Tag Archives: in the news

Peggy Noonan

Among other things, she writes:

Finally, Republicans should shock everyone, including themselves, by pushing for immigration reform—now. Don’t wait for the president, do it yourselves, come forward individually or in groups with the argument for legalization of who lives here now. Such bills should include border control and pathways for citizenship, but—and most important—they shouldn’t seem punitive or grudging and involve fines and lines and new ways to sue employers. The world has changed. Ease up now. In the past 10 years immigrants, legal and illegal, have fought our wars. We need to hurry in those who are trying to bring gifts we need into the USA. Whoever comes here learns to love our crazy country, or at least appreciate it. If we do a better job of teaching them why the goodness we have even exists, we will do OK.

Let’s hope.

Link roundup: December 12, 2012

Some links that may be worth reading are below. Note that linking is not the same as endorsing. I have some thoughts on each of these, but those are for another time.

Some absurdities of immigration policy

One oft-overlooked point about immigration policy is just how absurd and arbitrary it is, in any country you can name. One of the best prima facie arguments against the policy status quo is that it literally does not make sense: it is internally inconsistent, opaque, impossible to make sense of. A couple stories I have rounded up from friends (the VDARE link is courtesy co-blogger Vipul):

Co-blogger Nathan has dug up data suggesting that my fellow Malaysians are the most restrictionist people in the world. The absurdity here is both in public policy and public sentiment: 10% of Malaysia’s population (3 out of about 30 million) are immigrants and depending on how you slice it, 40 to 95% of Malaysians are descended from immigrants. The norm for middle-class Malaysians is to send their children for overseas education, and to encourage them to stay on and work for a time — if not indefinitely. Most of my friends from grade school (I attended public schools in a middle-class suburb of Kuala Lumpur) are currently studying or working in a Western country. When I went home last month for vacation, immigrants were everywhere, in every service job I encountered. The only complaints I heard about immigrants from any actual people was that government policy isn’t generous enough to high-skilled immigrants (the absurdity being that it is easier to hire a restaurant waiter from India than a college graduate from Italy).

Telling an absurd immigration story is like shooting fish in a barrel. One hot off the presses: a US government programme (“Secure Communities”) aimed at deporting illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds is now “optional” in California because a review found that 28% of the deportation victims in California actually aren’t criminals. So much for President Obama’s supposed amnesties (in the first place, this supposedly generous president has deported immigrants at a faster rate than any other president in history).

Finally, here’s the picture which Buzzfeed ranked 26 on its 45 most powerful images of the year:

I can’t even begin to start with the absurdities here:

  • The man and his family are Rohingya from Myanmar; he is begging the Bangladeshi Coast Guard officer to not deport them back to Myanmar, where he and his family are presumably fleeing recent “anti-immigrant” sentiment against the Rohingya, who the Burmese accuse of being “illegals” from Bangladesh
  • This man and his family are being treated like common criminals — clearly, their behaviour here screams “I am a selfish sociopath who hates the law” — and are literally on their knees, begging for mercy from the law for daring to get on a boat and go somewhere
  • In theory, international law ought to protect refugees like the Rohingya — in practice, good luck with that
  • If this family were fleeing crushing poverty or a natural disaster instead of persecution, even in theory international law doesn’t give a damn
  • Let’s not even talk about Bangladeshi or Burmese law — and who can blame these countries, when even most “civilised”, developed countries don’t give two hoots about most refugees?

Literally millions of Pakistani immigrants have risked being shot to death by border guards to get into Iran. The moral case for open borders (a concept no less crazy than free trade, and much more intuitively appealing to human moral sensibilities) demands the governments of the world explain themselves. I’ve used this quote from US Senator Marco Rubio before, but to me it sums up the case for open borders so well, I can’t help using it again:

If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here.

I certainly understand the pragmatic (and, I agree, almost just as intuitive) case for immigration restrictions in theory. But those making the restrictionist case need to face up to the exacting human cost of any immigration restrictions they propose. And more than that, there is incredible certainty about the human suffering immigration restrictions impose, but incredible uncertainty about the benefits they yield. Who is to say what the exact benefit of shooting one Pakistani in the head is to Iranians?

At the company I work for, various business programmes need to be reviewed and recertified annually by leadership, in order to ensure they are still serving their originally-intended purpose and are still desirable projects. The heritage of immigration restrictions is rooted in prejudice, bigotry, and racism, and they have rarely been audited or reviewed since — except on a piecemeal basis, where the human harm has been explicitly discounted, and the supposed benefits not explicitly considered beyond the vaguest terms (for instance, it is often declared that the goal of immigration policy is to reduce immigration — but with little actual valuation of different restrictive policy options).

The absurdity of the immigration status quo is I think morally indefensible and intellectually very unsettling. I would, with little hesitation, pronounce the immigration policies of most of the world unsound and morally wrong. I recognise it is impractical to do much about them in the short term, and I don’t know if I would recommend “no borders” as a superior option to be implemented tomorrow (if this were even feasible). But I don’t need to have a recommendation to know that closed borders are illogical and just plain wrong.

“I couldn’t accept that aging rulers simply decreed: “‘You can’t leave the country; you have to stay home in the small cage!'”

Der Spiegel has an interesting story on how one East German couple plotted to emigrate “legally” to West Germany. It’s an interesting read, and it calls to mind one of the most fundamental moral arguments for open borders:

“I wanted to live, I wanted to discover the world,” says Jens. “I couldn’t accept that aging rulers simply decreed: “‘You can’t leave the country; you have to stay home in the small cage!'”

Today, Jens writes independent biological assessments on nature conservation projects. He hasn’t seen Marion for 20 years. But he has cherished the memories of their forbidden journey, along with photos taken at the time. It was his children who started to ask him what happened back then. “If you want something, pursue it with all your heart,” he tells them.

It takes a special kind of person to believe that 9,000 kilometers is not too far to travel to go from East to West Berlin. Perhaps this is the kind of thing you can only come up with if you’re 24 years old and in love; if you can put up with not knowing in the morning where you will sleep that night; if the end of the forbidden journey is open; and if you see the dangers along the way as the challenge of a lifetime. And if you seize your freedom, instead of asking for it.

Indeed. Jens’s story resonates with us, and rightly so: every human being identifies with questing for freedom. Seeking one’s fortune is an ancient story-telling trope. Who are the people today simply decreeing “You can’t leave the country; you have to stay home in the small cage”? East Germany no longer exists, but the modern closed borders-regime is barely one step more progressive than East Germany’s.

Chilecon Valley

Post by Nathan Smith (regular blogger for the site, joined April 2012). See:

From The Economist:

THE world’s most valuable resource is talent. No country grows enough of it. Some, however, enjoy the colossal advantage of being able to import it. Rich, peaceful countries can attract clever immigrants. Unlike other useful imports, they cost the recipient country nothing. They come, they study, they work, they set up businesses, they create jobs: 40% of the founders of Fortune 500 companies are immigrants and their children. Yet they are only 23% of Americans.

Yet for more than a decade America has been choking off its supply of foreign talent, like a scuba diver squeezing his own breathing tube…

Canada, Australia and Singapore make it quick and painless for brainy foreigners to obtain visas to work or set up companies. Even Chile is luring some of the talent that America rejects. A remote emerging market with little tradition of innovation might seem an unlikely place to try to build a technology hub. But Start-Up Chile, a local programme to encourage entrepreneurs, is doing rather well, as our Silicon Valley correspondent reports from Santiago (see article). An entrepreneur with a good idea can get a visa in a couple of weeks. Since 2010, when Start-Up Chile began, it has attracted some 500 companies run by whizz-kids from 37 countries. Many of those who flock to Chilecon Valley, as it has been dubbed, would rather have gone to America, but couldn’t face a decade of immigration humiliation.

Chile or California?

Santiago is hardly a paradise for entrepreneurs. Chile’s domestic market is small, its bankruptcy law punitive. Private venture capital is still rare and credit costly. In a sad irony, Chilean bureaucrats are trying to shut down a low-interest lending market set up by the founder of Start-Up Chile. And although the programme to attract foreign entrepreneurs is promising, other government initiatives in that area—such as offering $40,000 grants to start-ups—are less sensible.

Still, the main lesson from Chilecon Valley is that clever people have choices.

Here’s hoping the idea spreads.