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Crime in the US under open borders

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Crime is a common concern regarding immigration among US restrictionists. The statistics on immigration and crime in the United States show pretty clearly that as things stand today, the foreign-born have lower crime rates than natives both in total and for every ethnicity and for every combination of ethnicity and high school graduation status. Nathan recently blogged about how immigration might also indirectly reduce native crime rates. So, restrictionists need not be worried about immigrant crime under the status quo.

But there’s still the concern about radical open borders to contend with: even if restrictionist concerns about immigrant crime are misplaced at current rates of migration, the concern may still be valid for truly open borders. Is it? It’s hard to say anything definitive, so if you believe in the precautionary principle, this is a slam dunk argument against open borders. However, I will try to argue in this post that there is no strong reason to believe that open borders would lead to a significant upward trend in US crime rates. In fact, I would say that the odds of crime rates going up versus down are about even, and they almost certainly will not explode.

The first point I will make is that even under the current highly restrictive immigration laws, there is some immigration, including “low-skilled” immigration, to the United States from all parts of the world. While border-crossing from Mexico forms the lion’s share of “low-skilled” immigration to the United States, there are also a few low-skilled work visas and, more importantly, a diversity visa that is not designed to pick out high-skilled workers but rather favors countries that send few immigrants to the United States. Thus, the current data on immigration and crime in the United States does shed some light on what might happen under a radically freer migration regime.

However, I will, for the moment, set this point aside. Assume for the moment that current immigration from a country is completely unrepresentative of what immigration from the country would look like under open borders. What method can we then use to approximate crime rates for immigration from that country? We could look at average crime rates in the sending country. I would argue that this would overestimate their crime rates in the United States for three reasons: Continue reading Crime in the US under open borders →

More responses to Caplan’s critics

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NOTE: All commenters are referred to as “he” in the text below. I did this because the only commenters whose pen names were gendered were male, and in my experience, most commenters on libertarian blogs seem to be male. I suppose I could have used the singular “they” but it seems ungrammatical when one is referring to a specific person. Apologies to any female commenters who might have been misidentified by my choice of pronoun.

Open borders is the most one-sided issue of our times. It wins the argument and to spare. That’s my position, and if there’s a certain bravado about it, that’s my way of daring those who disagree with me to justify themselves. I want to flush out the arguments against open borders, so I can refute them. Yet to argue with run-of-the-mill immigration critics is a tedious business, because their intellectual level is so low (see my dissection of Victor Davis Hanson) that the response could only consist in cutting through crude prejudices and elementary fallacies. Bryan Caplan’s Open Borders Persuasion Bleg a few days ago was useful because he evokes a more intelligent kind of critic. Indeed, as I noted in my previous response to Caplan’s critics, Caplan has managed to muster, in his comments section, the most clear-thinking group of critics of open borders on the web, because they’ve seen him make the case for open borders in its glittering clarity. They are informed dissenters. Though still mistaken.

Caplan started the thread with this invitation:

Immigration restrictions probably have bigger effects on the world’s economy than all other regulations combined.  As far as I can tell, virtually every moral theory – utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Kantian, Christian, and Marxist for starters –  implies that these effects are very bad.  As a blogger, I’ve tried (though perhaps not hard enough) to make open borders my pet issue – to convince as many people as possible that the cause of free immigration is of overriding value.

My question for you: How persuasive have I been?  In particular, how persuasive have I been for you personally?  Yes, polling your own blog readers obviously courts a strong selective bias, but I still want to hear your answers.

There were probably more positive than negative responses to this introduction, including some who were completely converted to the open borders cause from indifference or hostility. I’ll focus on the negative responses though because they show what we still need to work on. I’ll cover most of them, but skip the long comments from Ghost of Christmas Past because they would need their own post.  Continue reading More responses to Caplan’s critics →

Why are academia and Silicon Valley pro-immigration?

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Restrictionists often argue that immigration suppresses native wages. How, then, do they explain the significant economist consensus in support of more expanded immigration? They rely on a mix of arguments such as the economist blind spot, elite conscience salve, and other attacks on advocates. The subtext of these, particularly the elite conscience salve, is that most open borders advocates don’t have to live the adverse effects of immigration. In this telling, open borders advocates, safe in their ivory towers from the unwashed masses, can declare open borders and shrug their indifference to the annihilation of their less fortunate fellow nationals.

As a factual matter, George Borjas (the man most quoted by restrictionists on economic matters) found that in the short run in the US, college graduates lose more from immigration compared to ordinary Americans, and lose less only compared to high school dropouts. I’m personally unconvinced by Borjas’s pessimistic estimates, and find the more optimistic estimates of the impact of immigration more convincing. However, that’s not a topic I want to get into in this blog post. Rather, in this blog post, I want to consider two stereotypically high-skilled profession types where people within the profession (including many who aren’t open borders advocates) actively advocate for more immigration of people who would specifically compete with them for jobs. I’m talking about academia and Silicon Valley, both in the United States context.

The case of academia

In the United States, academia is one realm where the current immigration regime is closest to free migration. Student visas are not always granted, but it’s easier to get a student visa than a H1B visa, and it’s definitely way way easier than getting an unskilled work visa (the H2A visa category). For post-doctoral and tenure track positions, academia has successfully been able to exploit a loophole in the H1B regime. The H1B regime states that a H1B work visa can be granted only if it’s convincingly demonstrated that no qualified American could be found for the job. In academia, it is usually pretty easy to set forth a collection of job requirements (such as papers on a specific subset of topics) that are satisfied by only one person on earth. It’s much harder to use this trick to hire people in other high-skilled jobs, and nearly impossible to use the trick for “low-skilled” jobs like restaurant worker or farm worker. The point is not just that the law has a practical loophole, it’s that immigration officials generally let people get away with it. Bryan Caplan explains this between 22:30 and 25:00 of his immigration restrictions video. And Caplan also notes in this blog post that academia already has de facto free immigration. Continue reading Why are academia and Silicon Valley pro-immigration? →

What do open borders advocates really want?

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How do we translate the cause of open borders into specific policy recommendations? The range of policies entailed by “looser border controls” is wide — and the range of policies which might be mistakenly attached to the “open borders” idea is even wider. It is important to be clear on definitions when we discuss the idea of open borders, lest we waste time on proposals which few actually support.

Before I continue, note that I speak only for myself; not for Vipul, not for Nathan, and not for any other advocate of open borders, even though we all support greater immigration. In fact, immigration supporter Tyler Cowen declares himself opposed to open borders, even though I suspect under my definition of “open borders”, he may be one of our greatest advocates.

It is crucial to be clear about what “open borders” really means in terms of end goals. Being vague about the meaning of “open borders” makes it easy for restrictionists to attack straw men, while ignoring the strongest arguments for open borders. So when I seek open borders, here is what I want: people to be able to cross international borders at will, insofar as this is administratively practical.

Continue reading What do open borders advocates really want? →

Benefits and harms to migrants: a meta-response

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I just published a blog post titled gains from migration: GDP versus surplus where I make arguments similar to those in the blog post by Michael Clemens titled Do the Gains from International Migration “Go to the Immigrants”? But in true Caplanian fashion, I think it may be better to step back a bit and offer a meta-counterargument to people who use “all the gains from migration are captured by the migrants” as sufficient grounds to dismiss the huge benefits from open borders. And while I’m at it, I want to consider its mirror image argument, which is also offered by many restrictionists (though I haven’t yet seen a restrictionist offer both arguments simultaneously).

  • Benefits go “only” to the migrants: The claim here is that the benefits of open borders are huge, but they go “only” or “largely” to the migrants. Once we subtract off the benefits to the migrants, the benefits to the rest of humanity are miniscule, zero, or negative. So, open borders aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
  • Open borders hurt the very people they’re intended to help: This argument has a few respectable versions, such as the killing the goose that lays the golden eggs formulation and the cheap labor leading to a technological slowdown argument. But, there are a lot of other versions of the argument, and the version I want to address here builds upon the analogy between immigration restrictions and apartheid in South Africa. The claim is that the end of apartheid spelled disaster for South African whites and blacks. If immigration restrictions are like apartheid, then open borders might lead to the very same problems globally that we currently see in South Africa. Typical for this line of reasoning is this comment by egd on Bryan Caplan’s blog post:

    Do you seriously believe that open borders would lead to such an outcome for you?

    No, but that’s not the right question, is it?

    Even in South Africa, treatment of whites after apartheid is far better than treatment of blacks under apartheid.

    Has ending apartheid made whites better off?

    Has ending apartheid made blacks better off?

    The answer to both of these questions is pretty clearly “no”: more poverty, more income inequality (to the extent it’s bad), reduced life expectancy, and other problems have developed in South Africa.

    The root cause isn’t desegregation, the root cause is political externalities associated with desegregation. Political externalities matter.

    James A. Donald, in a further comment on the same blog post, writes:

    It is glaringly obvious that not only are whites far worse off with the end of Apartheid in South Africa, blacks also are worse off.

    The flood of illegals from neighboring black countries has ended with the end of apartheid, and in many cases reversed. Blacks are voting with their feet that black South Africa is no good, after previously voting with their feet that white South Africa was good.

    Electricity has become intermittent, water is dangerous, and the higher stories of tall buildings have become uninhabitable

    Black incomes have fallen dramatically following the end of apartheid

    http://www.nber.org/digest/jan06/w11384.html

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/economic-and-social-crisis-in-post-apartheid-south-africa/

    When the superior rule the inferior, it is not only better for the superior, it also better for the inferior.

    Even if blacks had the same income, that would be no substitute for the lack of clean water, lack of reliable electricity, and lack of law and order.

    And that is what America will become in due course with current levels of immigration of inferior people.

Continue reading Benefits and harms to migrants: a meta-response →