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Immigration Restrictions Enable Abuse

July 28, 2015 Joel Newman 2 Comments

The writers at openborders.info frequently describe how immigration restrictions are immoral in the context of official policy. Governments, in an effort to keep most people from immigrating to their countries, prevent would-be immigrants from entering their territories and detain and deport those who have managed to penetrate their borders; ending these official actions is our overarching goal. The evils of restrictions are not limited to official government policies, however. Immigration restrictions make immigrants and would-be immigrants vulnerable to mistreatment by individuals in myriad ways.

Before detailing this mistreatment, it is helpful to consider a similar dynamic in African-American history. Ta-Nehisi Coates has described in the Atlantic how many whites in America have taken advantage of blacks in the context of government and societal discrimination. He refers to “.. the marking of whole communities as beyond the protection of the state and thus subject to the purview of outlaws and predators.” For example, Mr. Coates relates how an African-American sharecropping family in Jim Crow Mississippi, whose landlord was supposed to split the profits from the cotton with them, would lose most of the money to him. The father in the family told his son not to resist this situation “‘because they’ll come and kill us all.’” In another example described by Mr. Coates, African Americans from the 1930s through the 1960s “were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market,” to a large extent due to Federal Housing Administration policy, which made black neighborhoods usually “ineligible for FHA backing.” As a result, “blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.”

Borrowing terms from Mr. Coates, restrictions herd immigrants into the sights of the unscrupulous. To begin with, migrants crossing borders illegally, by attempting to evade government authorities, are put at risk of being robbed (or worse). A Mexican man who crossed illegally into the U.S. recalled that he was robbed two times that evening. Before he and the other immigrants in his group even crossed the border, they were ambushed by bandits who threaten them with ice picks. He was forced to strip and was robbed of $40. Then, approaching the border wall, another group of robbers approached with guns, but after the immigrants explained they had already been robbed, the second group left them alone. Soon after crawling under the wall into the U.S., they were approached by yet another group of robbers with ice picks. The man was forced to give up his tennis shoes and in return was given a pair of old, used shoes. (Cristine Gonzalez, “Journey to Wenatchee,” The Oregonian, 6/15/07) The New York Times reported that “illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border often encounter bandits, armed civilian patrols and rival smugglers bent on robbing or stopping them.” In February of 2007, men with rifles robbed 18 immigrants who had crossed into Arizona. A day later, a group of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala were traveling in a vehicle along a known smuggling route when gunmen fired on the vehicle, which then crashed. Three of the immigrants were killed, three were wounded, and several others were kidnapped. An official with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said, “’There have been similar cases where undocumented migrants have been taken to a location and relatives in Mexico contacted and extortion took place.’”

Immigrants from Central America who cross Mexico on their way to the U.S. border are exposed to danger even before they reach it. It is easy to cross into Mexico from Guatemala, but, as reported in National Geographic, “it is at the southern Mexican border where the perils begin—the thugs, the drug runners, the extortionists in official uniforms, the police and migration agents who pack undocumented migrants into detention facilities before forcing them onto buses to be deported.” The Central American migrants in a Mexican city near the Guatemalan border “… because they’re isolated, vulnerable, and likely to be carrying money—attract assailants whose toxic presence alarms everybody in town.” The article adds that migrants who ride freight trains north through Mexico are sometimes accosted at stops by locals who beat and rob them, “sometimes with police watching or joining in.”

When undocumented immigrants make it in the U.S., their desperation to have legal residency and their vulnerability to deportation make them targets of other types of theft. Some attorneys have reportedly defrauded immigrants. A director of an immigrant advocacy group stated, “Immigrants are easy prey for unscrupulous attorneys, and they are often unwilling and unable to complain because they are likely to be deported if they do.” People who are not attorneys similarly take advantage of the undocumented. The New York Times reported several years ago that over a hundred undocumented immigrants in the New York area were cheated out of almost a million dollars by two men who had set up a church in Queens, New York. The immigrants were told that green cards were available through churches. They were also told to pay a fee in cash ranging from $6000 to $10,000. The immigrants drained their savings and/or borrowed money from others to cover the fees. After months had passed and the green cards did not appear, the immigrants began asking for refunds. After first threatening to report the immigrants to authorities, one of the schemers simply stopped answering calls and closed the church. “Many of the immigrants say they find themselves in deep financial holes at a time when work is scarce. Officials can offer only limited hope: Full restitution for victims is often difficult in cases of financial fraud, especially in immigration-related cases, which almost always involve cash transactions.” (See also here.)

Beyond enabling the fleecing of immigrants, restrictions also make immigrants vulnerable to sexual assault. The National Geographic article on Central Americans crossing Mexico refers to sexual assaults on migrants. In addition, a report by groups that monitor the U.S.-Mexico border states that “smugglers have been regularly accused of coercion, rape, and forced servitude…” (p. 13) The undocumented are also vulnerable to sexual assault when they work. According to an article on the Public Broadcasting Service site, a study of hundreds of low-wage employees working illegally in the U.S. “found that 64 percent of the janitors surveyed had been cheated out of pay or suffered some other labor violation. About one-third said they’d been forced to work against their will, and 17 percent of that group said they’d experienced some kind of physical threat, including sexual violence…” Immigrant agricultural workers are also abused, according to another article on the PBS website: “The combination of financial desperation and tenuous immigration status make agricultural workers vulnerable to workplace violence and less inclined to report crimes.”

Immigration agents themselves have mistreated immigrants beyond their official duties of stopping illegal immigration. This should not be surprising, given the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteers assumed the roles of either guards or inmates. Soon after the experiment began, the guards began to mistreat the prisoners. The experiment was shut down early because of the suffering that was occurring. (“The Slippery Slope of Evil,” Mother Jones, July/August, 2015, p. 56)

Restrictions make immigration agents the “guards” and undocumented immigrants the “prisoners.” Along the U.S.-Mexico border, each year there are hundreds of thousands of apprehensions of undocumented immigrants by armed immigration agents, so it is not shocking that, according to a 2008 report by groups that monitor the border, “in a very small but extremely important set of cases, Homeland Security officers (including Border Patrol officers) have used lethal force. The wider pattern of abuses includes pointing guns at immigrants, wrongful detention, excessive use of force, and verbal and psychological abuse.” (p. 15) In one case, an immigrant reported that on December 19, 2007, “I crossed the border and almost immediately an agent was upon me with his flashlight drawn like a weapon. I turned to run back to the Mexican side, he tackled me and pulled my feet and then there was another agent hitting me. Even though I had reached the Mexican side, the agent pulled me back and the other continued to hit me, and jumped on my back. My chest, hand and leg were hurt, and my body had cuts all over. The agent that was hitting me also pointed his gun at my head and was yelling at me. After I was taken to the border patrol station, an ambulance was called and I was taken to a hospital. After I was released and taken to the detention facility, I had to go back to the hospital two more times because of my injuries.” (Also see here, pp. 9-10)

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, notes that as part of writing the book (on the deadly crossing of Arizona’s desert undertaken by a group of undocumented immigrants in 2001) he spent hours in Border Patrol stations and trucks. He reveals some Border Patrol views of undocumented immigrants. “Illegal aliens, dying of thirst more often than not, are called ‘wets’ by agents… ‘Wets’ are also called ‘tonks,’ but the Border Patrol tries hard to keep that bon mot from civilians. It’s a nasty habit in the ranks. Only a fellow border cop could appreciate the humor of calling people a name based on the stark sound of flashlight breaking over a human head.” (p. 16) And this: “There are other games the Border Patrol guys like to play. Sometimes they toss a recently shot rattlesnake, dead but still writhing and rattling, into the cage with the captured wets. Ha ha—that’s a funny sight, watching them go apeshit in the back of the truck.” (p. 27)

In addition, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are literally prisoners in detention facilities in the U.S. each year. Some are in state and county criminal jails, while others are in facilities run by immigration authorities or private contractors. Amnesty International reports “pervasive problems with conditions of detention, such as commingling of immigration detainees with individuals convicted of criminal offenses; inappropriate and excessive use of restraints; inadequate access to healthcare, including mental health services; and inadequate access to exercise.” (p. 7) The New York Times has described the immigrant detention system as “a sprawling network of ill-managed prisons rife with reports of abuse, injury and preventable death… a system that puts little children in prison scrubs, that regularly denies detainees basic needs, like contact with lawyers and loved ones, like soap and sanitary napkins. It is a system where people who are not dangerous criminals by any definition get injured, sick and die without timely medical care.” A recent report from The Center for Migration Services and The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops noted that “attorneys and pastoral workers from Catholic agencies have learned first-hand of the sexual abuse of women detainees, women forced to deliver babies in restraints, frequent hunger strikes, suicides…” (p. 15)

The role of smugglers and employers in the exploitation of undocumented immigrants is more ambiguous. There have been cases where smugglers and employers have clearly mistreated undocumented immigrants. I earlier noted reports of sexual assault on immigrants by employers and smugglers. In addition, in at least one case smugglers of Chinese migrants had enforcers extort more resources from them during the voyage. (Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor, 1997, p. 80) When smuggled Chinese migrants arrived in America, they would sometimes be tortured to force the migrants’ relatives to pay off the smuggling fees and would even be forced to work without pay. Migrants from Syria and Eritrea often are smuggled across the Sudanese portion of the Sahara Desert on their way to the Libyan coast (and then on to Europe). An article in the Guardian states that “All must brave the desert – and not everyone makes it. At every stage, migrants are at the mercy of the smugglers in that particular area; kidnappings for ransom or for slave labour are common. There are stories of smugglers abandoning their clients in the dunes and of dozens dying of thirst.” Some of those who make it to Libya “are essentially kidnapped by smugglers or even local businessmen… whoever is doing it seems to be holding migrants in warehouses, or treating them as slave labour, until they pay what they owe.” In addition, “there are reports of beatings to extract more money from people while they wait” to begin the trip to Europe.

Employers can use immigration agents as a way of exploiting their immigrant workers. A report relates a situation in Louisiana in which
immigrants working to clean and repair an apartment complex damaged by Hurricane Katrina labored long hours, lived in moldy apartments in the complex, and were owed 15 weeks of unpaid wages. “The employer regularly threatened to call immigration authorities in response to workers’ demands for their pay.” A few days after an attorney sent a letter in 2008 to the employers on behalf of the workers demanding payment, ICE “agents arrived at the exact time and place that the immigrant workers were required to check in for the day, and arrested seven of the workers who had sought back pay.” At least two workers have been deported to Honduras. “As has been the case with many raids conducted by ICE, none of these workers had committed crimes, and the employer was not charged with anything or held liable for its abuse of the workers.” (“Raids on Workers: Destroying Our Rights,” Report of The National Commission on ICE Misconduct and Violations of 4th Amendment Rights, 2009, pp. 40-41) Another report stated that “in raids documented by NNIRR’s HURRICANE initiative in 2008, where employers cooperated fully with ICE’s enforcement operation, employers were subjecting workers to egregious labor rights violations. This included not paying minimum wage, non-payment of wages, including overtime work, threats of deportation, denying access to or not providing safety equipment and not meeting safety standards, sexual and verbal abuse and harassment by immediate supervisors.”

Notwithstanding these cases of abuse by smugglers and employers, on balance I agree with Vipul that “helping illegal immigrants by smuggling them or employing them, even when done for selfish reasons, is a good thing (if nobody were willing to smuggle people across the border, or employ them once they were on the other side, this wouldn’t be good for the immigrants).” (See here and here for Vipul’s elaboration of this perspective.)

The exploitation and abuse of undocumented immigrants described in this post is not a complete survey of all the suffering inflicted by immigration restrictions. I did not explore the suffering and death from exposure to the environment in an attempt to evade immigration authorities, whether that involves crossing a desert or a long stretch of sea. I did not relate the suffering caused by deportation and raids and the “normal” suffering associated with detention, such as separation from loved ones. I did not address the lost opportunities for those prevented from migrating to a different country. It should be kept in mind that the mistreatment discussed in the post accounts for only part of the suffering associated with restrictions.

It also needs reemphasizing that the ultimate responsibility for the mistreatment related in this post should be assigned to the people who create the laws that restrict immigration (and, in democracies, the citizenry that elects them). The immediate perpetrators of misdeeds against immigrants, whether they are border agents, robbers, swindlers, or prison guards, certainly bear responsibility for their actions, but they have been enabled by the policies that make immigrants vulnerable to their depredations. When immigration restrictions disappear (while keeping limited restrictions such as the exclusion of terrorists) and open borders are realized, the ability of people to abuse immigrants should dissipate.

Angela Merkel and the crying refugee, and the search for a human face of the costs of migration restrictions

July 23, 2015 Sebastian Nickel 1 Comment

A video showing German Chancellor Angela Merkel responding to a young Palestinian refugee has received a lot of attention in the press and in the social media last week. Reem Sahwil, a teenage girl whose family still faces the threat of deportation after four years in Germany, described her situation in some detail and eventually started crying on the air, prompting Ms Merkel to try to comfort her, all the while staying firm in her defense of the policies that have been causing Reem so much grief.

Most of the responses I’ve seen were critical of Angela Merkel, often describing her as cold hearted and her response as clumsy and insulting.

This sort of incident may be a strategic godsend for the cause of free(r) migration. In the Open Borders Action Group on Facebook, Sam Dumitriu suggests that “More situations like this should be engineered to make the costs of closed borders salient.”

The largely critical response also seems encouraging. As Andy Hallman pointed out in another Facebook thread, it’s not far fetched to imagine how commenters could have instead been “flippant about the little girl’s suffering”.

The great news is that a much more commonly expressed response has been anger at the unjust treatment of this young girl. The not so great news is that a lot, if not most, of the criticism focuses not on the policies, but on morally trivial aspects of Ms Merkel’s interaction with Reem.

What happened

An 88 minute long program was filmed on the 15th of July, which shows Chancellor Merkel talking politics with 29 teenage students of a school in Rostock. At one point the moderator passed the microphone to Reem Sawhil, asking her to tell her story. Reem explained that she is a Palestinian who had moved to Germany from Lebanon four years ago. She has found it easy to assimilate as people have been nice to her at her school and she likes her new home, but she has recently become aware that other young refugees have a much harder time.

Ms Merkel complimented her for her flawless German, and Reem explained that she loves languages and has also greatly enjoyed learning English as well as some Swedish, and that she will take up French next year.

Reem then explained that her family still had not received a residence permit, and that her father remains banned from working in Germany. Probably in anticipation of Reem’s participation in the TV program, her family members had started asking why it is that foreigners aren’t allowed to work as easily as Germans, and Reem had tried and failed to find any answers.

She then explained that her family had recently gone through a rough time, as they had been on the verge of being deported. Reem said she had been feeling very bad and that her teachers and friends had all noticed. Ms Merkel asked what the current situation was, and Reem explained that they had received permission to stay for the time being after some bureaucratic hoop jumping, but were still waiting to hear back from the immigration authorities. She then said how much she misses her family members whom she has not been able to see in four years.

Ms Merkel explained that the policies in place require that the authorities examine whether refugees have a legitimate reason to want political asylum. She said that policy makers have recently been discussing the issue of refugees being found to have an insufficient claim to asylum only after having spent several years in Germany while waiting for the authorities to make a decision. Here she asked Reem whether she had come to Lebanon from Syria, which Reem said was not the case. She then explained that, while Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps were clearly not well off, many other people live in political circumstances that are even worse, especially people in war zones. She repeated that it is a serious problem that refugees in Germany often have to wait for a decision for such a long time, and stated that measures to make this procedure faster are now under way. She added that they would not let all refugees from Lebanon in since they have to prioritise for people who come directly from war zones.

Reem then said she has a great desire to study in university, and she finds it tough watching her friends enjoy their lives and prospects while the uncertainty about her future deprives her of such enjoyment.

Ms Merkel said she understands this, but that she cannot simply grant her wishes. Politics can be tough, she said. And while she happened to be face to face with Reem at that time, and Reem happens to be an extremely likable person, there were thousands upon thousands of other people in Lebanon and elsewhere, and that if “we” told those people they can all come, “we wouldn’t be able to handle it”. The only answer they can offer, she said, is to make sure the procedure does not take so long. But, she repeated, many would have to go back, too.

The moderator then suggested to Ms Merkel that she remember Reem’s face and hold it in memory when making policy decisions on these issues. He asked her how quickly the authorities’ decision would be reached in the future, and Ms Merkel started telling him that she thinks the vast majority of cases that have been pending for more than two years would be processed within one year from now. I know this is what she went for saying because she stated it later in the program, but here she stopped mid sentence as she noticed Reem was crying.

She then walked up to her and stroked her back, telling her she had done great – suggesting, perhaps, that she took her crying to be from nervousness after having opened up on television. The moderator said he didn’t think it was about how well she’d done but about the toughness of her situation. Ms Merkel said she knew it was a tough situation, and that she nonetheless wanted to stroke her because “we” do not want to force people like Reem into such situations, and because Reem has it hard, but also because Reem had described so well, for very many other people, the sort of situation one can end up in.

What else happened

On the 10th of July (five days prior), a set of new laws had been passed, pursuant to which Reem will very likely be able to stay in Germany. These laws may not protect her parents from deportation, however, and also aim at deporting more refugees more quickly in the future. They also state that refugees can be incarcerated for up to four days prior to deportation.

As outraged responses started pouring through the web, a few articles stating that Reem was speaking up in defense of Ms Merkel appeared. They linked to a brief video in which Reem stated: “She listened to me, and she stated her opinion, and I think that’s fine.”

My comments

I think Ms Merkel has been unfairly accused, by very many commenters, of having been very harsh toward Reem in this encounter. And, in solidarity let’s say, I will begin my comments with some harshness of my own.

Obviously Reem is in a difficult situation, and I think the policies that put her in this situation are severely immoral. She has the right to live in any housing that a landowner agrees to rent or sell to her or her family, and her father has the right to work any job an employer or customer agrees to pay him to do (as does Reem, for that matter). Violating these rights without sufficient justification is wrong.

Yet, if we’re looking for a representative human face for the receiving side of the cruelty of migration restrictions, that face is not Reem’s. Reem is far too well off.

If you think to say this is to belittle the toughness of Reem’s situation, ask yourself whether you may be belittling the hardship of the many millions of people who have it far worse than her.

Hans Koss defended Ms Merkel against many of her recent critics in a similar vein:

The policies might be wrong in different ways, but I think that the idea to completely abolish any prioritization (currently Syria > L[e]banon > Albania) is more wrong; I believe that the capacities should be increased, but as long as the capacities are not unlimited (and that simply won’t happen – and if so, soon after that a party would be elected which drastically reduces it), prioritization is better than no prioritization. I believe that the debate is overemotionalized, which is bad for the refugees; I think it is remarkable how Merkel addresses the topic of prioritization in an honest way after having [made sure] that the girl is currently not in a desperate situation.

Many of the widely circulated criticisms of how Ms Merkel conducted herself strike me as blatantly unfair. E.g. the Daily Mail reports that

Jan Schnorrenberg, manager of the opposition Green party’s youth wing, wrote: ‘Explaining to a young girl on live camera that her fate doesn’t matter to you – just shameful.’

Ms Merkel did no such thing.

The guardian reports that

But she was forced to stop mid-sentence, and muttered “oh Gott”, on seeing that Reem was crying.

Did the author mishear? She did not mutter “oh Gott”.

But a much more important point about many such criticisms is that, even if they were fair, they would be unimportant. Had Ms Merkel actually lost her composure, or been particularly clumsy, or had she actually been cold or condescending toward Reem, even, those things would not be worth a fraction of the outrage so many have invested in these accusations.

Has Ms Merkel done anything wrong? Yes. She defended immoral policies. But note that these policies have been around for many decades. There’s no news here. Note, also, that these policies are overwhelmingly supported among the electorate. They’re not exactly her doing. And when she says that “we wouldn’t be able to handle” a massive inflow of immigrants, that statement can be quite reasonably defended on the basis that so many natives might respond to this inflow in seriously disruptive ways. (E.g. see reports of arson attacks and shootings here and here.) Spare some blame for those less prestigious agents of representative democracy, too.

When billions of foreigners have been victimised by the restrictionist policies of (far) more tolerable countries for such a long time, why make such a big deal out of Reem? In many cases, the reasons may well involve territorialism: Foreigners enjoy a lot more sympathy with respect to their desire to immigrate once they’ve already settled in the receiving country, even if they did so illegally. That Reem has been living in Germany for four years is sure to win her a lot of support, even though it also makes her such a “lesser victim” of the policies. The fact that she’s clearly bright and academically ambitious should win her further support from the many people whose pro-immigrant sentiments extend only to highly skilled individuals.

John Lee wrote some great comments in an email replying to my request for thoughts for the present post:

One tension I observe in immigration policy is that a lot of people support harsh policies in principle, but when confronted with the human impacts of their actions, they waver and demand an exception for that specific instance of harshness they’ve encountered. This is especially common on the left — in the US, the left’s reaction to the child asylum-seeker influx was basically spineless, since they refused to meaningfully alter US immigration policy, but demanded lots of exceptions for the children. A somewhat similar response materialised from the compassionate right as well (where they didn’t demand policy changes but offered charitable aid for the children).

The upshot of it is that the most “effective” immigration policies are those which hide away the suffering and harshness. Some of the comments I saw about the Merkel video were to the effect of “Well yes obviously now that she’s integrated into German society they have to let her stay. But that’s why the compassionate thing would have been to prevent refugees like her from ever coming to Germany in the first place.”

He attached this cartoon from The Economist:

For all the problems with the many reactions to the video, I think it’s fabulous that many people at least recognise the cruelty of deportation, at least when it’s given a likable human face, at least when that face belongs to someone who’s already put down roots in the receiving country. I hope the video makes a lasting effect in this regard.

The Moral Imperative of Open Borders Trumps (Pun Intended) Immigrant Crime Rates

July 20, 2015 Joel Newman 8 Comments

Many in the U.S. are currently focused on the amount of crime committed by immigrants in the country. This is due to remarks made by presidential contender Donald Trump in June and a murder allegedly committed by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco in July. Mr. Trump suggested that many Mexican immigrants are criminals. In this post I argue that even if it were true that immigrants would increase crime rates in America, open borders would still be justified.

In response to Mr. Trump’s remarks and the San Francisco murder, both The Washington Post and The New York Times have noted that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute has surveyed the research on immigration and crime rates and drawn a similar conclusion. The Immigration Policy Center also released a report which states that “the available evidence indicates that immigrants are not only less likely to end up behind bars than the native-born, but that immigrants are also less likely to commit criminal acts to begin with.” (p. 9) In a 2012 post, Vipul communicated the same message that immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans.

Focusing on Mexican and Hispanic immigration, Mr. Nowrasteh notes that although one study showed that Mexican immigrants were committing more property crimes than native-born Americans, another demonstrated that Mexican immigrants “had no effect on violent or property crime rates in major U.S. metropolitan areas.” He also cites a study on Hispanic immigrants in Chicago that found that they were much less prone to committing violent criminal acts than native whites or blacks in the city.

The Immigration Policy Center offers an explanation for why immigrants commit less crime: “This is hardly surprising since immigrants come to the United States to pursue economic and educational opportunities not available in their home countries and to build better lives for themselves and their families. As a result, they have little to gain and much to lose by breaking the law. Unauthorized immigrants in particular have even more reason to not run afoul of the law given the risk of deportation that their lack of legal status entails.” (p. 20)

What about the crime rate of the offspring of immigrants? They do appear to become more prone to crime than their immigrant relatives, which an editor at the Pew Research Center calls the “dark side of assimilation.” An article on reason.com notes that “every year that an immigrant lives in the U.S. is associated with a 1.9 and 0.9 percent increase in nonviolent and violent crime respectively.” In addition, “the behaviors of the children of immigrants over time begin to resemble that of native-borns.” However, the offspring do not appear to commit more crimes than Americans generally. (Census data from 2000 indicate that U.S.-born young males of Mexican, Cuban, and three Southeast Asian ethnicities are incarcerated at higher rates than the overall U.S.-born average. Vipul notes, however, that “locking out entire ethnic groups due to the anticipated future crime rates of their descendants based on past data, which aren’t that much higher than native rates anyway, causes substantially more harm than letting them in and dealing with a crime rate that might fall less slowly or rise slightly in the future.”)

But could this picture of relatively low immigrant criminality change under open borders, which would mean a larger flow of immigrants and probably higher proportions from certain countries? Vipul explored this question in his 2012 post and concluded that with open borders “the odds of crime rates going up versus down are about even, and they almost certainly will not explode.” In reaching this conclusion, Vipul noted that the future orientation associated with migrants is generally incompatible with criminality, that the worldwide crime rate is similar to that of the U.S., that much of the immigration to the U.S under restrictive immigration laws already comes from countries with relatively high crime rates (other countries in the Americas), and that India and China, which likely would be the sources of large numbers of immigrants under open borders, have lower crime rates than the U.S.

Some Americans who care only about the well-being of citizens might call for an end to immigration altogether, let alone open borders, because one citizen death caused by immigrants, in their view, might be too many. If it were possible to stop immigration, that policy would eventually lead to no more murders or other crimes committed by immigrants because there would be no immigrants. (But of course the inevitable reproduction of the citizen population would lead to the creation of more people who would commit crimes, so they would have watch out for these new citizen criminals. They might also have to worry about the migration of citizens within the country who might commit crimes in their new areas of residence.)

More thoughtful American citizenists might look favorably on the impact of immigration on crime under the status quo of immigration restrictions that allow some immigration. Looking at the data, they might think, “The immigration system works pretty well right now in terms of crime. Those immigrants who make it into the U.S. are generally more law abiding than us citizens. They are revitalizing blighted urban areas, which reduces crime, and places with concentrated immigration are especially safe. (p. 6) If they are really knowledgeable, they might say, as does Mr. Nowrasteh, that perhaps by “contributing to greater economic prosperity through pushing natives up the skills spectrum through complementary task specialization,” immigrants keep some Americans away from crime. They might agree that “It is easy to focus on the horrible tragedies when somebody is murdered by an immigrant but it’s very hard to imagine all of the people who weren’t murdered because of the lower crime rates created by increased immigration.” However, despite Vipul’s arguments that crime rates would most likely not explode under open borders, they wouldn’t want to take that risk. Besides, they would probably have other concerns about immigration’s impact on citizens.

However, from an open-borders perspective, even if crime rates were to increase significantly under an open borders policy, the moral importance of having open borders outweighs such a development. (The manifesto of the group No One Is Illegal similarly suggests that principle should trump the concrete consequences of immigration, whether positive or negative. Since the consequences can change, “statistics are useful to refute distortions and lies, but cannot be the bedrock of our opposition to controls.” ) In a previous post, I noted two strong moral arguments (from Joseph Carens and Michael Huemer) for open borders, both of which would countenance large increases in crime levels under open borders, should they occur. For both arguments, the right to open borders could be overridden only if the flow of people under open borders led to a “breakdown of public order” or a “disastrous” result in the receiving country. A significant increase in the crime rate, unlikely as it would be, would not constitute such a cataclysm.

In sum, the evidence strongly suggests that currently immigrant crime rates are lower than those of native-born Americans. The crime rates of immigrants’ offspring resembles those of Americans but doesn’t appear to be higher. Vipul has convincingly argued that under open borders the crime rate in the U.S. likely wouldn’t change dramatically. Even if it did, an open borders policy would still be morally warranted.

The photograph of Donald Trump featured on this post was taken by Gage Skidmore and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence.

The claim that open borders inevitably leads to homogeneity is incredibly weak

July 14, 2015 John Lee 1 Comment

A common argument against open borders hinges on the assumption that it will increase diversity in our societies, and that the harmful effects of diversity will outweigh the other positive effects of open borders. You can see our blog posts tagged “diversity” for various responses to that. However, there’s an interesting argument that runs in precisely the opposite direction: it claims that open borders will reduce diversity in the long run, and that this homogeneity will be harmful.

For one articulation of this from a somewhat libertarian standpoint, Patri Friedman (the grandson of economist Milton Friedman) recently blogged:

So if you even care about life existing – let alone the infinite diversity possible therein – then (contra Caplan), boundaries (such as national borders) are an absolute necessity. No differences, no energy flow, no (thermodynamic) work, no life. As in the stars, so on the earth: romance flows from polarity; trade from comparative advantage; thermodynamic work from heat differences; evolution from variation; economic competition from competing alternatives. All progress is driven by differences; so to erase differences is (counter-eponymously) to end progress.

The assumption here is that the existence of borders (and presumably, also the tight policing of who may traverse them) is critical to maintaining beneficial diversity. Now, I don’t want to wade right now into the debate over what kinds of diversity are beneficial, and what kinds of diversity aren’t.

I will say that as a general rule, I am skeptical of governments trying to engineer society. Arguments both for and against a policy on the basis that it changes the composition of society don’t persuade me much. If you can’t point to any identifiable harms or gains from the policy beyond “it will change the number of people of a particular ethnicity/religion/other identity in our society,” then it makes me wonder why you’re proposing or criticising the policy in the first place.

Given the very shady history of governments singling out certain identities to target in their policies, I am generally not a fan of diversity-type arguments for or against a particular policy. I may personally like Indian food a lot, but I am going to be suspicious of any policy to subsidise Indian migration for the sake of “culinary diversity”. Like co-blogger Vipul, I am unimpressed by “it will enhance diversity, and that’s by definition a good thing” kinds of arguments for open borders.

The inverse is similarly problematic: reducing diversity as a policy end in of itself is inherently suspicious. If some people don’t like certain types of restaurants, is that justification for prohibiting those restaurants, or restricting the movement of the cultural groups who would supply or demand that type of food?

However, the kind of argument Patri Friedman is making here strikes me as equally unimpressive, albeit for different reasons. I’m happy to grant the claim that some level of diversity is beneficial for both human society as a whole and particular societies or countries. The kind of argument Friedman seems to be making is that open borders would eventually turn humanity into some kind of amorphous, homogeneous grey blob of uniformity, which is a different way of reducing diversity — and is thus a bad thing.

But this would imply that if we had open borders tomorrow, then on a very visible timescale, we would witness the homogenisation of humanity. That claim strikes me as quite easy to disprove. In literally the second comment on Friedman’s post one Glen Raphael points out:

I don’t think you can use this insight to argue against opening national borders – the argument proves too much. Suppose we grant for the sake of argument the notion that having some sort of border maintains “energy differentials” that are useful to humanity – why would *existing national boundaries* be the best place to put those borders and why would we expect anything like the existing set of restrictions/policies to be the best ones for maintaining those differentials?

To maximize these sort of differentials might we not be be better off with strong border controls around each house? Around each city? Each county? Each state? If not – if you think you have good arguments to the effect that allowing free trade and free movement of people between Santa Clara and San Jose has benefits that outweigh the cost (*including* the cost in terms of reducing “energy differentials”), don’t similar arguments apply to allowing free trade and movement of people between, say, the US and Mexico? If not, why not?

There are open borders today between Alabama and New York. Has this fact eliminated all the differences and inequalities between those states? or even substantially reduced them?

You could, I suppose, retort that these effects would occur on longer timescales — although the US had international open borders for over a century after its founding, and has had domestic open borders for well over two centuries. But all I had to do to be suspicious of this was simply open the newspaper from a few days back.

Recently, The Telegraph reported on a new survey of the genetic heritage of Britons, conducted by Oxford University. The findings:

Archaeologists and geneticists were amazed to find that genetically similar individuals inhabit the same areas they did following the Anglo-Saxon invasion, following the fall of the Roman Empire.

In fact, a map showing tribes of Britain in 600AD is almost identical to a new chart showing genetic variability throughout the UK, suggesting that local communities have stayed put for the past 1415 years.

Many people in Britain claim to feel a strong sense of regional identity and scientists say they the new study proves that the link to birthplace is DNA deep.

The most striking genetic split can be seen between people living in Cornwall and Devon, where the division lies exactly along the county border. It means that people living on either side of the River Tamar, which separates the two counties, have different DNA.

Almost 15 centuries later, borders still discernibly delineate regional and even genetic identities — even though the UK has had internal open borders for almost the same amount of time. Indeed, not only were the borders open; for much of this time, the borders did not even exist!

To take the most obvious example of this in the UK, Wales has been administered as part of England since the 16th century. As far as politics was concerned, the borders of Wales ceased to exist. Only in the late 20th century has Wales begun to assume any separate administrative identity from England itself within the constitutional law of the UK. Surely nobody can argue that a Welsh identity disappeared for four centuries and has only been revived recently with the creation of a Welsh legislative assembly! The Jews didn’t have a state for almost two millenia, and dispersed across international borders at will — and yet their unique identity has survived all the same.

If diverse identities can persist with open borders, or even no borders, for centuries, it seems difficult to argue that fear of homogeneity is a reason to oppose open borders. Open borders clearly has nothing to do with the ultimate homogenisation of society, at least not on any measurable timescale relevant to making law.

If anything, migration often leads to greater diversity. In many cases, when multiple cultures meet, rather than one dominating and utterly subsuming the other, the two combine to form new varieties of culture. To take one personal example, I am Chinese Malaysian — Chinese (and partly Filipino) by ethnicity, Malaysian by nationality. I grew up in a community that observes various Chinese traditions. Yet, many of these traditions are alien to most other Chinese people in the world, because they fall in one or more of the following buckets:

A total innovation by Chinese living in Malaysia, unrelated to Malay or Chinese culture
An adaptation of local Malay culture
An adaptation of Chinese tradition that either was not picked up or actually abandoned by Chinese in China

It is hard for me to believe that my ancestors’ migration to Malaysia had the effect of homogenising Malaysia, China, or the world as a whole, when the differences stare us in the face. The food my community eats, the way we celebrate our traditional festivals, and the little things we do because they’re “traditional” are traditions unknown to Chinese in China, and yet traditions peculiar in Malaysia to just our community. I’m not sure whether the right label for this is homogeneity or diversity, but whatever it is, it makes me doubt any sweeping claims that people make about how migration inevitably homogenises or diversifies human culture.

I am not saying that migration must be good because it leads to cultural diversity, or that we can even empirically say cultural diversity constitutes a clear benefit of migration. However, I think people are too quick to assume migration will have a straightforward diversifying or homogenising effect: it’s a lot more complicated than that. These kinds of arguments against open borders make such sweeping claims, often in the face of how diversity works in real life, that it is hard to take them seriously.

The image featured above this post is of a fish salad called yee sang. It is a culinary tradition widely-practiced among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, yet almost completely unheard of among people in China today. Photo originally uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons and distributed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence.

Open Borders Is the Best Way to Help Haiti

July 3, 2015 Joel Newman 4 Comments

Advocates have suggested open borders (here and here) as a way to help Haiti, which has a long history of poverty, environmental disasters, political turmoil, and human rights abuses. Yet after a devastating earthquake in 2010 led to billions of dollars of outside help for Haiti in the form of humanitarian and development aid, as well as debt relief, has Haiti improved significantly? Has massive aid been the solution to Haiti’s problems? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding no, and open borders as a solution for much of Haiti’s misery continues to be as important as ever.

Even after the infusion of aid, Haiti has a per capita GDP of $1,800, placing it 209th out of 230 countries, with the 230th being the poorest. The Associated Press recently described Haiti as a “…deeply poor nation, with an official unemployment rate of about 40 percent and the World Bank says more than 6 million out of roughly 10.4 million inhabitants live under the national poverty line of $2.44 per day.” Statistics from three years ago show that about 23 percent of young children in Haiti were chronically undernourished and 4 percent were acutely malnourished.

Haiti also has been been cited as one of five countries where slavery is most prevalent. Human Rights Watch states that thousands of children from poor families are sent to live with wealthier families in order to provide them with schooling in exchange for domestic work, but often the children do not receive an education and are abused. Human Rights Watch also notes “long-standing human rights problems” in Haiti, as well as “concerns about the resurgence of political violence.”

Aid from other countries clearly hasn’t and might never transform Haiti. Per capita GDP has increased from $1200 in the years 2009-2012 to $1800 in 2014, but it is difficult to know to what extent this increase is due to foreign aid, remittances (see below), or other factors. The bottom line is that Haiti continues to be very poor, along with suffering from other problems. Foreign Policy in Focus concludes that “four years and billions of dollars later, conditions do not appear to have improved for Haitians affected by the earthquake; in fact, it can be argued that things are worse.” Similarly, GlobalPost, referring to American aid for Haiti, states that “the extent to which that money is creating sustainable progress remains unclear even four years after it began.”

While some good has been accomplished in Haiti because of outside help (see here and here and here), problems with its delivery have been identified. U.S. government aid for Haiti has largely gone to American companies and non-profits, and The Guardian notes that “Critics have argued for years that donors’ practice of spending aid money through organisations located in their own countries has hampered efforts to build self-sufficiency abroad, and works to the detriment of local businesses and industries.” And the impact of nearly $500 million raised by the American Red Cross for Haiti since the earthquake has been underwhelming, according to a recent investigation by National Public Radio and ProPublica. The groups found “… a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success…” associated with the funds. The American Red Cross built a total of six permanent homes in Haiti, even though housing is the area in which “the Red Cross made its biggest promises.” An article on the NBC News site states that “to Jonathan Katz, author of ‘The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster,’ the aid story is one of good intentions and bad policy, short-term fixes without a ground-breaking long game, Band-Aids over self-sufficiency.” (See here and here and here for additional criticism of aid efforts.)

On the other hand, emigration is much more promising than foreign aid, both for the Haitians who leave Haiti and for those who stay behind. Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development argues that international migration is “the cheapest and most powerful economic tool” for helping Haitians. He states that “the large majority of Haitians who have ever escaped poverty have done so by leaving Haiti.” Citing research by others that was published in 2008, he notes that Haitian immigrants to the U.S. gain a 680% wage increase due to the migration. He adds that “for those who don’t move, remittances… unlike foreign aid, generally go directly into the pockets of Haitian families. They are spent almost entirely on locally-produced goods and services…” The CIA World Factbook notes that for Haiti “remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange, equaling one-fifth of GDP and representing more than five times the earnings from exports in 2012.” Mr. Clemens concludes that “migration has been a principal cause of convergence, to date, between the incomes of Haitians and Americans.” (He does suggest that the gains to migrants might be diminished under open borders.)

There are more than half a million Haitian immigrants in the U.S. And many more Haitians want to come. A Gallup poll indicates that, if given the opportunity, about a quarter of Haiti’s adults would move permanently to the U.S.

However, under the status quo of border controls, the ability of Haitians to emigrate to the United States is limited. The U.S. has worked hard to keep many from coming. Since 1981 the U.S. Coast Guard has been interdicting, or intercepting, Haitian migrants traveling by boat to the U.S. Under a 1981 agreement with Haiti, the U.S. returns migrants to Haiti but ostensibly does not repatriate refugees. A study by the former Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First) found that from 1981 to 1990 almost 400 Haitian vessels were interdicted, 21,000 Haitians were returned home, and only six Haitians were allowed into the U.S. for a full asylum hearing, despite a “high incidence of serious human rights violations in Haiti during that period.” (from Stephen Legomsky, The USA and the Caribbean Interdiction Program, 2006) Since 1990, tens of thousands more Haitians have been intercepted and sent home. (See here and here.) It was reported that as a group of Haitians was forced back to Port-au-Prince in 1995, one of the returnees, handcuffed and carried down the gangplank, moaned, with “tears streaming down his cheeks,” “’I don’t want to come back to a country like this and die in the streets.’” And the interdictions continue, as indicated by statistics for fiscal year 2014.

Even after the earthquake struck Haiti, the New York Times reported that a U.S. Air Force plane flew over Haiti broadcasting a message from the Haitian ambassador to the U.S., who said in the message, meant to dissuade Haitians from fleeing to the U.S. on boats, “’If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.’” The Times also reported that the Coast Guard patrolled Haitian waters, ready to intercept anyone trying to escape. Moreover, the U.S. denied many seriously injured people permission to enter the U.S. for treatment. Only 23 were allowed to enter the U.S. for treatment, as well as some orphaned children.

Many have sought a better life in the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Hispanola, but many have experienced hardship there. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians, both those from Haiti and their offspring born in the Dominican Republic, live there. Minority Rights Group International states that Haitians there experience discrimination based on their skin color and culture. In addition, “they earn 60 per cent less than average Dominicans. They often do not have access to proper nutrition or adequate health care due to poor pay, their illegal status and fear of deportation.” Most sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic are Haitian. Conditions for the workers are poor, and workers are sometimes coerced into working. Recently, the Dominican Republic has threatened to deport many Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent. A court ruling in 2013 took away Dominican citizenship from children of Haitian migrants. Similarly, the Bahamas requires noncitizens, including those born in the Bahamas, to have passports, “a rule that human rights groups say unfairly targets people of Haitian descent,” according to the New York Times, and there have been immigration raids in “predominately Haitian shantytowns.” (See also here.) Under open borders, Haitian migrants could avoid these inhospitable destinations, and these countries could not use immigration restrictions as a tool to discriminate against Haitians.

Beyond the tremendous good that could be realized for Haitians through open borders, an open borders policy would help redress the harm U.S. foreign policy has caused the country over two centuries. Haiti, a French colony largely populated by African slaves, won its independence from France in a bloody struggle in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Once independence was achieved, however, the U.S. and European powers were hostile to the new republic. Randall Robinson notes that after independence “the United States, France and western Europe would quickly join together in a program of measures designed to defeat the new black republic’s prospects for success. For the next two hundred years, Haiti would be faced with active hostility from the world’s most powerful community of nations. The new country endured a variety of attacks, some imposed concurrently, others consecutively, including military invasions, economic embargoes, gunboat blockades, reparations demands, trade barriers, diplomatic quarantines, subsidized armed subversions, media volleys of public traducement, and a string of twentieth-century U.S.-armed black dictators, beginning with Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier, who rose to power in 1957…” (p. 18, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2007) Mr. Robinson concludes that “the Haitian economy has never recovered from the financial havoc France (and America) wreaked upon it, during and after slavery.” (p. 22) Michael Falco, in a letter to the New York Times, similarly writes that “Haiti spent its early existence handcuffed by crippling reparations to France — a penalty for rejecting the shackles of slavery. At the peak of this debt, Haiti was paying 80 percent of its national budget to foreign creditors. After the debt was ‘paid off,’ a string of brutal dictators — many propped up by the United States — ransacked the country’s coffers. Haiti never had a chance…”

In summary, while foreign aid has achieved some good for the Haitian people, open borders has the potential to enormously help. Haitian immigrants in economically advanced countries could earn much more than they could in Haiti, remittances could benefit those who remain in Haiti, U.S. interdictions of migrants could stop, Haitian migrants could bypass countries that mistreat them, and the world could begin to make up for its historic abuse of Haiti. Of the groups that could benefit most from a world with open borders, the Haitian people are among those at the top of the list.

Open Borders: The Case