Tag Archives: crime

How Did We Get Here? The Origins of Immigration Restrictions: The Chinese Exclusion Act

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As promised, here is the start of my historical examination of immigration rule changes, and we begin with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For those interested in the text of the act itself it can be found here.

For a little background, the first restriction on immigration to the US was actually the Page Act of 1875. This act too focused on Asian immigrants attempting to limit people being brought over for forced labor or prostitution. In practice that latter provision was a significant limiting factor on Chinese women coming to the United States, less because of most emigrating Chinese women actually being prostitutes than officials being overly skeptical towards claims of virtue. This association of the Chinese with crime was one of the major arguments used by anti-Chinese restrictionists in the years leading up to the exclusion act’s passage and parallels modern arguments about immigrant criminality. To explore this (and other major restrictionist arguments) the internet has made easily accessible wonderful resources such as arguments made before the California State Senate (the state with the highest Chinese population) by State Senator Creed Haymond. On page 4 he argues:

The State of California has a population variously estimated at from seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand, of which one hundred twenty-five thousand are Chinese…The evidence demonstrates beyond cavil that nearly the entire immigration comes from the lowest orders of the Chinese people, and mainly those having no homes or occupations on the land, but living on boats on the rivers, especially those in the vicinity of Canton.

This class of the people, according to the castes into which Chinese society is divided, are virtually pariahs—the dregs of the population. None of them are  admitted into any of the privileges of the orders ranking above them. And while rudimentary education is encouraged, and even enforced among the masses of the people, the fishermen and those living on the waters and harbors of China are excluded by the rigid and hoary constitutions of caster from participation in such advantages.

It would seem to be a necessary consequence, flowing from this class of immigration, that a large proportion of criminals should be found among it; and this deduction is abundantly sustained by the facts before us, for of five hundred and forty-five of the foreign criminals in our State Prison, one hundred and ninety-eight are Chinese—nearly two-fifths of the whole—while our jails and reformatories swarm with the lower grade of malefactors.

(Emphasis mine).

Continue reading How Did We Get Here? The Origins of Immigration Restrictions: The Chinese Exclusion Act →

Bleg: research on the effects of open borders beyond the labor market

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The double world GDP literature cited in Clemens’ paper (and also John Kennan’s paper) provides estimates of how free global labor mobility would affect world GDP, mainly through their effects on the labor market (though other channels of effect are also considered in these papers, albeit perhaps not as much as they should be). But I don’t know of any literature about the effect that open borders might have on crime (something I speculated about here), global IQ (something I asked Bryan Caplan to bleg), and global politics (whether through political externalities in the receiving countries or a changed political landscape in the immigrant-sending countries). Speculation about the effects on the dating and mating markets and the genetic composition of future generations might also be quite valuable (see for instance Erik’s comment).

If a serious case is to be made for open borders, and if serious efforts are to be made to move towards open borders with appropriately designed keyhole solutions, it is essential to understand, envisage and prepare for a range of scenarios regarding these questions.

So, I’m blegging for the answers to two questions:

  1. If you’re aware of any literature that considers counterfactual scenarios of radically more open borders, whether locally (for specific country pairs) or globally, but that goes beyond simply measuring the effects on the labor market, please pass it on in the comments.
  2. Assuming that I am correct about the paucity of such research, though, why is there so little research on these topics, even compared to economics research on the effects of open borders? Two hypotheses have been suggested to me:
    • Nathan Smith’s view: Various frameworks in economics, such as rationality, allow for the consideration of radical counterfactual scenarios in a manner that is not necessarily realistic but still bears some semblance of objectivity and offers some type of ballpark. No similar widely-agreed-upon first-pass framework exists in other disciplines.
    • Bryan Caplan’s view: Economics manages to attract a few people who are genuinely curious and adventurous and willing to consider radical alternative scenarios and perform a serious analysis of these scenarios. Other disciplines may not attract such people.

    Any alternative hypotheses would also be welcome.

Open borders, crime and targeting the natives: the case of South Africa

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Two objections to open borders are that under open borders (1) recipient countries are likely to experience an increase in crime and (2) natives, since they are on average richer than the new comers, are likely to bear the full brunt of crime. The two objections are not necessarily related: one can think of a scenario whereby the crime rate falls following open borders but the residual crime is disproportionately borne by natives. This post does not confront the first objection, namely that open borders might lead to an increase in crime, because others on this site have done so. In addition, I have speculated in a previous post that the increase in crime that immediately followed the collapse of apartheid in South Africa (to all intents and purposes an “open borders event”) was due to the fact that background checks were never performed on the “new comers” to isolate those with criminal records. (In that post, I also noted that it was impossible to perform such checks in South Africa’s case without upsetting an already delicate situation). My intention in this post is to confront the second objection, namely that natives are likely to bear the brunt of any crime that takes place under open borders. I will do so by appealing to South Africa’s post apartheid experience.

The dominant narrative on South Africa is that crime increased and has continued to increase in the post apartheid period and whites have largely been the victims of the crime wave. I took on the first part of this narrative in this post and showed that it was largely false — homicide rates (the most reliable measure of crime) have been declining every year since 1995 (apartheid officially ended in 1994). As a matter of fact, homicide rates are 50% lower today than they were in 1995. The second part of the crime narrative has a common sense appeal: whites are disproportionately the victims of crime because the average white South African is many times richer than the average black South African making him/her an attractive target for criminals. Official confirmation of this narrative seemed to have arrived when in 2009 Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) granted Brandon Huntley, a white South African living in Canada, refugee status on the basis that “[Huntley] would stand out like a ‘sore thumb’ due to his color in any part of [South Africa]”. Huntley “reported being the victim of several assaults by black South Africans. He alleged that those assaults were racially motivated, and stated that he did not seek police or state protection because the authorities [were] unwilling or unable to help white South Africans…The [IRB] found [Huntley] credible and accepted his evidence with regard to the attacks. One of [Huntley’s] witnesses, Ms. Kaplan, whose brother was victimized by black South Africans, also testified that the police [were] corrupt and [do] not help white South Africans, and that a genocide is occurring against white South Africans” (source). The ruling by the IRB sparked off a series of heated debates in South Africa with some seeing the decision as vindication of their long-held suspicions and others condemning it as unfounded. This prompted James Myburgh, the editor of Politicsweb, a popular local news and opinion website, to analyze several rounds of national victimization surveys whereupon he found that “whites were somewhat more likely to fall victim to crime than other race groups”. Myburgh’s conclusions were regarded as the final verdict on the matter by many since national victimization surveys were nationally representative and were conducted by Statistics South Africa, the Institute for Security Studies and the Human Sciences Research Council, bodies widely regarded as credible. The matter did not rest there, however. In December 2009, Gavin Silber and Nathan Geffen published an article in SA Crime Quarterly arguing that national victimization surveys (or NVSs) were not the best tool to use in answering the crime victimization question because they relied heavily on people’s opinions. Silber and Geffen advanced the following reasons [footnotes omitted]:

Firstly, the very concept of crime or criminality can be relatively subjective, as indeed is the case with ‘victimhood’. Some respondents to NVSs classify the threat of violence as a criminal act, while others might only classify its use as criminal. In addition, the distinction between perpetrator and victim can also be somewhat blurred in cases such as assault.

Secondly, there is strong evidence showing that reported victimization levels tend to increase with education, which is obviously (and particularly in South Africa) linked to income. A study in the United States showed that people with university degrees recalled three times as many assaults as those with a high school education. It is conceivable that over-exposure to a particular crime category amongst certain NVS respondents (in this case people with little education) may result in lesser infringements – such as assault – not qualifying as ‘criminal’. This has also been observed in studies illustrating how various developed cities/countries have produced higher victimization rates than poorer countries with higher levels of recorded crime.

Thirdly, reporting of property-related and violent crime tends to differ significantly, based on various circumstances. When a given sample is questioned on exposure to violent interpersonal crimes such as assault and sexual abuse (particularly when it involves a non-stranger), the results are likely to reflect a significant underreporting of actual exposure, due to a reluctance to report sexual abuse, child abuse, general assault and domestic violence.  Moreover, there might be differences in the way poor and relatively wealthy respondents perceive property-related crime. Relatively wealthy people have more items of value, and are able to afford insurance, which requires reporting such crimes to the authorities. This might mean they are more likely to be conscious of, or remember, thefts they have experienced in the period covered by the NVS.

They proposed an alternative method that looked at trends in deaths from non-natural causes, and in particular homicide rates. Such an approach yielded a different set of conclusions to those arrived at by Myburgh. For instance [footnotes omitted]:

In 2008/2009 18,148 people in South Africa were murdered. This amounts to 37.3 people per 100,000, or just under 50 per day. The evidence we have examined indicates that the victims are disproportionately african and coloured working class people.  We examined Statistics South Africa mortality data to determine the breakdown of murders by race. Our analysis is inconclusive but it indicates that victims are disproportionately africans and coloureds.

More compelling data come from the Medical Research Council (MRC). In an investigation into female homicide rates in South Africa in 2004, the MRC used national mortuary data to determine that 2.8 of every 100,000 white women die as a result of murder, whereas 8.9 africans and 18.3 coloureds meet the same fate. This shows that, at least for women, Myburgh is very likely wrong […] Black women are disproportionately murdered.

Another recent study by the Centre for The Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) analysed homicide rates in high-risk areas in Kwazulu-Natal, Western Cape, and Gauteng, using a representative sample of police dockets. Of the sample 85% of homicide victims were black, 9% were coloured, 5% asian and 1% of victims were white.

Silber and Geffen also looked at mortality reports produced by Statistics South Africa going all the way to the year 2000 and arrived at similar conclusions to those reported above.

So using an approach that counts the actual victims of crime shows that, contra Myburgh, the burden of crime in post-apartheid South Africa has largely been borne by the country’s non-white population.

The above notwithstanding, it is still quite possible that the homicide rate of whites has gone up since 1994 even though whites bear a lesser burden of crime when compared to other groups. Unfortunately, race specific homicide data were not collected prior to 1994 making it difficult for us to  work out and compare victimization rates for whites before and after apartheid. But the information that exists currently suggests that homicide rates for whites have come down or at the very least stayed the same since 1994. For instance, South Africa’s homicide rate began rising in the mid-1950s and continued on this upward trend, with an additional 5,000 homicides per decade, until 1994 (see the figure on page 10 of this document). And this happened during the period when the definition of South Africa excluded the homelands where most blacks (who were the majority of the population) lived suggesting that the increase in homicide rates over this period must have been largely borne by the citizens of South Africa as it was then defined. This piece of evidence coupled with the fact that homicides rates for the country as a whole have fallen by 50% after 1995 suggests that the homicide rate for whites must have declined alongside the country’s homicide rate or at the very least stayed the same since 1994.

Or perhaps certain types of victimization have increased since 1994 even though whites as a group are less vulnerable to crime when compared to whites before 1994 or when compared to other racial groups in contemporary South Africa. The typical case that is usually cited to illustrate this concern are the widely publicized attacks on white farmers. However, even here the current evidence seems to suggest that white South African farmers and their families are no more likely to fall victim to murder than the typical South African citizen. It is however important to point out that there is currently not a systematic and reliable way of collecting data on attacks on white farmers so the best analyses rely on data triangulations and assumptions implying that there is bound to be some dispersion in the conclusions. But be this as it may, all reasonable analysts of this story agree that there is currently no evidence to suggest that there is a genocide of white South African farmers, contrary to what some groups are claiming. Further, all experts agree that these attacks are not racially motivated nor do they have a political angle to them. According to a researcher who has had first-hand experience in investigating farm attacks, “most farm murders were criminal acts committed with a material motive behind them“.

What implications, if any, might this have for the open borders discussion since I have argued elsewhere that the fall of apartheid was an open borders event? Firstly, South Africa’s experience shows that crime rates do not necessarily rise following open borders — in South Africa’s case, the rate of crime has fallen in each year since 1995. And secondly, it is not clear-cut that the burden of crime will always be borne by natives following open borders — in South Africa’s case, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the victims of crime have overwhelmingly been the black (and to some extent, the coloured) population. In any case, open borders would present a way out for people such as Brandon Huntley who believed they were in danger of victimization. And under open borders, people like Huntley would not have to prove their case.

The specter of crime does not, in my mind, constitute sufficient grounds to overturn the presumption in favor of open borders — South Africa’s experience, with zero background checks, shows that crime is much more a concern for the new comers than it is for the natives. And I think it is possible to reduce the possibility of crime to a minimum by relying on background checks among other options. The alternative of consigning poor people to countries where they are perpetually the victims of crime, and to say nothing of poverty, is much worse.

 

 

Is blanket denial of the right to migrate based on criminal history unjust?

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John Roccia, a supporter of open borders, wrote a blog post about a month back titled Compassion Within The Lines, where he critiqued self-proclaimed supporters of immigration for their very restrictive conception of what it means to be pro-immigration — supporting immigration only for some classes of people. By and large, I agree with his critique. I’ve been critical of pro-immigration immigrant rights activists and Nathan has pointed out how moderate restrictionists often position themselves as being principled non-extremists by casting open borders as an extreme strawman position. Nathan’s also been critical of the “only high IQ immigrants” position that John Roccia is critical of. Nonetheless, some of John’s critique also extends to open borders advocates on this site, specifically me. In a blog post titled free speech absolutism versus viewpoint-based immigration restrictions, I wrote:

My thumb rule for blanket denials is: anything that constitutes sufficient reason for blanket denial of migration should also constitute sufficient reason for punitive measures under criminal or civil law in the target country of immigration. For instance, murder is sufficient grounds for imprisonment, and hence also, in my book, sufficient grounds for a blanket denial of the right to migrate. In some cases, I think the punitive measure under domestic criminal law really is morally unjustified, and hence restricting immigration on that basis is also unjustified. An example is laws against drug use in many countries — I don’t think drug use is sufficient grounds for imprisonment, and hence also not sufficient grounds for denying immigrants entry. But others, who hold different views on drug use, may come to the opposite conclusion.

So far, so good. It is when we move from criminal law to civil law that things get more interesting. Certain activities, such as libel, contract fraud, and copyright infringement, are punishable under civil, but not criminal, law in most jurisdiction — they are litigated by persons, not prosecuted by the state. Libertarians (and others) are probably unanimous about the evil of contract fraud, and may have the view that, at least in some extreme cases, this may be sufficient grounds for denying the right to migrate. Libel and copyright infringement are trickier, since many libertarians (and others) feel that copyright infringement is not immoral at all, and some hold a similar view about libel. Even for those who are opposed to libel and copyright infringement, deporting people, or denying entry, for these “crimes” may seem like overkill. Other minor “crimes” like traffic infractions may also seem like insufficient grounds for denying the right to migrate.

In other words, for most migrants, any negative externalities caused by the migrant should be dealt with through pecuniary transfers such as tariffs or taxes, or by imposing linguistic and cultural fluency requirements, but for crimes that merit imprisonment, blanket denial of the right to migrate may be the right thing.

Prior to the debate with John Roccia, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to this matter, mostly because most of the people I debate on open borders tend to be far more restrictionist than I am, so I’m not usually in a position of needing to defend specific restrictions. In fact, most people featured in the pro-open borders people list on this website have tacitly conceded the legitimacy of keeping criminals out. For instance, David Henderson describes his version of open borders as follows [emphasis mine, not in original]:

Assume that the U.S. government decided to let anyone in who wanted to come, unless the person had a criminal record or carried a dangerous communicable disease. […] Now, under my scheme, the U.S. government would couple open borders with a 20-year residency requirement for U.S. citizenship and a requirement that one be a citizen in order to get any kind of welfare, including government schooling. That way, people wouldn’t come here for welfare (I think most of them don’t anyway) and we wouldn’t worry about their voting away the very economic system that made this country attractive to them.

Alex Nowrasteh has also, repeatedly in his writings, acknowledged that restricting the immigration of violent and property criminals, and perhaps even deporting them, is morally legitimate. For instance, while praising California’s TRUST Act, Alex writes [emphasis mine, not in original]:

First, it [the TRUST Act] would limit immigration detainers to unauthorized immigrants convicted or currently charged with a serious or violent felony. If SCOMM must exist, it should exist for violent or property offenders and not otherwise peaceful unauthorized immigrants.

Similarly, he praises some aspects of US immigration policy towards Cuba with the following language [emphasis mine, not in original]:

First, the United States has a unique immigration policy for Cubans. Known as the “wet foot/dry foot policy,” if a Cuban reaches American soil he or she is allowed to gain permanent residency within a year. If a Cuban is captured at sea, he or she is returned to Cuba unless they cite fears of persecution. This means that most Cubans who want to leave, with the exception of violent or other criminal offenders, will be able to stay in the United States if they are able to make it to American soil. No other nationality in nearly a century, except the Hungarians in the 1950s, has been subject to such a generous policy.

John Lee, my co-blogger at Open Borders, has also been similarly accommodating of blanket restrictions and deportations of violent criminals, as witnessed in this blog post [emphasis mine, not in original]:

If, as Obama claims, the US kicked out 1.5 million criminals — ~0.5% of the 300 million-strong US population — why didn’t the crime rate fall precipitously? Oh, that’s right — because, unlike what some selective reports would have you believe, crime rates among immigrants are actually lower than among native-born Americans. Who is Obama kidding? I am sure he deported plenty of vile criminals who don’t deserve the opportunity to live and work in a developed economy, but there is no way he rounded up 1.5 million such criminals without deporting hundreds of thousands of US citizens.

Bryan Caplan, in his Haiti ICE hypothetical, also make an allowance for the legitimacy of immigration restrictions based on the prospective immigrant’s criminal history [emphasis mine, not in original]:

You: Why are you denying me permission to travel to the U.S.?

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] Agent: You just can’t go. End of story.

You: Why not? There’s got to be a reason.

ICE Agent: Sir, I don’t have to give you a reason.

You: This is going to ruin my life! Have you looked outside the embassy window? People here are literally eating dirt.

ICE Agent: It doesn’t matter. You can’t come, and I refuse to tell you why.

You: Well, it would have to be a pretty good reason to do something so awful to me…

ICE Agent: No comment.

You: Look, I’m not a criminal. I’m not a parasite. I’m not asking for charity. I’ve got a job and an apartment.

ICE Agent: Unfortunately, you don’t have legal permission to work at that job or live in that apartment.

So in some ways I’ve grown complacent about the idea of blanket immigration restrictions for people with criminal backgrounds, rather than trying to devote my energies to coming up with more humane keyhole solutions. Rightly, John Roccia challenged my argument for a blanket denial to criminals in a comment on his own post. I quote the relevant excerpt:

Second, I don’t morally agree with all the keyhole solutions. In particular, I’m not a fan of restricting immigration based on what would be criminally prosecutable here, for a number of reasons. There are simply too many factors of culture to consider. For instance, what is a “criminal?” Is it someone that has committed a crime? That seems unduly harsh, then – lots of people commit crimes, are rehabilitated, and then live productive lives. A career criminal? What defines that? How many crimes, how often, of what severity, and over how long a time? Any limit here would seem arbitrary. Also, are we basing the “criminal identity” on what their home country says, or what they would have been arrested for here? Seems like you’d have to do the latter, or you’d potentially have two different people with an identical history of actions, one who’d be allowed to immigrate and one not simply because of country of origin. But even if it’s based on what they’d be arrested for here, that leads to its own problems. We’re all aware that a huge amount of crime is created by economic conditions. Who knows if the “criminal” would have committed those crimes if he or she had the life they might have had in America? And why should we believe that someone who stole to survive in Venezuela would still steal here? Pure “criminality” isn’t something easily measured. There are too many external reasons why a crime gets committed, reasons that change if you radically change your environment.

I think that John makes some very good points. In fact, I can think of a lot of people — born and brought up in developed countries — who committed theft and other crimes as youngsters, and are now successful as adults. Actor-cum-tech-investor Ashton Kutcher broke into his high school at midnight to steal money, and was convicted of third-degree burglary. Personal development guru Steve Pavlina was arrested for grand theft in Sacramento, California in his late teens. Vivek Kundra, who served as the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, shoplifted four shirts from JC Penney in his youth.

At the same time, as John concedes, there are some people who are “career criminals” — and they differ from people who committed youthful indiscretions and have successfully rehabilitated themselves. I would argue that it is morally legitimate and socially prudent to deny them entry for the welfare of natives and others residing within the territory. Of course, many “career criminals” are already behind bars within the country they are currently residing in as well, and/or have their emigration rights restricted by their own country, so additional immigration restrictions may not be necessary. But there are probably edge cases. What about a person who committed murders, but had his sentence commuted or drastically reduced due to good behavior in prison or proof of temporary insanity or a sympathetic judge? Does the person still have the right to migrate, or is it morally permissible to restrict that right citing a risk, albeit not a certainty, that this person could commit more crimes?

These are difficult questions. Further, somebody who has committed a relatively minor crime is still more likely than a person without a criminal background to proceed to more major crimes. Are there any keyhole solutions? I’ve been thinking about this, and here are some possibilities.

Restricting immigration for people who have committed crimes recently

One idea is to restrict the immigration of people who have been convicted of committing crimes in the recent past, where the definition of “recent” would vary based on the nature of the crime. Continue reading Is blanket denial of the right to migrate based on criminal history unjust? →

IQ and double counting the harms of immigration

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Nathan just published a lengthy and detailed critique of various critics of open borders. I think he gets many things right, but in some ways he underestimates restrictionist arguments. This isn’t entirely Nathan’s fault — restrictionists often don’t frame their arguments cogently and clearly, and it’s extremely hard to understand their arguments without spending considerable time going through them. I want to talk about one particular restrictionist argument — the IQ deficit argument, and what I think an appropriate response to this argument is. This post is not intended to address specific restrictionist critiques of IQ. I’ll do that in subsequent posts. For now, my main goal is to explain my overall position.

Now, some open borders advocates find the entire discussion of IQ off-putting and are quick to make accusations of racism and invoke negative stereotypes for restrictionists. (To take just one example of where this came up, consider the comments section of this blog post where I came under fire for engaging IQ-based arguments in the context of immigration). I do not adopt this approach for multiple reasons, most important of which is that I think some of the basic premises underlying the IQ deficit concern are valid. And, my goal in this blog post is to address IQ-based objections, not to dismiss them.

I’ll state the IQ deficit argument for immigration to the United States, though the general framework is applicable to immigration to other countries as well.

  • IQ is meaningful, measurable, and correlated with a number of real-world performance metrics. Higher IQ people tend to be more cooperative, less criminal, more innovative, better and more informed voters, etc. These correlations hold even after we control for other things such as education levels. A high IQ person without much formal education would tend to be more cooperative than a low IQ person with a similarly low formal education: Basically, I think this is correct. It seems to agree with the Mainstream Science on Intelligence and Intelligence: Known and Unknowns. Recent work by Garett Jones has strengthened economists’ appreciation of the link IQ and cooperation and its role in economic development, something whose implications I considered in this blog post.
  • Adult IQ is fairly stable (though it can go down with head injuries and certain illnesses). It cannot usually be made to go up significantly. Childhood IQ may be malleable, but we don’t quite know how to manipulate it much on the positive side, though probably malnutrition and childhood disease affect it on the negative side. I think this is broadly correct too. This also agrees with the two consensus statements above.
  • Under open borders, the average IQ of immigrants to the United States is lower than the average IQ of current United States residents: International IQ data comparisons are not very solidly established, but the preliminary evidence suggests that this is likely to be true. If Lynn and Vanhanen’s data are to be believed, then the average world IQ is about 2/3 of a standard deviation below average US IQ. I’m not very confident about this, but it’s plausible.
  • The stability of adult IQ means that even after migration, the lower average IQ of immigrants will pull down the average IQ of the United States. This seems fairly plausible to me.

At this point, Nathan jumps in and says, “Ah! Even if correct, this is not as relevant as you think. You’re committing the maximize the average fallacy and refuse to understand the comparative advantage concept.”

Not so fast, restrictionists would say. As Richard Hoste puts it, the comparative advantage argument works in the context of pure economics, but once we bring in crime and political externalities, it starts to falter. If crime rates go up, then your chance of being a crime victim goes up, all else equal (there are caveats to be added, but I’m using a simplistic picture of crime). Comparative advantage doesn’t come to the rescue here. And if low IQ means voting for bad policies (something that’s supported by Caplan’s research) then low IQ immigration would lead to negative political externalities.

So, I don’t think the comparative advantage argument is quite the right way to tackle the IQ deficit concern. So what is? I think we need to step back a bit and be clearer about how IQ matters to the moral and practical considerations that come up with respect to immigration and its effect on natives and immigrants. Does IQ matter in and of itself (as some indication of moral worth or desert), or does it matter because of its correlation with things like crime or political beliefs or social capital or what-have-you? It’s only the rare IQ elitist who argues that IQ is morally significant in and of itself. Most people who believe in the importance of IQ believe in it because it’s correlated with a lot of other things like crime, political beliefs, etc.

This brings me to the crux of my objection to the IQ deficit concern. If lower immigrant IQ raises concerns about higher immigrant crime rates or wrong political beliefs, then that should show up in the evidence on immigrant crime rates and political beliefs. If it does show up there, then great, score a point for restrictionists, and now that we’ve done that, what additional information does immigrants’ IQ deficit give us? By saying that immigrants commit crime and that immigrants have a low IQ which means they would commit more crime, it seems like restrictionists are double counting crime.

What if restrictionists are unsuccessful in demonstrating higher immigrant crime? That does seem to be the case with current levels of immigration to the United States. As things stand today, the foreign-born have lower crime rates than natives both in total and for every ethnicity and for every combination of ethnicity and high school graduation status.

Some restrictionists look these data in the eye and say, “Immigrants have lower IQ, therefore they must be committing more crime, no matter what the data say.” I think the data on crime rates aren’t wrong, so let me engage restrictionists by offering alternative explanations within their explanatory framework of low IQ being correlated with higher crime rates. The first possibility is that the restrictionists may be wrong about their claim of lower IQ of current immigrants to the United States. The second possibility is that there may be certain other differences between the foreign-born and native-born Americans that compensate for the lower average IQ to push the overall averages in the other direction. Those differences may be in terms of the culture or in terms of the structural incentives and constraints faced by the foreign-born relative to natives. But whatever the story, I think that when restrictionists find that a particular predicted ill-effect of low immigrant IQ fails to materialize, then they should give up on that and concentrate on the other claimed bad effects. And, perhaps, also double-check their claim of lower immigrant IQ while they’re at it.

So my overall claim is that restrictionists who think the IQ framework is a good overarching framework within which to fit their objections can certainly offer this framework. But they should not double count harms by both including the harm itself and the IQ deficit channel for the harm as separate harms. And if a harm predicted by IQ deficit fails to materialize, they should sportingly concede the point and move on. Which means that IQ deficit ultimately serves only as a framework, not as an argument in and of itself.

I will now address a few possible objections that restrictionists might raise to what I’ve said above. Continue reading IQ and double counting the harms of immigration →