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Positive Political Externalities

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As fellow blogger Nathan Smith has argued before, the basic problem of political externalities is an essentially solved problem. To summarize, giving immigrants the vote is not a necessary addition to giving them the right to immigrate here. But can immigrants actually be a beneficial political externality? I’m going to try to examine the argument in favor of that. I should note that I will be working on the assumption that an increase in support for capitalism is a positive externality, so this argument is primarily for those with more conservative or libertarian views given that  they tend to show more support for increased immigration restrictions.

One can point to certain anecdotal examples. David Henderson for instance has fairly recently blogged about his efforts in blocking local tax increases in his community. Here is an example of a Canadian immigrant helping to improve (at least from a perspective of economics) political outcomes in the place he has chosen to move to. However, Dr. Henderson is also a very particular kind of high-skill immigrant, namely an economist. So are high skill immigrants more generally likely to improve the political situation of the country they move to? Some examples, both current and historical might be useful in this case.

To start, let’s examine Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia has a long history of Chinese immigrants, often including many high skill emigrants such as merchants and businessmen. Today though, three countries stand out as having a large proportion of ethnic Chinese in their populations (in order from most to least): Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand (with nearly 77%, nearly 24%, and 14% of their populations being Chinese respectively). Singapore may be an unfair example due to its small size and location as a convenient port-of-call going through the Straits of Malacca, so in the interest of looking at a more “apples-to-apples” type comparison, let’s forget about Singapore. Even discarding Singapore however, the institutions and economic success of Thailand and Malaysia stand out compared to the rest of South East Asia. Of all the countries in Southeast Asia (for this discussion that area including Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia) only Malaysia and Thailand manage to qualify for the label “moderately free” on the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom, the rest of the region being labeled “mostly unfree.” Turning then to economic performance, the results are also significant.

On the general Human Development Index, Thailand and Malaysia both easily beat the rest of their region. This is also reflected in their GDP per capita numbers, with less wealthy Thailand having three times the GDP per capita as the richest country of the rest of the region, Vietnam. This result does not come from a sending country with superior institutions thereby simply bringing Malaysia and Thailand up to China’s level. Malaysia and Thailand both currently outperform China on GDP per capita, are far higher ranked on the economic freedom index, and while Thailand and China have similar HDI rankings, Malaysia clearly surpasses China.

This “immigration leading to better institutional outcomes than was the case in either the sending or receiving country” outcome makes sense once one remembers that immigrants are self-selecting. This is especially the case with high-skill immigrants whose education will tend to be correlated with more pro-capitalism conclusions (full text should be freely available, worked for me anyways). While it should be emphasized that education is not necessarily the cause of pro-capitalist conclusions, the correlation can be used to the advantage of immigrant-receiving countries. Large numbers of educated immigrants with the ability to impact politics would tend to lead to outcomes that libertarians would tend to prefer.

So the upshot for those worried about killing the goose that lays the golden egg, allow me to offer a different keyhole solution. Maintain open borders for the economic benefits, and then require immigrants to attain a certain level of education before being allowed voting rights. The result can then be that countries receiving immigrants can not only improve their economies, but their political structures as well.

Shikha Dalmia’s new paper on immigration

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Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation has a paper arguing for open borders in a US context here (PDF download here (17 pages)). People who are familiar with the Open Borders website and blog will probably not find much new about the paper, but it still makes for interesting reading. The first page of the paper, with some discussion on the attitudes towards immigration of historical figures such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, included some nuggets of information that were new to me. Dalmia’s paper is mainly focused on the US-specific suppression of wages of natives and the welfare state/fiscal burden objection, but she also considers some more niche objections such as overpopulation and environment, cheap labor leading to a technological slowdown, and increased footprint.

For those new to this blog, please check out our pro-open borders reading list which includes links to articles, papers (including Dalmia’s), and books making the case for open borders from a variety of perspectives. For balance, you may also wish to read the anti-open borders reading list. You might also want to check out our video section while you’re at it.

Framing immigration and the sip taste test fallacy

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I’ve been reading through the memos on immigration that have been put out by the Frameworks Institute, which describes itself as “changing the public conversation about social problems” and, from what I can make out, takes broadly progressive positions on various issues (or rather, offers framing advice geared towards progressive causes). (Thanks to Alex Nowrasteh for sending me the link for these memos). These memos were also briefly referenced in Fabio Rojas’s post open borders: what to do about it (part 2). The memos are targeted mostly to a US audience.

Let me begin by pointing out what parts of these memos I find intuitively plausible. First, I think that they’re largely on target with respect to their key suggestions to pro-immigration advocates: put emphasis on prosperity, opportunity, and fairness, don’t activate zero sum thinking, and avoid blaming people or calling them bad names. There are also suggestions — somewhat morally dubious but probably strategically valid — to tailor the message based on the race and ethnicity of the people receiving the message. When talking to whites, for instance, the memo recommends the value of “Fairness between Places.” When talking to blacks, it recommends the value of “Fairness between Groups.” When talking to Latinos, it recommends emphasis on the “value of opportunity.” The morality of offering different messages to different audiences seems questionable to me, but I don’t doubt the research they highlight to show that different framings appeal differently to different racial and ethnic groups on average.

The part where I’m not on board with the Frameworks Institute, however, is when it comes to their Don’t list. For instance, they suggest:

  • Don’t talk about immigration as a legal issue, or mention illegal immigrants.
  • Don’t evoke the Crisis frame by talking about how widely and deeply broken the immigration system is.
  • Don’t talk about securing borders or preventing problems.
  • Don’t begin the conversation by focusing on good immigrants, because that brings to mind all the bad immigrants.

I’m quite skeptical of all these suggestions. The way the Frameworks Institute comes up with these suggestions is by doing controlled experiments — expose people to different framings, see how they respond to each one within the setting. For instance, two people may be presented with otherwise identical paragraphs one of which has a phrase evoking a certain frame, and the other one without that phrase. The audience reactions are then compared.

The problem here, however, is that the research methodology seems to focus on people’s instantaneous responses, rather than their considered responses after reflection. In particular, it doesn’t seem to account for how people would respond after they had time to hear opposing viewpoints. Continue reading Framing immigration and the sip taste test fallacy →

Open borders: what to do about it (part 2)

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This is a guest post by Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Rojas maintains his personal webpage here and is one of the bloggers at the orgtheory.net blog.

This guest post is the second in a three-post series on how one could achieve open borders. The series focuses on public opinion and immigration policy in the United States, but its insights may apply to other nations as well. The first post of the series can be found here.

Open Borders: Changing Public Opinion

Broadly speaking, fundamental policy change, such as creating open borders, is often the result of two forces, public opinion and organized action (“politics”). Open borders will become a reality when the public stops believing that immigrants are a threat and people who take the time to fight anti-immigration policies in the courts, legislatures and even in the street succeed. This essay focuses on one side of the equation – public opinion. Though I believe that all countries should have open borders, my comments are aimed at people in Western nations such as the US because my comments are based on what I’ve learned by studying social movements in relatively open nations. My comments don’t apply to nations that are authoritarian, such as North Korea, or countries that do not have some type of legal and political system that admits challenge. The next instalment will focus on politics, the “how to” of political change.

Framing the Issue

What should open borders advocates say to the public? In general, it is a mistake to offer highly technical arguments. Most people won’t be interested in subtle arguments about migration. Instead, open borders advocates should offer what social psychologists and linguists call a “framing,” a very general concept that allows people to succinctly identify a problem and think about the solution. A successful framing defines the way we see things and what we think is possible. A good framing appeals to some basic moral intuition, not scholarly argument. Scholars who study social change often find that framing among activist is something that often precedes broader change. (See Robert Benford and David Snow’s “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” in the 2000 Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611-639. Available on JSTOR).

Anti-immigration sentiment seems to rely on two frames. Among liberals, there is the “social problems” frame. Immigration is bad because new people require more resources such as jobs and government services. There is also a related view that immigrants will have problems assimilating into American society. They won’t learn the language and they can’t get educated. All these criticisms of immigration appeal to the idea that a nation is like a boat. The boat has only so much space and overcrowding will sink the ship. Immigrants are inherently bad. It’s just that low levels are preferable for technical reasons.

There is also a nativist framing that views immigration as a threat. Immigrants are viewed as outside the native ethnic group. They are impure and not really American. They are of lower moral character and are more likely to require charity and more likely to be criminals. From this perspective, immigration restrictions are needed to preserve native culture and keep out people who will drain resources and be a drag on the rest of society.

It is not clear to me that open borders advocates have articulated a compelling alternate frame, even though I find lengthier academic arguments to be persuasive. For example, many in the immigrant rights community draw attention to the suffering of immigrants. While I agree that immigrants unjustly suffer, this is an ineffective framing of the issue because immigrant rights activists rarely attack the premise that immigration restrictions themselves are unjust. In other words, as long as average Americans think that it is normal to restrict immigration, framings such as “immigrant rights” or “end the suffering” will not be effective.

It is worth mentioning that some writers have thought carefully about framing. The FrameWorks Institute, a group that studies how to make people think differently about policy issues, has issued two papers dealing with framing immigration (available here). Continue reading Open borders: what to do about it (part 2) →

Answer to Vipul’s question about enforcement

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This post is in answer to Vipul’s post “Immigration enforcement — what’s morally acceptable? A question for fellow open borders advocates.” I have indeed thought a lot about this. In fact, to establish the answer to this question was one of my main goals in writing Principles of a Free Society, though I don’t focus my arguments on that question in any one place in the book. Vipul asks: “I feel that harping too much on [criticism of enforcement] is dismissive of… legitimate concerns, namely, how can you enforce any immigration policy — or any specific keyhole solution — without some enforcement teeth?” Yes, that’s why I had to be a rather careful policy designer in Principles. Because I think conserving good institutions is very important, but at the same time, deep moral logic compels me to regard most of the sorts of measures governments use to control immigration today as unjust. Morally, I think ICE is pretty much on a level with any gang of robbers: an organization whose raison d’etre is unjust violence.

My starting point in Principles is natural rights:

A human being is mind and body. The body has a particular telos, or peculiar flourishing, of which we have some natural understanding. Thus, we see the difference between a healthy body and a body wounded, injured, decrepit, or sick, though it would probably be impossible mathematically to define the difference in microphysical terms. To flourish, the body must have food, water and air; must not be subjected to cold or heat too extreme or for too long; must not be pierced by sharp objects or crushed by heavy blows; must not be exposed to certain substances, certain types of radiation, certain intensities of sound; must be allowed a certain degree of movement and a certain degree of sleep; should not spend too much time in water or darkness; and so forth. Each body is naturally subject to one human mind. To be subject to that mind is part of the body’s telos. The means by which the body can be subjected to the power of other human minds– it can be beaten, wounded, dragged in chains, and so on– trespass against or violate the body’s telos. The body should belong to its natural possessor. (Principles of a Free Society, p. 1)

I call this the habeas corpus principle, “taking some liberties with a venerable phrase from the English common law, yet faithfully capturing, I think, both its strict semantic sense and its highest historical significance.”

To cut a long story short, you can’t violate natural rights except as retribution for violations of natural rights. Utility can’t trump natural rights because (a) a person must generally be presumed to be the best judge of their own utility, and (b) utility isn’t interpersonally comparable. The state’s claim to a special right to use violence must derive from a social contract if it is to be just at all. Most problematic here is taxation. Ordinary law enforcement is (if the laws in question are just) retribution against violations of natural rights, usually at the behest of the victim, so that’s fine. But what justifies the state in forcing people who have violated no one’s natural rights to pay it money.  To this, I give a handful of answers which are not that satisfying, but which I think are the best you can do. Three of them are:

  1. Violating rights to protect rights.Even if utility does not trump rights, might an action be acceptable which violates rights but prevents other rights violations so that there are “less” violations (whatever that means) than otherwise?
  2. Free-rider problems.It’s possible that Pareto-improving collective action could be prevented by interminable problems of negotiation. Perhaps a state is assuming power justly if doing so improves the welfare of all members. (Interpersonal utility comparison is not a problem in this case, but it’s still a problem that utility is unobservable.)
  3. Payment for judicial services.Complex forms of property rights, such as corporate property rights with their separation of ownership and control etc., are probably only possible with the help of state coercion. To the extent that the state facilitates wealth creation through provision of sophisticated property rights (which arise from natural property rights but are too complex for casual moral intuition to settle disputes about), it may be justified in extracting some of the wealth thus created from the beneficiaries of judicial services.

Where does this leave the undocumented immigrant? To simplify somewhat, he has violated no one’s rights, and no one has a right to interfere with him. Continue reading Answer to Vipul’s question about enforcement →