Category Archives: Uncategorized

How rational can we expect nation-states to be in setting immigration policy?

1 Comment

A recent comment by Christopher Chang made a point that I feel we haven’t adequately addressed on this site: if open borders is such a great deal, why has nobody tried it? Using a similar structure of argument as Bryan Caplan employed in his blog post on motivating sheep or Gary Becker employed in the now-standard argument that market forces gradually erode discrimination, Chang writes:

It does not matter if 90% of actors are inefficiently biased, as long as some subset of the other 10% knows what they are doing; that subset, and its future imitators, win in the long run. This has happened over and over and over again in political, economic, and military history. Both you and Paul fail to comprehend the nature of “collective assessment” that requires only one yes vote. As I’ve mentioned numerous times, you can even provide much of the yes vote yourselves, and according to all your economic claims, this would be quite lucrative. (This does not mean that any particular individual’s failure to do so is damning; life circumstances frequently interfere. But the fact that none of you have done anything like this does, in fact, add up to a strong revealed preference against your claims. Your failure to even seriously openly discuss this among yourselves strongly implies that you do not actually want your rosy projections tested.)

I like the general reasoning behind the generation of these types of questions. Claims that the status quo is radically suboptimal should be met with skepticism, and should be taken seriously only if the people making the claims can offer a convincing explanation for why the suboptimal system is stable. In this post, I explore some possible explanations. Read and judge their strength for yourself!

Note that this post is not, in and of itself, a complete argument for open borders, or open borders with keyhole solutions, being optimal. It’s rather an explanation for how the current state of the world (far from open borders) is consistent with the possibility of open borders being a lot better. It seeks to address a potential inconsistency, rather than offer complete proof. Therefore, my rhetoric in the post will assume the open borders position and simply demonstrate that there are no obvious contradictions.

There’s a connection between this post and my earlier post on whether migration levels under open borders would be optimal, too high, or too low. But whereas that post is about the decisions of individuals holding state policies constant, this post is about the creation and tweaking of the policies themselves.

#1: The gains from pure open borders go to quite an extent to migrants and their descendants, and even though existing residents of migrant-receiving countries gain somewhat, the gains are a lot less

Why don’t we have pure open borders, if it benefits the world so much? The short answer is that the people with the power to decide this (the people in political power and the voters and special interests that they cater to) are not the people who benefit the most from open borders. As Nathan Smith notes here and here, immigration policy is quite “undemocratic” in the sense that potential immigrants have no (direct) electoral say in a matter that affects their freedom.

This point has a number of different aspects:

  • If the gains from migration went mostly to the immigrants and not to non-immigrants in the target country, the people who gain the most don’t have a say in the electoral process. Note that this point is valid even in the absence of disparity or asymmetry between nations. If immigration from Canada to the US significantly enriches the Canadians who migrate to the US, but has little effect on US natives, then US natives (who vote in the elections) have little incentive to push for freer migration from Canada.
  • One possible remedy to the above would be to push for free migration through reciprocity, for instance, freeing migration from Canada to the US in exchange for freeing migration from the US to Canada. This would work in the case that the fraction of the population in either country that has an interest in the option of migrating is large enough: if enough Americans want the freedom of easy migration to Canada, they may vote for a treaty that frees migration both ways. If, however, the fraction of people interested in migrating is small, then they may not be able to push for freer migration even if the absolute gains they experience are huge. That’s because democracy is based on counting votes, rather than on winners compensating losers.
  • In the current world, there are significant international disparities in wealth and wages, and a strong directionality to potential migrant flows. In light of this, the spotlight falls on the migration policy of countries that have greater per capita income or wages or are otherwise attractive migrant destinations. The degree of solidarity between potential migrants and the set of people who have the most influence over the most relevant migration policy is now quite low: the former are people from low-income countries, and the latter are people of prosperous countries. Even though the latter set is expected to gain somewhat in expectation, the gains are smaller in absolute terms, and even smaller when viewed as a proportion of how well off they currently are.

Note that many of these can be fixed, at least in principle, if we relax from pure open borders to open borders with appropriate keyhole solutions such as pro-native tax-and-transfer schemes. So why don’t we have instances of the latter? Actually, we do, to some extent. We’ll get to this later in the post.

#2: The full gains from open borders take time to materialize

Estimates of significant increases in world production after open borders are not estimates of overnight gains. Rather, these are estimates of how the world would look a decade or two from the opening of borders, relative to how it might look in the counterfactual. Even if the estimates were correct, the full magnitude of the gains would be felt after a fairly long time-lapse. Thus, there may not be good electoral incentives for democratic governments to support freer migration for the economic benefits. Some of the economic benefits would be reaped immediately, but it would be an order of magnitude less than the long-term gains. Note that this is similar to the reason why we expect individual migration to be less than what seems economically optimal, as discussed in my other post.

#3: In so far as there is a citizenist case for open borders, it relies on a tax-and-transfer scheme combined with somewhat draconian enforcement

Nathan Smith has previously argued that there is a citizenist case for open borders: use a tax-and-transfer scheme such as immigration tariffs or DRITI to hold natives harmless and distribute the gains away from migrants and towards natives.

Schemes like DRITI present a dark side: they exacerbate the visibility of poverty and, even as they reduce the unfairness of the system as a whole, make it more visible. So, in addition to open borders advocates who’d worry about such schemes (see, for instance, here and here), there are many others, such as immigrant rights activists, who would reject these schemes. Even if open borders started out with such “keyhole solutions” it’s not clear that they’d be stable.

The combination of citizenism and the form of local inequality aversion make tax-and-transfer-based keyhole solutions a hard sell in many countries. I don’t think the problems are insurmountable. But I don’t think it’s surprising that we haven’t seen a lot of progress on these so far. It’s fruit, but it’s not very low-hanging fruit.

Incidentally, one prediction of this setup is that countries that are less democratic, and where governments have more authority to carry out more draconian enforcement, might be more likely to have implemented citizenistic migration liberalization. This is indeed the case, as we’ll see in #5.

#4: The incentives of democracy

The incentives of the politicians and bureaucrats running the government are not perfectly aligned with the long-term interests of the citizens. There are two broad problems:

  1. Citizens themselves don’t know what’s best for them, so they may not reward their representatives in government for choosing better policies or delivering better outcomes.
  2. Politicians often cater to special interests rather than the needs of citizens.

In the context of why there hasn’t been more significant migration liberalization, I expect (1) to be a far bigger reason than (2). The general phenomenon of political ignorance in the electorate in advanced democracies has been well-studied (the political knowledge elsewhere is highly unlikely to be better, and quite likely to be worse). Explanations such as rational ignorance and rational irrationality have been offered. Given generally low levels of political knowledge and decision-making skill on the part of the electorate, we shouldn’t have strong reason to expect a democracy to converge to a good outcome. But we might still expect that, by random chance, some democracies would converge to good outcomes in a given area. So a bit more is needed.

Bryan Caplan has posited that one particular aspect to voter irrationality is anti-foreign bias: people systematically underestimate the benefits of interactions with foreigners. Are people inherently anti-foreign? I think that people have inherent tendencies to support their ingroup and resent or discount the welfare of outgroups. But the particular use of nationality as the criterion to define ingroup and outgroup is probably an artifact of the political process: there is an existing governance infrastructure that facilitates discrimination on the basis of nationality, and an existing ideological infrastructure that gives particular importance to national identity. So people’s diverse ingroup-outgroup choices get projected to divisions based on nationality and citizenship even if that’s not the best way of describing the distinctions in their own minds. The upshot is that we might expect the political process to produce an anti-migration bias relative to what’s optimal, and while this reflects some discomfort that individuals experience interacting with foreigners, it’s often a result of a political process translating other forms of discomfort people have to the language of discrimination based on nationality (this is a somewhat tricky point, and I hope to elaborate in a future post).

#5: Some countries that are undemocratic or less democratic, and have more deference for elites, tend to have citizenistic and numerically liberal migration policies

Carl Shulman has been doing yeoman’s work of late examining some interesting “open borders with keyhole solutions”-type regimes. He looked at Singapore in a blog post titled Migration levies and unskilled labor mobility in Singapore, where he discussed Singapore’s large temporary guest worker program for low-skilled migrants, that combines fairly huge numbers of migration with fairly stringent restrictions on what migrants can do, as well as taxes on the migrants that make them fiscally good for the government. In a blog post titled What does migration to the United Arab Emirates tell us about labor mobility?, he looked at the UAE, where a significant majority of the population is foreign-born, and where there are significant differences between the rights and privileges accorded to a native elite and a large foreign-born workforce. In both cases, their policies created a win-win for natives, the government officials, and migrants. In Singapore, the success of these policies arises from an effective one-party system and considerable deference to elites in policymaking, despite the general population being less pro-migration than in many First World countries with far stricter limits on migration. The UAE is a federation of hereditary monarchies, which insulates it from the pressures of competitive democracy. The population is also less likely to push for liberal ideals of equality that jeopardize the stability of keyhole solutions.

Relatedly, a recent book called The Price of Rights by Martin Ruhs (to be reviewed later) empirically came to the conclusion that there’s a trade-off between the number of migrants a country admits and the package of rights that are accorded to people after they migrate. A similar point had been made in a post by Michael Carey a while back on immigration and class struggle. If modern liberal democracies tend to be strong on the package of rights and privileges, this (often) comes at the expense of the number of migrants they admit.

#6: If many countries tried citizenistic open borders, competition would drive down tariffs eventually, bringing the world closer to open borders

In #1, we (sort of) ruled out the plausibility of pure open borders (barring dramatic changes in people’s views of moral permissibility and side-constraints). But in #5, we pointed out that we do have partial approximations to “open borders with keyhole solutions” and these could be taken further. So how far are “open borders with keyhole solutions” from pure open borders?

We can think of pure open borders as migration with zero government-imposed barriers or taxes. Suppose most countries have prohibitively high barriers, and a few countries experiment with selectively reducing taxes to the level of “open borders with keyhole solutions.” These few countries can still afford to keep the taxes at their profit-maximizing level, because they’re effective monopolists: all the other countries are out of the running because their barriers are too high. The policies of these few countries are a Pareto improvement over the status quo, but they still carry the inefficiencies of a monopoly. If, however, more countries start getting drawn into the game of open borders with keyhole solutions, then there is more competition between countries that exerts a downward pressure on the taxes and barriers. Thus, as more countries do it, we get closer to open borders. We probably don’t get anywhere near pure open borders, but we do get a lot closer than if only one or two countries were trying it out.

PS: Open borders isn’t the only policy proposal for which we can ask this sort of question. I’m quite curious to hear the thoughts of proponents of drug legalization, free trade, organ trading, and other such cutting-edge proposals. The situation with some of these seems to be a bit better than for open borders, but not by a huge margin. For instance, consider the case of drug legalization. According to this Wikipedia page, there is only one country, Uruguay, where the possession, sale, transport, and cultivation of cannabis (marijuana) are all legal. But there are a number of nation-states (plus member states in nations) where the possession of marijuana is legal, or illegal but decriminalized, and there are others where marijuana use is de facto tolerated. So even though full-blown legalization is rarely embraced, we have enough variation in the direction of legalization to address the question of “if it’s such low-hanging fruit, why has nobody plucked it?” This is roughly similar to the situation with open borders.

PS2: I wrote up a condensed version of an early draft of this post in the form of an Open Borders Action Group post.

Making the moral case for open borders: Crooked Timber’s symposium on the work of Joseph Carens

2 Comments

Bryan Caplan, the economist who originally inspired the founding of this website (and who is quoted in our masthead to this day), is a tireless advocate for both the economic and moral case for open borders. Today, however, he ought to take second billing to ethicist Joseph Carens, who has been building the moral case for open borders since the 1980s. The Crooked Timber blog is running a symposium on Carens’s new book, The Ethics of Immigration. I highly encourage you to read the symposium contributions, which prod Carens’s case for its weak points.

In case you missed it when the book first came out (what, you mean you don’t pay attention to the latest and greatest developments in the ethics of border policy?), Dylan Matthews did a fantastic interview with Carens in the Washington Post which I cannot recommend highly enough. Carens summarises the thrust of his book, which he divides into two portions:

  1. First, he argues that even if you grant states utter carte blanche over who they can exclude via border policy, it follows from well-established principles of law and liberal democracy that states are still morally required to allow certain foreigners who may immigrate illegally to stay, once they have sufficiently integrated;
  2. Then, he argues that actually, you should not grant states carte blanche discretion in how they determine who to exclude, any more than you should allow a handful of feudal lords to determine the future of millions of serfs.

There’s obviously a lot more to it than that, so do read the interview (and Carens’s book, if you have the time). I’ve also previously written about that first portion of Carens’s argument on this blog. At the time I write this, Crooked Timber has so far published four takes on Carens’s ideas, by four different authors:

  1. Chris Bertram, criticising Carens’s assumption that his view of the “democratic consensus” about membership in liberal societies is widely-held
  2. Ryan Pevnick, arguing that Carens bites off more than he can chew when he posits that states should offer amnesty to unauthorised migrants who have sufficiently integrated into their societies (I’ve written about Carens’s argument here before)
  3. Brian Weatherson, questioning the validity of Carens’s analogy between movement across international borders versus movement across subnational borders (Carens is not alone in using this; see also “Save Fairfax” and “Texas to Americans: Stay in America“)
  4. Kenan Malik, on the risks of further entrenching the notions that the status quo is “realistic,” or that open borders are utopian

Bertram’s promised in the inaugural post of the symposium that Carens will make an appearance at the end to respond to his critics. I’m looking forward to seeing what other responses they have lined up.

Ultimately, I believe the case for open borders rests much more than just on the pecuniary returns from liberating the families and workers of the world to go and be where they truly want to be. Even if the pecuniary returns to open borders were mildly negative, that would not constitute an open-and-shut case for junking the idea. On the contrary, I think the ethical case for scrutinising how our states exclude people on account of a condition of their birth is extremely resilient to different sets of economic tradeoffs.

That is not to say that I believe we ought to be insensitive or blind to the economic effects of immigration. I simply think that our societies need to weigh on our consciences as well how our immigration controls immiserate and exclude billions of people without any basis beyond the condition of their birth. Both the economic and moral case for open borders matter; I think philosopher Jason Brennan sums them both up nicely when he says:

If you have an economic system where everything can be globalised, except poor labour, then you make the world’s poor sitting ducks for exploitation. They can’t go where labour is scarce to get a good deal. They are forced to wait for capital to come find them and give them a bad deal. It’s not just that these restrictions are inefficient. Immigration restrictions impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

It should not surprise us that the economic disaster of closed borders might have ethical ramifications. Few government decisions, short of actually going to war, have the power to literally make or break the livelihoods and lives of hundreds of millions of people. In his book Let Their People Come, economist Lant Pritchett (another pioneer of the open borders movement) gives one illustration of the impact which border exclusions can have:

Amartya Sen has popularized the notion of “missing women” in Asia due to differential death rates and (increasingly) sex-selective abortion. Because the child mortality rate in India is about 100 per 1,000 while it is 8 per 1,000 in the United States, this implies that 92 per 1,000 more Indian children than U.S. children die before age five. This means there are 2.2 million missing Indian children each year.However, while the “missing women” is a standard refrain, I have never heard the term “missing Indians” to describe the results of the child mortality differentials between the rich world and India.

Now, to be sure, even under open borders we would likely not see full equality of child mortality rates across nations. But to the extent our border controls prohibit Indians from seeking access to more efficient healthcare delivery systems and more qualified doctors, we have contributed to the problem of “missing Indians” — innocent lives snuffed out on account of these babies “choosing” the wrong country to be born in. To bring it home, Pritchett actually goes on to cite Carens’s ethical analysis immediately after this discussion to reinforce his point.

(Pritchett’s book is a tour de force of the case for open borders, and as much as I like Carens, if you choose to read only one book after this, I don’t think you have much of an excuse for failing to read Pritchett: his book is available for free online. )

The nature of how our societies exclude billions of people carries huge ramifications, both economic and ethical. Even though we might disagree with the analysis here, it is critical that we understand just what these ramifications are. When our states literally hold the lives of people in their hands, as they often do when it comes to migration, we have an imperative to strictly scrutinise what our governments do in our name.

This is why Carens’s work matters: somebody has to ask hard ethical questions about government policies which, in arguably quite a literal sense, are a matter of life or death for hundreds of millions. I hope to see many more symposiums like this one. More than that, I hope to see these ideas penetrate the popular consciousness.

Some years ago, novelist Orson Scott Card authored a few brilliant, non-academic elucidations of ideas clearly embedded in Carens’s and Pritchett’s work. In fact, for an illustration of what Carens talks about when it comes to exclusion and arbitrariness, it is hard to outdo Card’s depiction of what would happen if the US were to deport all its unlawful immigrants. The ultimate point of the academy is to mine our brightest minds for the best ideas, and to have those ideas make a difference in our society: I hope to see more of Carens’s ideas (and also those of his reviewers in this symposium) seeping into the mainstream’s consciousness, just as they seem to have in the case of Card’s.

I started this post with a mention of economist Bryan Caplan, whose activism served as inspiration for this site. Perhaps it is fitting to close with Bryan’s words on just why this academic work is so important:

If research energy were proportional to the inefficiency of the status quo, virtually every economist would study immigration.  And if outrage were proportional to harm, virtually every protest on earth would be in favor of open borders.

Weekly OBAG roundup 14 2014

1 Comment

This is part of a series of weekly posts with the most interesting content from the Open Borders Action Group on Facebook. Do join the group to weigh in on existing discussions or start your own (you might want to read this post before joining).

Thought-provoking general questions or general observations

Discussions of specific historical and current situations

Events and meta

  • Post by Vipul Naik, May 23, 2014, linking to a Cato event on George Borjas’ forthcoming book Immigration Ecnomics. The event will be held on June 11, 2014, 12:00 PM, at the Hayek Auditorium of the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. 4 likes, 3 comments.

Weekly OBAG roundup 13 2014

Leave a comment

This is part of a series of weekly posts with the most interesting content from the Open Borders Action Group on Facebook. Do join the group to weigh in on existing discussions or start your own (you might want to read this post before joining).

Thought-provoking general questions or general observations

Discussions of specific historical and current situations

Meta

We Need More San Franciscos

3 Comments

Post by Michelangelo Landgrave (occasional blogger for the site, joined February 2014). See:

This post is a response to Nathan Smith’s recent post Make More Singapores! where he makes a call for the creation of more city-states like Singapore. I have two small quibbles with Smith. Firstly, I believe that we need start-up cities as well as charter cities. Secondly, I disagree with Smith when he remarks that current international relations make it unlikely that we will see the birth of new city-states.

I have discussed start-up cities previously here, but allow me to refresh readers on the topic nonetheless. City-states are some of the earliest forms of political organizations, but the concept of charter cities is much younger and can be attributed as Stanford Economist Paul Romer’s thought child. Under Romer’s charter city arrangement a host government would cede administration of a region of their land to a 3rd party. The 3rd party would administer the region under its laws this would hopefully allow for 1st world institutions to be imported abroad. One major concern about Romer’s charter city proposal would be that it could quickly become a form of colonization under a new label.

An alternative proposal to Romer’s charter city has been the start-up city. I previously described the start-up city as being different in that it remains under the administration of the host government. By avoiding using a 3rd party as an administrator a start-up city avoids the potential for neo-colonialism. As I have written previously, those nations with a significant emigrant population living in the global north have a comparative advantage in forming start up cities since they can draw on the expertise of their emigrant population. In retrospect this description undersells the start-up city concept, as a start-up city does not content itself with trying to emulate the existing institutions of 3rd parties, but also seeks to create entirely new forms of institutions.

The world needs both charter and start-up cities. The former have a comparative advantage in importing institutions that have proven useful and the latter may have the comparative advantage in experimenting with new institutions to see if improvements can be made. Most city-states today exist somewhere in between ‘charter’ and ‘start up’ city.

I propose viewing city-states as being defined by two key characteristics:

(1) The level of sovereignty they have.
(2) Whether their goal is to emulate pre-existing institutions or to experiment with new institutions altogether.

WNMS

Most cities fluctuate between these categories over time. Singapore began its life as a sovereign charter city content with following British institutions, but has continually moved towards acting as a start-up city willing to experiment with everything from DRITI-esque immigration policies to managed lanes.

Hong Kong meanwhile is a former non-sovereign charter city under British administration that became a constituent charter city after the transfer of its sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China. PRC China’s ‘one country, two systems’ policy has effectively created a federal system that allows Hong Kong to act as a constituent member of a larger Chinese federation. Of relevance to us in the open borders movement, Hong Kong does not currently seem willing to act as a start-up city when it comes to its immigration policies despite it otherwise sharing many characteristics with Singapore. Both Singapore and Hong Kong are populated mainly by ethnic Chinese who lived under British administration for most of the modern era and today boast some of the most market friendly regimes in the world. Both Singapore and Hong Kong have control over their migration policies, but of the two Singapore has thus far been more welcoming of migrants.

Hong Kong’s reluctance towards open borders seems to stem chiefly from a fear that Beijing would encourage mainland Chinese to move to Hong Kong in an effort to undermine Hong Kong’s political autonomy. Taiwan shares a similar fear that opening its borders with mainland China would also endanger its own autonomy. The best keyhole solution in both cases would be to allow open borders, but not open citizenship.

An example of a non-sovereign start-up city is the greater San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco is a region in California that enjoys both a high concentration of migrants and powerful corporations. As I touched upon in the beginning of this post, I disagree with Smith that the current international system makes it unlikely for new city-states to form as I believe that San Francisco is already a city-state and is poised to gain further autonomy in the near future.

In terms of immigration policy several cities in the greater San Francisco area have adopted ID programs that provide documentation for all of their residents, regardless of their immigration status. San Francisco was instrumental in the passage of the California TRUST Act, which limits the amount of cooperation between local governments and federal authorities in the enforcement of immigration policy. Most of the major corporations based in San Francisco in turn are leading the current immigration reform movement in the United States. It is clear as such that San Francisco has radically different views on what immigration policy should be and this difference in political opinion translates over to other public policies as well.

It is granted that due to the experimental nature of start up cities they will create bad institutions as well as good institutions. San Francisco has developed better institutions than the rest of the United States with dealing with its migrant population, but has also produced bad institutions in such areas as transit or housing. This is okay and is not an argument against start up cities. Failure is an essential part of the creative destruction process.

In the past few months San Francisco has been attempting to gain greater political autonomy in the form of the ‘Six Californias’ ballot proposition. If passed by Californian voters the proposition would split the current state of California into six new states, with much of San Francisco forming the state of Silicon Valley. The proposal is being carried out by businessman Tim Draper and being sold as being for the benefit of all Californians, but it is clear that it chiefly an attempt for greater autonomy for San Francisco. It is doubtful that the Six Californias initiative will pass this year, but I would not be surprised to see San Francisco to gain greater political autonomy in my lifetime.

Many of the great city-states of history achieved sovereign status by attaining sufficient military might to fend off their neighbors, and on this point I agree with Smith that the current international system discourages secession from the major powers. Then again, has secession ever been easy when one neighbors a major power?
A city-state however needs not full sovereignty; it can exist as a constituent member of a larger federation. The Italian city-states were fully sovereign, but at the same time many city-states existed in federation with the Holy Roman Empire. The United Arab Emirates and the Swiss Confederation are both modern day city-state federations. Several cities in modern PRC China enjoy a high degree of autonomy in economic and legal affairs as ‘sub-provincial divisions’.

A necessary condition for city-statehood is for it to house an economically affluent population that has substantial political differences with the rest of the current nation. San Francisco meets this condition and as such I don’t believe it wrong to classify it a city-state. It may not have the military prowess to attain full sovereign status, but I could see it becoming a constituent city-state within the United States.

Such a city-state would be extremely beneficial to the open borders movement. San Francisco already has favorable policies towards its large migrant population. If it gained the ability to set its own immigration policy it would surely move towards even more open borders. Regardless of their exact nature, city-states are of immense importance to the open borders movement for two reasons;

(1) They bring better institutions to those who are unable to migrate and,
(2) They provide laboratories in which to create better institutions than ones currently known to us.

All in all I agree with Smith that we need more Singapores, but qualify it by adding that we also need more San Franciscos.