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Open borders, moral egalitarianism, and blank slatism

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Co-blogger Nathan already did a good job responding to critics in the comments on Bryan Caplan’s blog post Vipul Naik and the Priority of Open Borders, which in turn was a follow up to my blog post Open borders and the libertarian priority list: part 1. Fortunately for me, he chose not to critique one of the commenters that I was planning to critique, namely, Ghost of Christmas Past. It’s a long comment, laying out a cogent one-stop shop version of the economically literate restrictionist position. Responding to the comment in its entirety is beyond the scope of this blog post — rather, such a response is the scope of the entire Open Borders site. However, there’s a particular part of Ghost of Christmas Past’s post that I wish to comment upon. Ghost of Christmas Past begins with a strong claim:

Actually, Brian’s arguments for open borders have been absolutely crushed in the comments to his earlier posts on the subject (read them from the links in the side column).

Fundamentally, the problem is that Brian and other open-borders advocates are relentlessly anti-empirical on this question, which I think a “libertarian economist” should be ashamed of. Brian’s writings about immigration resemble sophomore Marxism more than anything else.

I’m interested in the second point on Ghost of Christmas Past’s list:

Second, his oft-repeated and empirically-wrong assumption that all humans are the same, their behavior simply molded by the nearly-immutable “institutions” which happen to govern society in one geographic place or another. This too, is crudely Marxist. Brian claims that immigration to the US would have no effect on US “institutions,” therefore no effect on the society which current Americans have built and enjoy, apart from driving down wages for a small segment of the population. This is nearly insane. “Institutions” are produced by the people who live under them. If you alter the people you alter the institutions. All the analyses showing that world GDP would double or whatever if there were no restrictions on migration are based on the idiotic assumption that advanced societies can instantly absorb all the world’s low-productivity people while maintaining constant marginal productivity. Such analyses are much less intellectually defensible than the “static analysis” of effects of changes in Income tax rates (raising rates will raise revenue without affecting behavior) which libertarian economists always deride when American leftists proffer them.

Apart from the empirical objection (which seems largely an objection regarding the characteristics of immigrants that harm immigrant-receiving countries, combined with concerns about political externalities, culture clash, and assimilation problems), Ghost of Christmas Past makes an interesting assertion about the beliefs that underlie open borders advocates. He/she argues that open borders advocates believe in a form of “blank slatism” — that all human beings are essentially the same, and that differences between human beings are due to their surroundings (in this case, institutions).

Even if this attack applied to some open borders advocates, Bryan Caplan is definitely not among them. Caplan has attacked blank-slatism and environmental determinism from at least two different angles: he has argued for the heritability of a number of traits, i.e., the role that genes play in explaining the variation among individuals. He has also argued for the role that free will plays in individual decisions and used it to argue against the desert of the poor. In fact, Caplan has gone farther than most by using a free will-based paradigm to study mental illness (see here). Caplan may not top the list of people who are the antithesis of environmental determinist or blank slatist, but he is definitely there on the list.

Is Ghost of Christmas Past right that Caplan foregoes his skeptical stance and embraces blank slatism on issues of immigration? Probably not. Caplan doesn’t assume that immigrants are identical to natives, or that institutions explain all the differences. He argues for specific postulates based on the evidence — in this case, evidence based on such things as the place premium, which shows that the exact same worker with identical skills can earn more in some countries than others. And Caplan doesn’t blithely sidestep the political externalities concern; he carefully tries to address it.

The extent of Ghost of Christmas Past’s confusion regarding Caplan’s views suggests a possible deeper communication problem. Upon some reflection, I think there is one plausible candidate for this communication problem. Namely, most arguments for open borders, including those espoused by Caplan, are based on what my co-blogger Nathan Smith has called “moral egalitarianism.” Moral egalitarianism is not limited to the usual egalitarian meta-ethical framework as usually understood, but also includes libertarian and utilitarian frameworks that treat all human beings symmetrically. Continue reading Open borders, moral egalitarianism, and blank slatism →

Immigration and Group Norms

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Arnold Kling’s essay on “Libertarianism and Group Norms” raises important issues. I have some sympathy with where Kling is going, very little with where he is coming from. Kling’s thesis:

I think it is unwise to dismiss altogether the case for group loyalty and adherence to group norms. My inclination is to approve of organizations that promote group objectives and attempt to limit individual choices, as long as participation in these organizations is voluntary. However, within libertarian thought, there are very different points of view as to whether or not the pressure to conform to group norms is morally justified.

He cites a lot of libertarian-friendly thinkers, including Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Hayek, to show that libertarians are historically divided on the issue of “group norms.” To me, Kling seems to conflate group norms with morality. In other words, he presupposes that our morality is socialized, rather than that there is a real right and wrong which we perceive, sometimes of course with imperfect accuracy. For example, he writes that: “An important way to achieve status within a group is to adhere to and defend its norms.” Why not say that an important way to achieve status in a group is to practice virtue? Presumably because he thinks “virtue” is whatever the group says it is, so that to replace the words “practice virtue” with the words “adhere to and defend [a group’s] norms” is a way to avoid naivete. Note also this definition of morality, which Kling approvingly cites from Jonathan Haidt:

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible. Continue reading Immigration and Group Norms →

The Age of National Socialism

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When I was 19, I had an idea of writing a history of the 20th century called The Age of National Socialism. I recalled it the other day and was surprised that it still seems like a good idea. Since then I’ve been through several churches and a religious conversion, married and divorced, changed my views on natural rights, gone from Gandhian pacifist to Bush Republican and now to pox-on-both-their-houses apolitical, yet on this issue at least, it’s surprising how consistent I’ve been. I think the reason is that I thought deeply about politics in my teens, and while on many very big questions reflection causes one to see multiple sides, on the topic of immigration, there’s only one right answer, which soon becomes clear beyond evasion. Not that the book I had in mind was just about immigration.

The thesis was basically this: that the 20th century was the age of national socialism, in three varieties: (1) welfare-state democracy, (2) fascism/Nazism, (3) the ‘socialism-in-one-country’ that was established in the Soviet Union after the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread globally, and which then became the model for other socialist societies. All three were governments “of the people” in somewhat different senses. For the Soviets, “the people” mean the proletariat, as against the bourgeoisie; for the Nazis, “the people” mean the Volk, the ethnic nation, as against external and internal “aliens”; while the semi-liberal democracies of the West didn’t define the people in novel, ideological ways and still contrasted them, if anything, to the monarchs and ruling aristocracies of a bygone age. But all of them gave a kind of sacral value to “the people,” and exercised unprecedentedly pervasive power in their name, and all more or less played down the rights of individuals, though of course they fared better in the semi-liberal democracies of the West than elsewhere. By partitioning the world into well-defined sovereign nation-states– the label world apartheid is, I think, a fairly accurate characterization of this system, though in some contexts one would want to avoid the phrase so as not to give offense– the national socialists of various stripes created an unprecedented degree of inequality in wealth and freedom among the members of the human race.

The title of the putative book expresses the hope that ‘the age of national socialism’ won’t last forever. Individual rights, humanitarianism and justice may make a comeback, and perhaps in a couple of generations the idea that it is tolerable to exclude a person from a country because of his place of birth will rightly seem as weird and wicked as it seems to us today to exclude a black man from a restaurant on the ground of the color of his skin. The all-powerful nation-state may find itself hemmed in and hamstrung on all sides, curtailed from below by empowered local governments and civil disobedience and churches and newly enlightened social norms, from the side by global financial markets and treaty obligations and international NGOs, from above by a stronger UN (sorry, libertarians) and other international agencies, which may perhaps enjoy growing popular legitimacy. Anyway, I doubt I’ll write it anytime soon, so anyone who likes is welcome to take the idea and run with it.

The Right to Invite

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I have often written about the right to migrate (or see here) but what about the right to invite? Foreigners aren’t the only ones who suffer by migration restrictions. Natives suffer from being blocked from interacting with foreigners. Recently, a choir I sing in was bereft of a brilliant accompanist when her visa expired. It would be interesting to know, if the government charged a fee to let her stay, how much could have been raised in donations to keep her. I really have no idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were $10,000 or more. Considerable effort was exerted in calling the congressman, talking to lawyers, and whatnot. But of course, there’s little we could do. I suspect that affluent Americans in the 19th century would have been astounded at the idea of a government blocking them from inviting whatever foreigners they want. They would have disdained to recognize as “free” any people so cowardly and supine that they tolerated a regime that interfered with such a basic amenity of a prosperous life as the ability to snap up foreign talent at will. Not to get too personal, but I have often considered emigrating so that foreign friends could come visit at will. I once took a job in Africa for a couple of months so that my then-fiancee (actually the story’s a little more complicated but never mind) from Russia could come to see me. And I might have been remarried a few years ago if a certain lady in St. Petersburg had been permitted to visit America. (Yes, there’s a fiancee visa, but she’d rather see the country first before taking the plunge.)

As I wrote back in 2006:

Democracy is a good system of government because the people who live under laws get to have a say in making them. In this sense, immigration restrictions are the limiting case of undemocratic law: the set of people who get to make them is the exact inverse of the set of people who may find themselves on the receiving end of them.

But while migrants’ rights are structurally unrepresented in democracies, the right to invite should, in principle, have a domestic constituency. There should be natives who want the right to invite, and for whom politicians’ willingness to supply it would be a factor in their voting decisions. Now, I’ve never heard of the right to invite being an issue in a political campaign in any democracy. You might conclude, then, that this right isn’t really that important to natives. But I think that would be a case of the rational voter fallacy which Bryan Caplan has debunked. People don’t really vote their self-interest, they vote for the common good as apprehended through the lens of lazy, feel-good ideologies. People wrongly believe, without having really thought about it, that it’s good for the government to be “sovereign” in the sense of “controlling our borders,” and they’d probably feel presumption saying, “The government has no right to deport, or keep out, our pianist / our cook / the best candidate for CEO / sorely needed programmers or scientists or engineers. Give us back our freedom! Give us back the right to invite!” But it might be possible to teach people to think that way.

I suppose I even believe in the right to invite, though I wouldn’t stress that in my own philosophy. I would say that people have a general right to self-ownership and natural mobility and not to be coerced; that coercion, always a bit suspect, can only be partly justified in the context of a social contract with a view to protecting rights; and that blocking peaceful migration is not a legitimate use of coercion. A foreigner does not need to be invited by a native in order to have the liberty to enter the territory of a country, such that no one may justly compel him to turn back. Still, if the right to invite were conceded liberally enough by rich-country governments, it could amount to almost the same thing.

And there might be a Tiebout mechanism to encourage the right to migrate. What’s a “Tiebout mechanism?” Well, Tiebout was the theorist who first developed the idea that “voting with the feet” could procure optimal supply of public goods. What I mean here is that governments could conceivably compete with one another by offering high-value individuals and companies the right to invite. Suppose Georgia, say, or Colombia, offered to, say, Google, or Apple, the right to set up labs and factories in their country and invite whomever they wanted to work there? I can easily imagine them building large gated communities there, with private airports, isolating themselves somewhat but paying Colombian or Georgian taxes and generating some positive spillovers, while moving much of their R&D there in order to take advantage of the ability to hire workers from anywhere in the world at will, rather than dealing with the wretched H1-B visa process. Could “the right to invite” become first a selling-point for countries trying to attract foreign investors, later a moral-cum-self-interested cause championed by rich-world voters? At any rate, it can’t hurt to coin the phrase.

Immigration Politics are Holding Up the Technology Sector

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This piece originally appeared in the National Journal here, and is reproduced with permission from the author. It is written specifically in the context of United States politics.

Politicians are simply playing at immigration reform. As these representatives and senators take their turn at political games, introducing pieces of legislation designed to go nowhere, the federal immigration bureaucracy once again highlights how much the current opaque immigration system damages the U.S. economy, now in its third year of anemic growth.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, recently introduced a bill to eliminate the diversity visa program, which awards 55,000 green cards by lottery, and instead redirects all of those green cards to skilled advanced foreign graduates from U.S. universities. His bill came up for a vote last week, failing in the House.

As a counter, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who represents part of Silicon Valley, introduced their own legislation to increase the number of green cards for highly skilled graduates without destroying the diversity visa program. It’s a version of Smith’s bill meant to appeal to Democrats who support the diversity visa, but it will turn off Republicans who are newly opposed to it.

Both bills, introduced with provisions unacceptable to the other party, make for political theater but leave the fundamental problem of immigration reform unresolved.

On Oct. 1, new highly skilled migrant workers on H-1B visas can start working in the United States. H-1B visas are a small subset of visas that let U.S. firms temporarily hire skilled foreigners. Along with skilled foreigners on green cards, H-1Bs make a big difference in innovative growth industries, even though only 85,000 a year are hired annually. About half of all H-1Bs work in the computer industry, with most of the rest in engineering, science, mathematics, and technology. 

Over the last decade, the number of jobs in these sectors has grown three times faster than in the rest of the economy. Foreigners seem particularly driven to these high-growth industries. About 35 percent of engineers, 27 percent of computer scientists and mathematicians, and 25 percent of physical scientists were born in foreign countries. 

To be clear, Americans are driven to these industries, too. U.S. firms try to hire H-1Bs and skilled immigrants when they are expanding. Smaller technology firms that employ H-1Bs hire five to seven other employees for each H-1B worker brought in. H-1B workers expand production, meaning that firms have to hire other Americans as well to work alongside H-1Bs. That is one reason why more technology workers do not drive down American wages. 

Every year, firms in Silicon Valley and elsewhere clamber for more H-1B visas than are issued. This year, after just two months of accepting H-1B visas, the government had to stop because the quota had been reached. Last decade, when the economy was growing at a rapid clip, the yearly quota would fill up in a single day. 

Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have done a lot to hobble the H-1B. Under Bush’s TARP, financial firms getting bailed out were not allowed to hire H-1B workers. 

And it’s not like hiring H-1B workers is easy or cheap. Firms already spend about $6,000 in legal and government fees per H-1B and as much as twice that for employment-sponsored green cards. Obama didn’t think those fees were high enough, so he doubled them for firms heavily dependent on H-1B workers, mostly Indian firms, to fund increased border-security efforts. 

Dynamic Silicon Valley firms and the technology industry are highly dependent on skilled workers. As they grow, so does their demand for skilled workers. To continue to expand in this overall moribund economy and remain a bright light of economic success, they need to be freed of obtuse immigration restrictive, quotas, and rules that hobble their expansion.

The bills introduced by Schumer, Lofgren, and Smith would release a bit of the pressure. But when desperately needed reform is stalled over the diversity visa, which has nothing to do with skilled immigration and is blamed for many sins it has never committed, it is clear just how unserious Washington is about solving the immigration mess it created.

[Open Border editorial note: Readers might like to check our pages on high versus low skill as well as our page on the startup visa, which contain related material]