Category Archives: Uncategorized

Open Borders Action Group

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Open borders supporter Fabio Rojas, the brain behind the Open Borders Logo Contest, recently converted the Open Borders Logo Contest Facebook group to the Open Borders Action Group (OBAG). While the group was originally intended for a discussion of open borders logos, the new incarnation is intended for a general discussion of strategy and rhetoric related to open borders advocacy. Object-level discussion of the merits of open borders is also welcome, but not the focus.

If you’re interested in discussing or following discussions of open borders advocacy and action, consider joining the group. You can edit the notification settings to determine whether you get notified when new posts are made to the group, so don’t worry about getting too much notification spam. You don’t need to be an open borders supporter, or express only “pro-open borders” views in the posts and comments, but the group’s goals mean that you’re unlikely to enjoy it much unless you have some sympathy for the position. That said, open borders skeptics should feel free to join and lurk in the group to obtain “competitive intelligence” so to speak.

A few quick guidelines for OBAG:

  • Fabio moderates posts and comments ruthlessly for incivility, including reciprocal incivility (if somebody’s rude to you, let the moderators deal with it).
  • To the extent possible, when commenting on a post, stick to the topic of the post rather than pivoting to a general discussion of the merits or demerits of open borders. This helps keep the discussion focused.
  • More detailed comments and discussion are better suited to the Open Borders blog, where the bloggers and audience are more committed to hashing out arguments in full detail.

NAFTA’s Labor Agreement

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Last November President Obama was heckled by pro-migrant activists demanding that his administration take action to halt deportations. The President responded that he was unable to take further steps and that this was an issue Congress had to tackle.

One wonders if the President has considered using administrative changes to ease use of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) labor agreement.

NAFTA dealt primarily with reducing barriers in goods and services, but it also provided for a minor reduction in barriers to labor as well. Canadian and Mexican professionals may acquire the non-immigrant TN status to work and live in the United States in renewable increments of three years. The relevant text can be found in Chapter 16 of the NAFTA treaty. Only a handful of professions are covered by the status and most of them require bachelor degrees, which means that expanding the TN status would not provide much aid to lower skilled migrant-hopefuls but it would nonetheless be a move towards more open borders.

At minimum the President’s administration could seek to ease the application process for the TN status. Currently most TN status holders leave the United States in order to renew their TN status in an US consulate or embassy in their home countries. This is costly to do and many would benefit from being able to apply from within the United States. A process to apply does exist within the United States, but it is rarely exercised due to the difficulty of doing so.

The President’s administration could also seek to allow those eligible for TN status to self-apply to renew the status without the need for cooperation from their employer. The TN status is quasi-portable; when first applying a TN holder must prove that they have a job offer in the United States but can change employers in the interluding time provided they file out some paperwork. Unfortunately the need to have their employers  help them renew their status limits the portability of the status. Allowing self-petition would remove this and make the status fully portable.

TN status is currently valid for increments of three years. The President’s administration could expand this to five or ten years. During the Bush administration the status was changed from one to three years, so Obama would merely be following in his predecessors’ action.

If the President was especially ambitious he could seek to expand the list of professions covered by the TN status. Unlike other proposals here the President would have to negotiate the terms of expansion with Mexico, Canada, and Congress. President Obama is down in Mexico discuss the future of NAFTA, could it be he is already toying with the idea of using NAFTA for a broader labor agreement?

Expansion of the TN status should be an attractive route and it is surprising that both successive Presidents and open border advocates have ignored it. The TN status  is already part of the US code (Title 8 Section 214.6) and no further enabling legislation from Congress would be necessary. The President’s administration would not be creating a new status using executive order, it would merely be easing the administration process of a well established aspect of US immigration law.

Regular opponents of increased immigration would be hard pressed to argue against expanding NAFTA’s labor provisions. The President could potentially increase the list of eligible professions, but the TN status would ultimately only benefit skilled workers. There is plenty of rhetoric against unskilled migrants, but it is rare to find the same passion against skilled migrants. The TN status does not provide a pathway to citizenship to its holder and therefore denies its holder the possibility of benefiting from most US welfare programs or voting. The types of migrants that come under the TN status are the most favorable ones; well educated middle income professionals who are here to do business.

Easing use of the NAFTA’s labor agreement could not easily be portrayed as misuse either. NAFTA was meant to reduce trade barriers between the US, Canada and Mexico. Both the letter and spirit of NAFTA would be carried out by easing the application process for the TN status. Is it fateful that the trade treaty celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

The TN status has no numerical caps. Mexican applicants were numerically capped at its inception, but said cap was removed in 2004. Increasing the number of TN status holders would not reduce the number of visas available elsewhere and should not cause any significant backlogging of other visa applications.

In 2012 733,692 individuals were admitted into the US under TN status, mostly for short periods. Only a relative few reside in the United States for significant portions of time.

Source: DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2012

No labor certification process is required for those applying for the TN status.  The low number of TN status holders relative to the supply of potential applicants suggests that the administration is being stringent in who it grants the TN status to. It also implies that many more individuals could TN status if the President’s administration eased its application procedures.

If done properly an extension of NAFTA’s labor provisions could lead to the the three member nations agreeing to reform the treaty to include lower skilled labor as well or possibly extending NAFTA membership to the Caribbean and Central America countries. These would all be marginal moves, but they may wet  things enough for a slippery slope towards open borders in the long run.

Introducing Michelangelo Landgrave

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We’re happy to announce the addition of a new occasional blogger to our ever-growing roster of contributors: Michelangelo Geovanny Landgrave Lara.

Michelangelo is an economics student in California. He holds a BA in Economics from California State University, Northridge and plans to begin his graduate studies in the autumn.

He was born in Morelia, a provincial capital in western Mexico. At the age of two he was brought to the US by his parents along with his younger sister. A libertarian from birth, Michelangelo never understood why he needed anyone’s permission to move across the US-Mexican border. He settled down in Los Angeles and has lived there ever since.

Michelangelo’s first blog post will be published soon, but if you’re eager to read him, check out his writing on immigration for PolicyMic in Autumn 2013.

PS: If you are interested in blogging for Open Borders, fill our potential guest blogger contact form.

Worried about Hispanic immigration to the US? Your worst fears have already come true

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More than any other country in the world, the US epitomises a country welcoming to immigrants. Its legacy of reaping the boons of immigration, and outsized influence on the world stage are why we so often discuss it on Open Borders, even if we firmly stand behind open borders across the world. In recent years, the US has been setting a bad example for the world on immigration, and we need to set the record straight. Americans today are happy to embrace their immigrant past, but reluctant to face their immigrant future. But these are two sides of the same coin — and the past tells us that American restrictionists’ worst fears have already come to pass — and gone.

Immigrants from Asia, Africa, and above all, Central and Latin America are taking centre stage in the US today. Hispanics especially represent the future of American immigration. As a result, any American can present you with a laundry list of concerns about Hispanic immigration:

  • They are low-skilled and poorly educated
  • They don’t learn our language
  • Their culture is rude, uncouth, and macho
  • They are migrating at an immense rate, far too quick for societal or political institutions to adapt
  • They bring their own language with them, and unabashedly force American institutions to accommodate their language
  • They are either apathetic or outright disloyal to the US, and pose a risk to national security

It is tempting for those on the left to dismiss concerns about immigration as rooted merely in the basest racism, bigotry, and prejudice. I would agree that anyone who has seriously examined the empirical data here will find these concerns to be overblown — even on the rare occasion that there’s a grain of truth to them, the situation is nowhere near as bad as restrictionists typically make it out to be. And it is true that immigration restrictions, especially in the US, have traditionally been founded primarily, if not entirely, on racial prejudice. But these are not reasons to casually dismiss reasonable people’s concerns about immigration today.

Now, for those who really think that, based on that laundry list I laid out above, Hispanic immigration is a major problem in the US and one that needs to be stopped at all costs, I simply say: your concerns, valid as they may be, were anticipated a long time ago. No less an American than founding father Benjamin Franklin expressed precisely the same sentiments about a new cohort of swarthy immigrants threatening to overwhelm the United States:

Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation… Not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it; and as Kolben says of the young Hottentots, that they are not esteemed men till they have shewn their manhood by beating their mothers, so these seem to think themselves not free, till they can feel their liberty in abusing and insulting their Teachers.

…now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two Counties; Few of their children in the Country learn English…They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts…there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say; In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.

Franklin went as far as to accuse these teeming masses of ignorant, uncouth immigrants of treason. When the colonies that would become the US fought the French, these immigrants refused to fight, and publicly argued that it would be better to surrender to the French instead:

…for when the English who were not Quakers, alarmed by the danger arising from the defenceless state of our Country entered unanimously into an Association within this Government and the lower Countries raised armed and Disciplined near 10,000 men, the Germans except a very few in proportion to their numbers refused to engage in it, giving out one among another, and even in print, that if they were quiet the French should they take the Country would not molest them; at the same time abusing the Philadelphians for fitting out Privateers against the Enemy; and representing the trouble hazard and Expence of defending the Province, as a greater inconvenience than any that might be expected from a change of Government.

Yes, the swarthy immigrants Franklin was talking about here were none other than the Germans. (While none of us would describe them as such today, he was quite explicit in his correspondence, describing peoples like the French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans as “swarthy” in complexion.) The early US faced a dramatic influx of a horde of immigrants, all from one particular country and cultural background. Even the most sympathetic immigration advocate would surely agree that at some point, “swamping” creates meaningful and dangerous risks to the established order and institutions of society.

But despite all the dangers he called out, Franklin saw no reason to demand mass deportations or even a closing of the borders. He simply wanted to encourage broader settlement of the new immigrants, greater funding for English-language schooling, and precautions against importation of criminals:

I am not for refusing entirely to admit them into our Colonies: all that seems to be necessary is, to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English Schools where they are now too thick settled, and take some care to prevent the practice lately fallen into by some of the Ship Owners, of sweeping the German Gaols to make up the number of their Passengers.

Maybe Franklin didn’t want to consider deportations or strict border controls because he didn’t believe in the feasibility of a massive militarised law enforcement apparatus that would be necessary to enforce these. We surely can feasibly have those things today (albeit at the cost of turning a leading democracy into a leading police state). But if we have learned anything from the German-American experience, why on earth would we want to?

In Ben Franklin’s day, Germans were swarthy, ignorant, unskilled, uncouth foreigners. They were alien to the people of the United States, and migrating in such vast numbers that they could have swamped and sunk the ship of state. But this clearly did not happen. Quite the contrary. Germans became truly American to a vast degree, despite continued immigration from Germany through the 19th century. If you keep ethnic descent in mind, then the Germans truly won World War II, as esteemed co-blogger Hansjoerg Walther has pointed out before:

Forget about General Eisenhower, and get used to Generalfeldmarschall Eisenhauer. Same for Chester Nimitz for the Navy (now: Generaladmiral Nimitz) and Carl Andrew Spaatz for the Air Force (now: Generalfeldmarschall Karl Andreas Spatz).

The Germans were as alien to the US Ben Franklin knew as Hispanics are alien to the US we know today. Actually, that’s wrong: the Germans were more alien. Hispanics have grown up in close proximity to the US, under the influence of its cultural and political leadership. They hail from democracies of some kind, and have a much better understanding of democracy than most any German growing up in the monarchic, aristocratic Germany of Ben Franklin’s day would have had. They have strong economic and cultural ties to the US. Many Hispanics are literally native Americans. Hispanics are far less likely to undermine the America we know today than the Germans were likely to undermine the America Ben Franklin knew in his day.

The Germans were truly alien to the US. But we no longer think of them that way. If I had told Ben Franklin that two centuries down the road, the largest single ethnic group in the country he helped found would be the Germans, he would have recoiled quite violently. But that is in fact the case: Germans are the largest single ethnic group in the modern United States, numbering almost 50 million. The Germans won World War II for the US. The Germans gave the US some of its greatest cultural contributions, including hot dogs and hamburgers. German-Americans include such American figures as Tom Cruise and Walt Disney.

Perhaps Ben Franklin would consider the modern US unimaginably impoverished by the supposed dilution of Anglo-Saxon culture and institutions. But the institutions that he established were preserved by generations of German immigrants. German-Americans gave their lives for these institutions in World War II. We don’t think of the hamburger as alien; it’s the quintessential piece of American cuisine.

If German immigration has taught us anything about swarthy, unskilled, uneducated, impolite, and politically apathetic immigrants, it’s that the United States will be just fine taking them in. The US admitted millions of Germans in an era of open borders when its institutions were unbelievably weak and newborn, and when those millions of Germans were coming in far greater numbers relative to the US population than anything we see today. The notion that US society and institutions are less equipped to cope with a similar influx under open borders conditions today than the US society and institutions of the Revolutionary Era is absolutely laughable.

We may be shocked to see what the America of 2063 or 2113 looks like. It may be even less familiar to us than the America of 2013 would be to Ben Franklin. But from all we’ve seen with German immigration, it seems quite clear that the waves of immigrants making the US their home today, Hispanic or otherwise, will turn out just fine.

And we can repeat this exercise ad infinitum. Other cohorts of immigrants have lessons to teach us too, after all. The Irish are the third-largest single ethnic group in the US today, numbering over 35 million, or over 10% of the population. And judging from the concerns of 19th century Americans facing a horde of Irish migrants, again, I think the US and its people will be just fine:

Tyler Cowen Must Try Harder to Think Clearly

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Tyler Cowen is a remarkable thinker. He is a sponge for information and a great summarizer, categorizer, and synthesizer thereof. It is a service in which our age, with its sprawling clamor of disparate thought, greatly needs. Perhaps Cowen’s gifts are inseparable from his compulsive moderation, which often spills over into muddle-headedness. Cowen couldn’t be such a good listener if he didn’t give muddle-headed people a hearing. If he was as lucid and logical a thinker as Bryan Caplan, he’d see through nonsense too quickly and wouldn’t have the patience to read/blog it so that we don’t have to.

Nonetheless, with all due respect, I must remark that a recent post in which he goes after Bryan Caplan as a “False Cosmopolitanite” is singularly demonstrative of the inferiority of Cowen’s philosophical and logical acumen relative to Caplan’s. Caplan hasn’t responded to it yet– perhaps he won’t, either because he’s busy or because it would be so embarrassingly easy– but I think I have a pretty good idea what his response might be. Cowen writes:

Enter the intellectuals, whom I call The False Cosmopolitanites… The intellectuals… push for marginal moves toward a stronger cosmopolitanism, even though in a deconstructionist sense their inflated sense of superiority and smugness, while doing so, is its own form of non-cosmopolitanism… Sailer can skewer The False Cosmopolitanites, who serve up a highly elastic and never-ending supply of objectionable, fact-denying, self-righteous nonsense… Embedded in all of this, Caplan is more particularistic than he lets on, embodying and glorifying a form of upper-middle class U.S. suburban culture of which I am personally quite fond. Sailer is… a non-conformist and smart aleck who plays at the status games of The False Cosmopolitanites.  Sailer insists on relativizing and deconstructing The False Cosmopolitanites, which is fine by me, but at the same time he overestimates their power and influence…

There is not the slightest inconsistency between “embodying and glorifying a form of upper-middle class US suburban culture” and favoring open borders. Cowen’s critique is a complete, unmitigated nonsequitur. No reconciliation of Caplan’s two positions (pro-suburbia and pro-open borders) is really needed, but if he felt the need to dispel any slight persuasive force Cowen’s remarks had on weak-minded readers, Caplan could answer in either or all of the following ways.

  1. Open borders will not disrupt the upper-middle class suburban culture of which he is fond. There’s little reason to think it would lead to more crime. If it did, the boost to GDP from open borders would easily fund a few more police. Many immigrants might integrate pretty easily into upper-middle-class suburbia, but if it takes soaring new tenements and sprawling shantytowns to house the immigrant multitudes, there will be plenty of land on which to build those while leaving room for a lot of upper-middle-class suburbia, too.
  2. Open borders will, moreover, give more people access to the American suburban life Caplan is so fond of. If Caplan thinks so highly of middle-class suburbia in America, by all means let’s try to give as many people as possible access to this fortunate existence.
  3. Even if open borders did threaten the American suburban lifestyle, it is not in the least inconsistent to say that protecting that lifestyle is not an adequate motive for immigration restriction policies that is by far the greatest cause of dire poverty in the world. Americans probably wouldn’t need to sacrifice suburban comfort to accommodate open borders, but if they did, that would be a small price to pay for the global gains that could be expected.

    4. Doubtless, there are counter-arguments to all these claims, but that’s beside the point. If Caplan believes (1), (2), and/or (3), Cowen’s suggestion that Caplan is a “False Cosmopolitanite”– inconsistent– for being pro-suburbia and pro-open borders, fails.

    Whether or not Caplan, or open borders advocates generally, are guilty of “smugness” or an “inflated sense of superiority” is entirely beside the point. Really, we all have better things to do than talk about the tone in which the arguments are stated. Our business is to evaluate their truth. Are governments justified in using force to prevent peaceful migration, or not?

    The answer to that question has nothing to do with whether one is “cosmopolitan” in the sense of liking multicultural art, or having foreign friends, or liking foreigners, or thinking that all cultures are equally valuable or anything of the sort. It is entirely consistent to think most foreigners are morally inferior to Americans and still think we ought not to coerce them to stay in foreign countries. For that matter, it would be eminently consistent to support open immigration because one thinks most foreigners are morally inferior to Americans, in hopes that exposure to the moral influence of American society will improve them.

    I doubt that Cowen could even define his terms “particularist” and “cosmopolitan” in a minimally satisfactory way. The suggestions that being “smug” is “non-cosmopolitan” and that “glorifying suburbia” is “particularist” suggest that whatever Cowen means by the terms is so stultifyingly subjective that they couldn’t do any real work in any sensible argument about open borders. Is my meta-ethics of universal altruism plus division of labor “cosmopolitan?” I do insist that we should ultimately place equal value on the welfare of foreigners. But I am not at all “cosmopolitan” in the sense of airy detachment from “particularist” cultural traditions: on the contrary, I’m a Christian, and support open borders partly from Christian reasons. But then, does the fact that Christianity is global and universalistic religion– Jesus said to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19)– make me cosmopolitan again? Such questions are unanswerable and fundamentally silly.

    Cowen says that “Sailer insists on relativizing and deconstructing The False Cosmopolitanites, which is fine by me.” Why is it fine by him? We intellectuals have a primary duty to truth. Part of that duty includes taking the claims of other scholars seriously, answering argument with argument, not engaging in ad hominem attacks and low blows against one another’s motives. Cowen should know better than to approve of Sailer “relativizing and deconstructing” Caplan.

    By the same token, calling Caplan a “False Cosmopolitanite” ought to be beneath Cowen. Has Caplan ever claimed to be “cosmopolitan” in any sense, let along Cowen’s strange subjectivist sense? If he hasn’t claimed to be a Cosmopolitanite, he can’t be a false one. In general, while I often disagree with Caplan– I find his “common-sense case for pacifism” very naïve, for example– “false” is a very inapt description of him. On the contrary, much of his charm lies in his extreme ingenuousness. But the “False Cosmopolitanite” label is especially fatuous because Cowen’s concept of “cosmopolitan” is so confused, and its logical connection to open borders, for or against, so non-existent.

    Cowen says that his “perspective is a synthetic one,” but the post is calculated to give “synthetic perspectives” a bad name. There can be a conflict between synthesizing and seeking truth. In this case, Cowen’s attempt to be a sort of hybrid of Bryan Caplan and Steve Sailer yields a singularly muddled contribution to the debate. Tyler Cowen must try harder to think clearly.