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US to foreigners: we’re a nation of immigrants! (If you’re a lottery winner, or Methuselah)

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I recently stumbled across this interesting blog post by immigration lawyer Angelo Paparelli, where he talks about US visa refusals. The post is from 2009, responding to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s public statement that she was committed to streamlining the US visa process. Angelo mentions a staggering figure from the State Department’s fiscal year 2008 annual report:

In FY 2008, the State Department’s consular officers denied 1,481,471 nonimmigrant visa (NIV) applications under Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) § 214(b) (failure to establish entitlement to the requested NIV classification). While 19,837 (1.3%) of these refusals were overcome, almost 99% of the refusals prevented possibly deserving applicants from coming to the United States. [Note: These do not include the 64,516 refusals for specific grounds such as criminal conduct, public charge, material support of terrorism, etc.]

I checked the 2012 fiscal year figures and they are similar in every meaningful respect. To calculate the approval rate we need to bring in data on visas issued: with 8.9 million non-immigrant visas issued and 1.4 million non-immigrant visa applications rejected (virtually all because of 214(b)), we get an overall rejection rate of about 14%. I don’t know if that is too high or too low. But look at the data for yourself: these aren’t people with communicable diseases or criminal records. Over 1 million people have been refused student or visitor visas for the amorphous reason of “Failure to establish entitlement to nonimmigrant status.”

Presumably the intent is to deter fraud: there is a valid concern that non-immigrant visas can be used to get into the country and via overstaying, unlawfully “convert” the visa-holder to a de facto immigrant. But the main reason that is a problem is because the immigrant visa process itself deters bona fide immigrants! If you don’t believe this, one of Angelo’s colleagues recently crunched the numbers on current expected waits for some classes of lawful immigrants:

The wait for someone getting a visa today was as long as 24 years. The wait for someone starting today is much longer. An extreme example is Mexico F2B [Mexico-born “Unmarried Sons and Daughters (21 years of age or older) of Permanent Residents”].

The last time I took the difference between the cut-off date and the present date, then factored in the rate of “advance,” the anticipated delay for someone applying today under that category was 395 years. Mexico F-1 [Mexico-born “Unmarried Sons and Daughters of U.S. Citizens”] was “only” about 80-85 years.

In the US, gun rights activists love to say that if you make guns outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. By outlawing immigration, the US has ensured only outlaws will immigrate. Abortion rights activists love to warn that if abortions are banned, the only thing that will change is that more women will get hurt or die from unlicensed backdoor abortion providers: if immigration is banned, unsurprisingly millions will risk life and limb to immigrate.

If wait times longer than the human lifespan are not a de facto ban, I don’t know what is. You might as well tell someone he can own a gun when he lives to be as old as Methuselah (a man from the Old Testament who lived for over 8 centuries), or tell her she can have an abortion when she wins the Powerball (an American lottery). You may scoff. But that is exactly what the US government tells the person looking to join their family or earn a honest living. “Sure, we’re a nation of immigrants! If you’re a lottery-winning Methuselah, come on in.” And it is worse for those 1 million+ people denied the chance to visit or study in the US: because the US government has essentially outlawed immigrants, it has similarly had no choice but to do the same for visitors too. Through no fault of their own, millions of foreigners have been punished for the US government’s failure to fix its own laws.

Prediction records and open borders

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I recently finished reading The Signal of the Noise by prediction guru and stats wizard Nate Silver (here’s the book on Amazon, and here’s Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog-cum-website). Silver is well known for his extremely accurate predictions and commentary related to US elections, but his knowledge of and interest in issues related to prediction range far and wide. His book deals with many subtleties associated with prediction. The book manages to go quite deep into the statistical issues without pulling any punches, yet manages to be broadly accessible to readers.

Silver does not discuss anything as radical as open borders, and in general, does not discuss normative questions at all, preferring to stick to his area of expertise: the accuracy and precision of predictions and forecasts and the problems associated with trying to make good predictions and forecasts. Nonetheless, my guess after reading Silver’s book is that he would be extremely skeptical of any claims regarding the effects of open borders, which are way “out of sample.” In particular, I’m guessing Silver would be unimpressed with claims that open borders would double world GDP. At any rate, reading Silver makes me more skeptical of claims made about the effects of open borders with allegedly high confidence. If you believe in Knightian uncertainty as a concept, you may well take the view that the uncertainty associated with open borders is Knightian in nature, and that most attempts at quantifying its impact are flawed. This might also explain why, even though there is a broad economist consensus supporting somewhat more open borders, few economists commit to going all the way to open borders. My co-blogger Nathan noted this explicitly in a comment on another blog post.

Even in areas where we are looking at “out of sample” predictions, however, all is not lost. One idea that Silver repeatedly reiterates throughout his book is that one should keep and use every piece of data. Judging the effects of open borders might be very difficult, and we may end up with a huge range (i.e., low precision). But we can still use some data points. The type of question that somebody like Silver, starting from the outside view, would ask is: “Of the people making predictions regarding the effects of changes in migration policy regimes, who has the better prediction track record?” Or “of the various methods used to predict the effects of changes in migration policy regimes, which methods have the better prediction track record?” Ideally, what we’d need to make this kind of judgment is:

  • A large number of data points,
  • all of which have outcomes that can be agreed upon clearly,
  • with information about what prediction each side made prior to the event, and
  • with information about what the outcome was.

Weather prediction is one such example. There are a large number of data points (the daily maximum and minimum temperature and precipitation statistics in many cities over half a century). The final value of each data point is broadly agreed upon, though there are measurement error issues. The values predicted by organizations such as the National Weather Service and Weather Channel are also available. All the conditions for an analysis are therefore available, and Silver in his book mentions one such analysis. The analysis finds that both the National Weather Service and the Weather Channel are fairly accurate, but that the Weather Channel (deliberately, it turns out), inflates the probability of precipitation on days when that probability is extremely low. This phenomenon is now known as wet bias.

Predictions in the political and economic realm don’t fare as well. There are a reasonably large number of data points regarding the outcomes of various electoral races, which satisfy the necessary conditions (lots of data points, clear outcomes, information about each side’s predictions, and information about the outcome) that allow us to get a sense of the quality of political predictions. The data isn’t as extensive as for weather, but it is still quite extensive. Silver finds that while predictions that relied on statistically valid polling techniques tended to do well, predictions made by political pundits on television didn’t. Silver finds a similar disappointing story of prediction when it comes to economic forecasting. He is also critical of people who make predictions and forecasts without specifying the margin of error or the distribution, but simply give a point estimate. In the discussion, Silver alluded to Tetlock’s study of prediction records and his distinction between “foxes” and “hedgehogs” (see here for an article co-authored by Tetlock with a summary of the idea).

When two sides are debating an issue and relying heavily on empirical claims about the future to make their respective cases, you’d naturally be curious about the prediction records of the two sides with respect to past predictions. There are two additional complications over and above the obvious measurement difficulties that apply particularly to political debates such as migration policy debates:

  • The specific people engaging in the debate are usually different each time. Most pro-immigration groups and people around today weren’t there when the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed. The same is true of the anti-immigration groups and people. Given this complication, each side can happily claim allegiance to the correct claims made historically by their side, and disown the incorrect claims as having been made by others they don’t support. This can be partly overcome by trying to come up with objective metrics of just how similar arguments offered today are to the failed arguments of the past, but there are many then versus now “outs” to deflect claims of objective similarity between the present and the past.
  • Relatedly, it can be argued that proponents of an argument weren’t saying it because they actually believed it, but rather, they were just trying to rally public support to our cause, knowing that they would need to lie to (or at any rate, exaggerate their case to) a public that did not share their normative views. (I discussed incentives to lie about immigration enforcement in an earlier post).

Although these two difficulties present a challenge, there is probably much to be gained from a retrospective analysis of past changes in migration regimes and the predictions made by various people during those changes. Significant changes are better because (a) more people are likely to make explicit predictions of the effects of significant changes, and (b) the larger effect size makes it easy to determine what actually happened. Unfortunately, significant changes are also fewer in number, so we do not have the “large number of data points” that would allow for good calibration of the accuracy of predictions. But we’ve just got to deal with that uncertainty. It’s better than completely ignoring the past.

Relatedly, looking at migration regime changes sufficiently far back in the past also gives us some idea of the more long term effects of the changes. BK, one of the skeptics of open borders in our comments, has argued that the benefits of migration are front-loaded, while the costs take decades to unfold (see for instance here and here). Evaluating such concerns would require us to look at the long-term effects of past migration regime changes.

My co-blogger Chris Hendrix plans to begin a series that looks at various instances of open borders becoming more closed, along with the predictions and rationales offered at the time (expect to read Chris’s introductory post soon!). Later, one of us (perhaps Chris again, perhaps I, or perhaps one of our other bloggers) will be looking at instances of immigration liberalization and the predictions and arguments accompanying and opposing them. I’m particularly interested in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 in the United States and the Rivers of Blood Speech by Enoch Powell in 1968 in the UK. The historical analysis will hopefully help us better calibrate the accuracy of predictions and forecasts about changes to migration regimes, hence better enabling us to evaluate the plausibility of claims such as “double world GDP” or end of poverty from the outside view.

Hospitality in The Odyssey

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Restrictionists frequently try to marginalize the arguments of open borders by claiming that, as Steve Camarota put it in our TV debate, “all societies, all sovereign states throughout all history have always had the idea that they can regulate who comes into their society,” or more generally, by treating state sovereignty as a universal norm of human life and migration restrictions as an essential element of sovereignty. In fact, passport controls were the exception rather than the rule until the early 20th century, and as far as I have been able to judge the evidence (but more research would be useful), there is little by way of analogous institutions in former times. What there is evidence for is a norm of hospitality across many cultures.

In particular, hospitality is perhaps the foremost moral theme of The Odyssey, one of the two great epics of ancient Greece. It was written (according to tradition) by Homer, who was also the author of the other great Greek epic, The Iliad. The Odyssey and the Iliad were to the Greeks a little like the Bible to the Jews: major source books of ethics, theology, and history; central reference points for the culture; definers of the Greek identity. The great difference in character between the Greek epics and the Bible expresses very well the great difference in character between the Greeks and the Jews. I previously wrote about the immigration policy encoded in the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. Having formed my open borders views, and even written a book about it, long before I studied the Old Testament teachings on the treatment of the foreigner, I was amazed at the extent to which the Bible confirmed my views, if indeed it does not go even farther than I had dared to go in insisting that strangers be welcomed and well-treated. In its own, quite different way, yet hardly less emphatically, the Odyssey, too, gives open borders supporters all they could ask for.

Odysseus, the hero and namesake of the Odyssey, is a Greek king from the heroic age, who participated in the great war that ended in the destruction of Troy. That war originated in the pollution of hospitality by Paris, the Trojan prince who was a guest of Spartan king Menelaus and seduced his wife Helen. Hospitality is a two-way street. Guests as well as hosts have obligations. On his return voyage, however, Odysseus runs into all sorts of troubles and disasters that keep him from getting home. The epic begins about twenty years after the fall of Troy, by which time Odysseus’s house has been overrun by men– “the suitors”– who are wasting his goods and seeking to marry his wife. The suitors, those unwelcome guests, are the villains of the epic, who in the climax of the story are slaughtered by the returning Odysseus. Again, hospitality is a two-way street, but it would be a stretch to compare the suitors to illegal immigrants, for it is not their mere presence in the household, but their theft of Odysseus’s goods and their hopes of marrying Odysseus’s wife that seem to make them the villains. Worse, at one point they plot to murder Odysseus’s son. Moreover, when Odysseus returns in the guise of a wandering beggar, they treat him with great inhospitality. Thus they deserve their fate.

Meanwhile, Odysseus is a love-slave on the island of the goddess, Calypso, but in spite of her divine embraces, yearns to return home. At last, the gods grant him to sail to the country of a people called the Phaecians, where they know, but Odysseus does not, that he will be well-treated and given passage back to his home country of Ithaca. After a rough sea voyage he is wrecked on the Phaecian coast, where he says (this is in Book VI):

“Alas,” said he to himself, “what kind of people have I come amongst? Are they cruel, savage, and uncivilized, or hospitable and humane? I seem to hear the voices of young women, and they sound like those of the nymphs that haunt mountain tops, or springs of rivers and meadows of green grass. At any rate I am among a race of men and women. Let me try if I cannot manage to get a look at them.”

Note the dichotomy Odysseus makes here. A people may be (a) cruel, savage, and uncivilized, or (b) hospitable and humane. Hospitality, humane treatment of guests, is the first, defining feature of civilized peoples. Of course, it might only be uppermost in Odysseus’s mind because he will soon be obliged to seek their hospitality. Still, the identification of hospitality with civilization shows the importance of this norm.

Shortly afterwards, Odysseus (known to the Latins as Ulysses) finds himself in the court of King Alcinous of the Phaecians, where (in Book VII) he presents himself as a suppliant:

So here Ulysses stood for a while and looked about him, but when he had looked long enough he crossed the threshold and went within the precincts of the house… Every one was speechless with surprise at seeing a man there, but Ulysses began at once with his petition.

“Queen Arete,” he exclaimed, “daughter of great Rhexenor, in my distress I humbly pray you, as also your husband and these your guests (whom may heaven prosper with long life and happiness, and may they leave their possessions to their children, and all the honours conferred upon them by the state) to help me home to my own country as soon as possible; for I have been long in trouble and away from my friends.”

Then he sat down on the hearth among the ashes and they all held their peace, till presently the old hero Echeneus, who was an excellent speaker and an elder among the Phaeacians, plainly and in all honesty addressed them thus: “Alcinous,” said he, “it is not creditable to you that a stranger should be seen sitting among the ashes of your hearth; every one is waiting to hear what you are about to say; tell him, then, to rise and take a seat on a stool inlaid with silver, and bid your servants mix some wine and water that we may make a drink-offering to Jove the lord of thunder, who takes all well-disposed suppliants under his protection; and let the housekeeper give him some supper, of whatever there may be in the house.”

When Alcinous heard this he took Ulysses by the hand, raised him from the hearth, and bade him take the seat of Laodamas, who had been sitting beside him, and was his favourite son. A maid servant then brought him water in a beautiful golden ewer and poured it into a silver basin for him to wash his hands, and she drew a clean table beside him; an upper servant brought him bread and offered him many good things of what there was in the house, and Ulysses ate and drank. Then Alcinous said to one of the servants, “Pontonous, mix a cup of wine and hand it round that we may make drink-offerings to Jove the lord of thunder, who is the protector of all well-disposed suppliants.”

In this passage, it is clear that King Alcinous has some authority to decide who will be received in his hall, though it does not follow that he gets to decide who is present on the territory of his kingdom. But the king is not exactly at liberty to exercise this authority simply as he happens to prefer. Echeneus, who is characterized as an “old hero,” suggesting an exemplar of virtue, declares that it is “not creditable” to treat “a stranger” otherwise than to welcome him by giving him an honorable seat. Moreover, there is a theological justification for this: “Jove [Zeus] takes all well-disposed suppliants under his protection.” Here there is a striking parallel with the Old Testament, where it is written that God “defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18). Clearly, Echeneus is not making this up, but rather expressing the conventional wisdom, “speaking plainly and in all honesty,” and the king quickly echoes him, saying that “Jove [Zeus] the lord of thunder… is the protector of all well-disposed suppliants.” Continue reading Hospitality in The Odyssey →

Risking death to get into South Africa

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The supposedly horrible socioeconomic consequences of South African apartheid’s abolition are sometimes used as a cautionary tale against open borders. But this story of Ethiopians and Somalians risking life and limb to get into South Africa serve as a potent example of how much people are willing to risk in search of a better life:

41 young Ethiopians suffocated to death inside an overcrowded van in Tanzania. With the aid of human traffickers, they had been hoping to start a new life in South Africa.

Some ended up paying with their lives, while those who survived will be deported back to their home country.

…Most refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia are economic refugees, says Getachew. But others flee also from war and political persecution. 32 year-old Mohad Abdul is among those who fled to South Africa because of violence in Somalia….Integration in South Africa was relatively easy for Abdul. He quickly obtained a residence and work permit. Today he is a businessman in Johannesburg and watches closely as more and more Somalis and Ethiopians flock into the country.

In no other country are there so many asylum applications. In 2011 alone, there were 100,000 applications. The authorities can scarcely keep up with processing them.

There is no accounting for such reckless risking of life without considering the place premium: the same person doing the same job in one country can earn dramatically more than he or she would in a different country. The Somalian fleeing lawlessness is almost certain to be more productive in any other society in the world, since that country will at least have a half-functioning legal system. It is not difficult to imagine that even countries in less anarchic states might not offer their citizens the institutions conducive to productivity and prosperity which do exist a country or two away.

The international wage discrimination created by closed borders is literally the worst that has ever been measured. That conclusion may sound shockingly strong, but when you consider that there are Indonesians who literally migrate to Australian jails (because to them it’s better to be in a jail in Australia than free in their homeland) or Afghans who risk being shot to death to get into Iran, what’s shocking is how blind we are to the suffering which closed borders create.

The image featured at the top of this post is of a mother with her child crawling under the South African fence bordering Zimbabwe, taken by Themba Hadebe for the Associated Press in 2010 and published in The Guardian.