having done a full cost-benefit analysis on all of this, I would say start with security at the border, make the process of immigration more rational but don’t just throw it wide open, and then provide some path to citizenship that involves a serious penalty and isn’t just simple amnesty.

A fence? Yes, if it would work, no, if it wouldn’t.

These are fairly conventional views, but what strikes me is that the disclaimer that supporting immigration reform doesn’t amount to supporting open borders should be necessary. It is semi-necessary because moderate restrictionists who want to let those who are here stay, but keep out any new undocumented immigrants, get lambasted as supporters of “open borders” by the nativist right– Victor Davis Hanson, say. But the distinction between open borders and a moderate restrictionist who wants to build fences and is OK with large numbers of deportations should be too obvious to need explaining. That’s what I mean by “the poverty of language/concepts in the migration debate.”

Objections to Reppert. First, it wouldn’t actually be a good thing for the country to “secure the border,” even if it were possible. It would separate a lot of families, prevent California growers and other employers from getting the workers they need, and block a lot of foreigners from opportunities to better their lives. Second, calling possible payments involved with a path to citizenship a “penalty” isn’t quite appropriate since illegal immigration isn’t morally wrong. But OK, that’s hair-splitting. Third, if you do establish a path to citizenship/amnesty, then you’ll strengthen the incentives for other foreigners to come. That’s fine with me! But it’s a problem for proposals to secure the border while letting the people already here gain status. Reppert isn’t an open borders supporter, and my main point is that the use of “open borders” as a straw-man attack on moderate restrictionists from the nativist right is unfair. One useful role that Open Borders: The Case might play is that moderate restrictionists could link to us and say, “I don’t support open borders! Those guys support open borders.” However, Reppert’s seemingly commonsensical moderate position is not actually a feasible, sustainable compromise. One amnesty would create the expectation of another amnesty, which would draw in more immigrants hoping to benefit from the next amnesty, until, hopefully, people start to see that the only way to reconcile a decent respect for human rights with incentivitizing law-abiding behavior is to open the borders. Currently, of course, we’re getting neither– neither decent respect for human rights (over 1.4 million deportations during Obama’s first term)– nor rule of law.

Robots or Immigrants?

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There’s been some buzz lately about falling birthrates in the United States.

The U.S. birthrate plunged last year to a record low, with the decline being led by immigrant women hit hard by the recession, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The overall birthrate decreased by 8 percent between 2007 and 2010, with a much bigger drop of 14 percent among foreign-born women. The overall birthrate is at its lowest since 1920, the earliest year with reliable records. The 2011 figures don’t have breakdowns for immigrants yet, but the preliminary findings indicate that they will follow the same trend. (via Marginal Revolution)

Here’s Ross Douthat’s take and Megan McArdle’s take, both very eloquent, and thoughtful, and worried, as is Bryan Caplan‘s take. Douthat mentions immigration obliquely but doesn’t think it’s a solution to demographic decline:

But deeper forces than the financial crisis may keep American fertility rates depressed. Foreign-born birthrates will probably gradually recover from their current nadir, but with fertility in decline across Mexico and Latin America, it isn’t clear that the United States can continue to rely heavily on immigrant birthrates to help drive population growth.

This isn’t quite convincing, because the US wouldn’t need high immigrant birthrates to drive population growth. High levels of immigration would suffice to drive population growth. McArdle goes into more detail about the possibility of more immigrants as a solution to demographic decline:

In theory, you just export capital to younger societies, or import young immigrants.  But there are some problems with this theory, the largest of which is that the whole world is getting older almost all at once.  Every country is facing (or soon will) the same looming demographic pressure.

That’s an exaggeration. It’s true that birthrates are falling virtually everywhere in the world, but they’re still pretty high in Africa and many other developing countries (with India, 20.60 births per 1,000 persons, well above the United States, 13.68). There will be plenty of young immigrants to draw in for a long time yet. McArdle argues that there are limits to investing a broad as a strategy for securing the future: Continue reading Robots or Immigrants? →

Open borders in Scandinavia: a brief case study

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Now here is an interesting account of migrant workers who live in overcrowded quarters and work for relatively magnificent wages doing menial work which natives don’t deign to do. The twist, of course, is that the migrants are Swedes working in Norway. It’s fascinating, and it illustrates, I think, to a large degree that the social problems presented by migrants will never go away completely.

After all, Sweden and Norway are both relatively rich countries with a shared culture and history. If ever there were two countries better suited for open borders, it’s hard to imagine, and so it is of course unsurprising that their borders are in fact open to each other. Yet none of this has made all the common stereotypes about migrant workers go away: Swedes are seen as living in filthy, overcrowded lodging, doing menial work and being uncouth, uncultured. Employers simultaneously prize them for their work ethic and willingness to accept lower wages than the natives.

All this of course overstates the tensions that exist between the two: clearly, Norway is not on the brink of social collapse because of a horde of unwashed Swedish masses. The natives and migrant workers may coexist uneasily, but I do not think anyone would suggest that Norway’s taking in Swedes has harmed Norway, or Sweden for that matter.

The lessons of this tale are many, and can really be marshalled to support any stance you like on open borders. What I would focus on is of course the optimism — that even if we can’t make inherent anti-foreign bias or mistrust of foreigners go away, there’s no reason to expect your society to break down just because you admit most any foreigner to work and live in your country. What a pessimist would focus on is how Norwegian issues with migrants might be magnified if Norway opened its borders to most anyone — since, after all, plenty of us around the world would be willing to take on Norwegian summer jobs that pay 30 or 40 US dollars an hour!

At the same time, one must be careful to nuance the picture: 13% of all Norwegian residents are already immigrants, with the top 3 source countries being Poland, Sweden, and Pakistan in that order. Poland and Pakistan are clearly no Sweden, and yet there is no evidence either that immigration is threatening Norway. The author of the Swedish migrant worker account asserts (without citation) that “Over the past ten years, Norway has taken in more foreign labor than any other European country.”

One might cite Norway’s immense mineral wealth as a factor in its resiliency to the harms of immigration here — it’s interesting to note that policies in natural resource-rich countries in general seem more accepting of migrants — think Canada, Australia, Malaysia, the UAE, and I suppose, Norway. But I am not sure if that is the whole story, as I can’t think of an obvious prima facie reason why mineral wealth, as opposed to wealth in other forms such as industrial or human capital, should substantially matter here. If we are talking about wealth redistribution to immigrants, that’s one thing — but a lot of these countries have limited if not zero redistributive policies for many if not most migrants. Good luck trying to take advantage of the UAE or Malaysian welfare states — and it’s not like Canada or Australia are giving away the farm to most people who come over either.

Overall, I think the Norwegian case supports revising upwards our prior probabilities of the potential success of open borders. At the very least, it supports that relatively uncontroversial (I hope) notion that more liberal immigration policies in some countries would be a good idea. It certainly does little, I think, for the common supposition that rich countries generally either don’t benefit much from immigration, or are actively and substantially harmed by immigration.

Link roundup: December 12, 2012

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Some links that may be worth reading are below. Note that linking is not the same as endorsing. I have some thoughts on each of these, but those are for another time.