6 thoughts on “Immigration Does Not Decrease Economic Freedom”

1. Nowrathteh’s summation completely avoids reality as to mass immigration. It degrades and usurps jobs from the host nation’s native workers–especially minorities with scant education. He glosses over the fact that mass immigration overwhelms the environment, energy,water and resource base of the host country. In short: this stupid commentary cannot be understood with any credibility. No matter what your degree in college, you lack common sense and rational thinking. Endless immigration from third world countries that produce 80 million extra people annually cannot be sustained by first world countries–unless, of course, they want to become third world countries themselves. Get a grip man. Frosty Wooldridge, 6 continent world bicycle traveler

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   1. Hey Frosty! Just a quick note, Alex’s post is about one particular argument against open borders. If a single blog post could deal with every objection and every argument in favor of the idea we wouldn’t need a whole site for it. But for those curious about the points Frosty brings up I encourage you to scroll up and check out the potential harms sections of the site. Thanks for posting Frosty!

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2. A fascinating result! This does provide some hard evidence against these fears, but I can see one significant objection. It may be the case that the tipping point in an effect such as this comes when a majority of the population is immigrants. I’m not personally convinced that’s the most plausible idea however. The United States for instance, managed to elect a second-generation black American (one on side of his family anyways) without non-whites losing their majority either in the population at large or in the voting booth. If there was going to be a significant immigrant-induced negative impact on economic freedom, I would have expected to see it in the data. At the very least, even if this isn’t a deathblow to the political externalities argument (and the related IQ arguments) this should at least weaken their appeal.

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3. The data are from mostly selective migration regimes that pick out desirable immigrants, who are often on average bringing up the average human capital of the receiving countries.

   http://perso.uclouvain.be/frederic.docquier/filePDF/DM_ozdenschiff.pdf

   Table 3 lists the portion of workers who meet a skilled worker qualification with the portion of emigrants to OECD countries from that country or region who are skilled.

   4.0% of Africans qualify, but 30.9% of African emigrants do. 6.3% of Asians qualify, but 46.8% of Asian emigrants do.

   That level of selection is incompatible with open borders. If someone argues that immigration which lowers average human capital stock has some negative long-term effects in the recipient country, while human-capital-increasing immigration improves things, it’s a bait-and-switch to use the figures from the selective migration system to say they should think open borders would have similar effects.

   The post is most relevant to people who think there is something about immigrants qua immigrants that impairs local institutions, instead of being concerned about human capital or other particular features of immigrants, which will vary depending on selection policies and other factors.

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4. I guess you could refine the argument in this way:

   Immigration does not have an effect on levels, but on changes.

   This gives a good fit with an R^2 of 67,7%.

   I think it would also be reasonable not to expect an immediate effect, but one with a lag of let’s say a decade (how long it takes for immigrants to become citizens). If I run it just on the overlap, R^2 goes up to 82,8%. In this case you could make a prediction that economic freedom will be at 6,86 in 2015 and at 6,02 in 2020, which looks pretty bad. And unfortunately, it could prove to be correct.

   Now you could argue that low levels are still furthering economic liberty. But I could do a Krugman on you and claim that it would have improved even more without it, and improvements come from natives who counterbalance the bad influences of immigrants.

   If someone tried to make such an argument, I’d not be impressed with a forecast on only five data points. In addition, making inferences from such aggregate data, you would have to guard against confounding variables. But that also applies to the original argument on only seven data points .

   [BTW, I was a little astonished that Germany would not make it to the top 25 in 1980 – the Federal Republic, of course.]

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   1. For anyone wondering: I took immigration at the end of five years vs. change in those years. That’s debatable. If I take immigration at the beginning, I get a better R^2 for contemporaneous and a worse for lagged, but still high with 76% and 69%. Forecasts get worse with 6.9 in 2015 and 5.9 in 2020. But then it is now down to just four data points.

      I am bit tired, so excuse any errors, but it looks like I can’t really mess this up.

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