Tag Archives: open borders advocacy

Framing immigration and the sip taste test fallacy

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I’ve been reading through the memos on immigration that have been put out by the Frameworks Institute, which describes itself as “changing the public conversation about social problems” and, from what I can make out, takes broadly progressive positions on various issues (or rather, offers framing advice geared towards progressive causes). (Thanks to Alex Nowrasteh for sending me the link for these memos). These memos were also briefly referenced in Fabio Rojas’s post open borders: what to do about it (part 2). The memos are targeted mostly to a US audience.

Let me begin by pointing out what parts of these memos I find intuitively plausible. First, I think that they’re largely on target with respect to their key suggestions to pro-immigration advocates: put emphasis on prosperity, opportunity, and fairness, don’t activate zero sum thinking, and avoid blaming people or calling them bad names. There are also suggestions — somewhat morally dubious but probably strategically valid — to tailor the message based on the race and ethnicity of the people receiving the message. When talking to whites, for instance, the memo recommends the value of “Fairness between Places.” When talking to blacks, it recommends the value of “Fairness between Groups.” When talking to Latinos, it recommends emphasis on the “value of opportunity.” The morality of offering different messages to different audiences seems questionable to me, but I don’t doubt the research they highlight to show that different framings appeal differently to different racial and ethnic groups on average.

The part where I’m not on board with the Frameworks Institute, however, is when it comes to their Don’t list. For instance, they suggest:

  • Don’t talk about immigration as a legal issue, or mention illegal immigrants.
  • Don’t evoke the Crisis frame by talking about how widely and deeply broken the immigration system is.
  • Don’t talk about securing borders or preventing problems.
  • Don’t begin the conversation by focusing on good immigrants, because that brings to mind all the bad immigrants.

I’m quite skeptical of all these suggestions. The way the Frameworks Institute comes up with these suggestions is by doing controlled experiments — expose people to different framings, see how they respond to each one within the setting. For instance, two people may be presented with otherwise identical paragraphs one of which has a phrase evoking a certain frame, and the other one without that phrase. The audience reactions are then compared.

The problem here, however, is that the research methodology seems to focus on people’s instantaneous responses, rather than their considered responses after reflection. In particular, it doesn’t seem to account for how people would respond after they had time to hear opposing viewpoints. Continue reading Framing immigration and the sip taste test fallacy →

Open borders: what to do about it (part 2)

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This is a guest post by Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Rojas maintains his personal webpage here and is one of the bloggers at the orgtheory.net blog.

This guest post is the second in a three-post series on how one could achieve open borders. The series focuses on public opinion and immigration policy in the United States, but its insights may apply to other nations as well. The first post of the series can be found here.

Open Borders: Changing Public Opinion

Broadly speaking, fundamental policy change, such as creating open borders, is often the result of two forces, public opinion and organized action (“politics”). Open borders will become a reality when the public stops believing that immigrants are a threat and people who take the time to fight anti-immigration policies in the courts, legislatures and even in the street succeed. This essay focuses on one side of the equation – public opinion. Though I believe that all countries should have open borders, my comments are aimed at people in Western nations such as the US because my comments are based on what I’ve learned by studying social movements in relatively open nations. My comments don’t apply to nations that are authoritarian, such as North Korea, or countries that do not have some type of legal and political system that admits challenge. The next instalment will focus on politics, the “how to” of political change.

Framing the Issue

What should open borders advocates say to the public? In general, it is a mistake to offer highly technical arguments. Most people won’t be interested in subtle arguments about migration. Instead, open borders advocates should offer what social psychologists and linguists call a “framing,” a very general concept that allows people to succinctly identify a problem and think about the solution. A successful framing defines the way we see things and what we think is possible. A good framing appeals to some basic moral intuition, not scholarly argument. Scholars who study social change often find that framing among activist is something that often precedes broader change. (See Robert Benford and David Snow’s “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” in the 2000 Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611-639. Available on JSTOR).

Anti-immigration sentiment seems to rely on two frames. Among liberals, there is the “social problems” frame. Immigration is bad because new people require more resources such as jobs and government services. There is also a related view that immigrants will have problems assimilating into American society. They won’t learn the language and they can’t get educated. All these criticisms of immigration appeal to the idea that a nation is like a boat. The boat has only so much space and overcrowding will sink the ship. Immigrants are inherently bad. It’s just that low levels are preferable for technical reasons.

There is also a nativist framing that views immigration as a threat. Immigrants are viewed as outside the native ethnic group. They are impure and not really American. They are of lower moral character and are more likely to require charity and more likely to be criminals. From this perspective, immigration restrictions are needed to preserve native culture and keep out people who will drain resources and be a drag on the rest of society.

It is not clear to me that open borders advocates have articulated a compelling alternate frame, even though I find lengthier academic arguments to be persuasive. For example, many in the immigrant rights community draw attention to the suffering of immigrants. While I agree that immigrants unjustly suffer, this is an ineffective framing of the issue because immigrant rights activists rarely attack the premise that immigration restrictions themselves are unjust. In other words, as long as average Americans think that it is normal to restrict immigration, framings such as “immigrant rights” or “end the suffering” will not be effective.

It is worth mentioning that some writers have thought carefully about framing. The FrameWorks Institute, a group that studies how to make people think differently about policy issues, has issued two papers dealing with framing immigration (available here). Continue reading Open borders: what to do about it (part 2) →

Aviva Chomsky on open borders: weak on economics, stronger on politics and history

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I recently finished reading Aviva Chomsky’s They Take Our Jobs: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration (Amazon ebook). Like co-blogger Vipul, I did not find the book on the whole convincing. Chomsky’s grasp of economics is questionable at best, and her suggestion that poor countries became or remain poor primarily because of oppression from the rich world may be true in some cases, but is likely not a good general principle of development economics. She also unwittingly trivialises the place premium by accepting the mistaken belief that the only thing keeping firms in developed countries from paying their employees developing world salaries are things like minimum wage laws. In spite of this, I would actually recommend Chomsky’s book to the critical reader with an open mind: her grasp of economics may be weak, but her social and political history is on stronger footing — and the political arguments she makes from historical backing are worth considering.

One of the important issues Chomsky raises is the question of suffrage and enfranchisement. She notes that historically in the US, non-citizens have been entitled to vote, and this generally held true until the advent of closed borders in the early 20th century. She does not dive into this in detail, but it’s also noteworthy that this remains true in some countries today. Citizens of the Commonwealth (such as myself, by virtue of my Malaysian citizenship) are entitled to vote and sometimes even stand for elections in the UK and in a number of other Commonwealth countries, provided we meet certain relatively loose residency requirements (I know plenty of Malaysians who voted in the UK simply because they were studying there).

Chomsky argues that immigrants should of right be entitled to the vote, because in a democratic society anyone who enjoys the rights and responsibilities of residence should also enjoy the rights and responsibilities of the ballot. If you are a stakeholder in the policies of your community, it seems foolish to disenfranchise you because you happened to have been born elsewhere. I can see the appeal of this argument, even though it is not one that I would necessarily embrace.

Unlike Chomsky, I don’t place a huge priority on voting rights for immigrants. It seems to me that each society should be entitled to decide who should be able to vote, and it’s up to the US, as well as its individual states and localities, to decide which foreigners, if any, should be entitled to vote. A political right is not a fundamental human right. I accept Chomsky’s argument that we should not arbitrarily tie the vote to citizenship, but it doesn’t seem to me that the disenfranchisement of non-citizens is even close to being the worst thing in the world. It isn’t hard to see why even a liberal-minded person would be skeptical of allowing anyone from anywhere to vote in their jurisdiction (though I suspect most attempts to use immigration policy to address this are trying to tackle the problem with a very blunt instrument).

I do think it is harmful to perpetuate the disenfranchisement of non-citizens who indicate a strong commitment to their adopted society. One can demonstrate this commitment in many ways; military service, lengthy residence, marrying a citizen. It would seem arbitrary and unjust to me to declare that because you happened to be born a non-citizen, you can never aspire to become a citizen. Immigrants should be able to expect greater political rights as they integrate into their adopted societies. But again, though I would place great importance on there being a path to citizenship, it is not the most important thing.

Where I think there is a higher bar, and where societies need to be absolutely transparent in how they decide their rules, is the simple act of immigration. Morally, a society is more or less entitled to decide in any arbitrary way it wants who gets to vote in its elections. But morally, a society is not entitled to decide in any arbitrary way who gets to be with their family, and who doesn’t. It is not entitled to decide in any arbitrary way who gets to seek gainful employment, and who doesn’t. It is free to restrict these rights, but it needs to explain itself when it does so.

The other interesting point which Chomsky brings up is the importance of equal protection under the law for immigrants. A recurring theme is how whether explicitly or implicitly, US law has denied non-citizen workers certain rights which citizen workers take for granted. In many cases, because the immigrant workers are unlawfully present, their employers refuse to pay them the legal minimum wage or offer them other forms of compensation (e.g. safety equipment, etc.) which citizens might expect. Immigrant workers are also often limited in their “exit options” — either they keep working with their current employer, or they go home. This is often true not only of illegal immigrants, but legal ones as well: most US work permits, including the H-1B visa for professionals, link immigrants to specific employers, and have a lengthy process (if there is one at all) for the immigrant to change their employer.

Chomsky and other leftists deplore this as yet another instance of the capitalist class oppressing the weak and needy, but one does not need to be an all-out Marxist to see the injustice in this situation. One very understandable fear many activists have when it comes to keyhole solutions such as guest worker programmes is that by tying immigration status to a specific employer, a country would effectively legalise indentured labour. I think most open borders advocates would agree: we cannot meaningfully call an immigration policy one of “open borders” if it really is “you can cross the border, only as long as you work for this specific employer”. That may be an improvement on the status quo, but that speaks more to the foolishness of the immigration policy status quo than anything else.

The other points Chomsky makes are interesting, but certainly open to question. A major pitfall of the book is that although its primary focus is immigration, a secondary focus seems to be attacking almost any non-leftist political ideology. Chomsky is prone to digress into tangential topics which aren’t totally relevant to the subject at hand, and the connections she draws seem tenuous at best. She is strongest when she discusses the sordid history of immigration law in the US, and explicitly articulates the reason for attacking specific policies; even if I disagree with her, I can understand where she is coming from and why her views are important. For this reason, I would recommend Chomsky’s book to the interested reader, subject to qualifications I’ve discussed here.

Addendum: I am currently reading Teresa Hayter’s Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, which makes arguments similar to Chomsky’s from a left-liberal British standpoint, but with a much tighter focus on immigration — especially on the issue of refugees. I intend to review Hayter’s book as well when I am finished with it.

Milton Friedman and open borders

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I’ve not posted recently because I am on vacation till the end of this week. However, while on my hiatus, I managed to finish Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose. It’s an interesting book from an open borders perspective, since although the Friedmans explicitly cite barriers to immigration as an arbitrary and unjust infringement of liberty, virtually all the book is devoted to other infringements of economic rights which an open borders advocate would likely consider milder, if they considered them infringements at all (since, after all, not every open borders advocate is as much an economic libertarian as the Friedmans were).

The only time immigration really appears as anything other than a brief throwaway topic is in Chapter 5: Created Equal, specifically under the subchapter Equality of Opportunity. The Friedmans say:

Literal equality of opportunity — in the sense of “identity” — is impossible. One child is born blind, another with sight. One child has parents deeply concerned about his welfare who provide a background of culture and understanding; another has dissolute, improvident parents. One child is born in the United States, another in India, or China, or Russia. They clearly do not have identical opportunities open to them at birth, and there is no way that their opportunities can be made identical.

Like personal equality, equality of opportunity is not to be interpreted literally. Its real meaning is perhaps best expressed by the French expression dating from the French Revolution: Une carrière ouverte aux les talents — a career open to the talents. No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from achieving those positions for which their talents fit them and which their values lead them to seek. Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person — only his abilities.

…

In respect of government measures, one major deviation from free markets was in foreign trade, where Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures had enshrined tariff protection for domestic industries as part of the American way. Tariff protection was inconsistent with thoroughgoing equality of opportunity and, indeed, with the free immigration of persons, which was the rule until World War I, except only for Orientals. Yet it could be rationalized both by the needs of national defense and on the very different ground that equality stops at the water’s edge — an illogical rationalization that is adopted also by most of today’s proponents of a very different concept of equality: equality of outcome.

You have literally just finished reading virtually all that Milton and Rose Friedman had to say about the freedom of movement and migration in Free to Choose. It’s obvious that in their framework, immigration restrictions are reprehensible, arbitrary, and inconsistent with both libertarianism and egalitarianism. It would be interesting to compare the Friedmans’ framework of equality of opportunity with similar approaches, such as Amartya Sen’s approach of maximising human capabilities. However, it is still odd why the Friedmans would virtually disregard immigration altogether, except for citing it as a brief example of restrictions on trade. If we value human life more than goods or services, immigration restrictions cannot be treated simply as another version of steel tariffs or automobile quotas.

My hypothesis is the Friedmans did not think immigration or labour mobility unimportant; rather they felt it impractical to pursue the extension of these rights, when there remained other battles to fight — battles more easily won. After all, if you can’t persuade Americans to end trade restrictions or end wage and price controls, in spite of all the evidence that this would actually benefit them, you’re not going to be able to persuade them to end immigration restrictions, where the benefits to natives are even less salient. Monetary policy also strikes me as another issue which a 1970s libertarian (Free to Choose was published in 1979) might justifiably argue superseded immigration in importance, and the Friedmans devote much of their book to this.

Going beyond Free to Choose, it’s also apparent that Milton Friedman believed open borders to be incompatible with the modern welfare state. Obviously he did not consider keyhole solutions or other policy reforms that would be concomitant with any opening of the borders, an odd oversight for a man who was so willing to push the envelope in other areas.

One possible reason for this reticence appears in Chapter 10: The Tide is Turning. Here, the Friedmans argue:

…those of us who want to halt and reverse the recent trend [towards expansion of government] should oppose additional specific measures to expand further the power and scope of government, urge repeal and reform of existing measures, and try to elect legislators and executives who share that view. But that is not an effective way to reverse the growth of government. It is doomed to failure. Each of us would defend our own special privileges and try to limit government at someone else’s expense. We would be fighting a many-headed hydra that would grow new heads faster than we could cut old ones off.

Our founding fathers have shown us a more promising way to proceed: by package deals, as it were. We should adopt self-denying ordinances that limit the objectives we try to pursue through political channels. We should not consider each case on its merits, but lay down broad rules limiting what government may do.

The merit of this approach is well illustrated by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Many specific restrictions on freedom of speech would be approved by a substantial majority of both legislators and voters. A majority would very likely favor preventing Nazis, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Ku Klux Klan, vegetarians, or almost any other little group you might name from speaking on a street corner.

The wisdom of the First Amendment is that it treats these cases as a bundle. It adopts the general principle that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”; no consideration of each case on its merits.

In short, the Friedmans might be skeptical of some keyhole solutions in part because they don’t see this as a sustainable policy in the long run. I think this objection applies particularly well to some keyhole solutions that might be floated from time to time: banning or severely restricting immigration from developing countries, severely limiting immigration or citizenship based on educational attainment, etc. More generalist keyhole solutions, such as a more carefully thought-out visa system that recognises diverse reasons for crossing borders (as opposed to treating all immigrants as either permanent settlers or temporary tourists/students/guest workers), or immigration tariffs, don’t seem quite as susceptible to this objection to me.

The Friedmans go on to propose an “economic bill of rights” that would circumscribe the US government’s ability to regulate the economy. Their proposed language for an amendment pertaining to international trade: “Congress shall not lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws.” This dovetails quite well with my personal ideal for open borders, given political constraints: government should not restrict movement across borders, except insofar as this is administratively necessary (e.g. to prevent an invasion, influx of criminals, influx of contagious disease vectors, etc. — all reasonable policy objectives).

The paucity of attention to immigration from the Friedmans remains puzzling to me, and I think points to just how radical the concept of open borders appears to many people. Even if you explicitly recognise the injustice of arbitrary immigration restrictions, as the Friedmans clearly do, it’s easier to ignore it than to say something about it, because it sucks you down a rabbithole of having to explain why you aren’t a crazy person (though that’s probably something the Friedmans already faced a lot, especially when justifying proposals such as the abolition of welfare or publicly-funded education).

To me, there’s nothing more crazy about open borders than there is about, say, free trade. Advocating free trade does not mean one would allow Mexican drug lords to cart in M16s or Taliban warlords to airdrop AK-47s over the US border. It does not mean one would gladly allow illegal goods such as narcotics or permit the illegal funneling of money, such as via money laundering, out of blind devotion to principle. What open borders advocates (or at least I) want is people who seek a better life, in good faith, to be able to do so as far as it is administratively possible to permit this. The Friedmans would have agreed.

Open borders: what to do about it (part 1)

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This is a guest post by Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Rojas maintains his personal webpage here and is one of the bloggers at the orgtheory.net blog.

This guest post is the first in a three-post series on how one could achieve open borders. The series focuses on public opinion and immigration policy in the United States, but its insights may apply to other nations as well. The second post in the series is now available here.

Vipul has graciously asked me to contribute to the Open Borders website. As an enthusiastic advocate of free immigration, I immediately agreed. There has been some discussion on this site about why open borders are desirable and about what open borders advocates want. My goal in this series of posts is to address the related question: “How do we get there?” What can we do to make open borders a reality? I think that I have some valuable insights because I am a sociologist who studies social change. Sociologists have spent decades thinking about the factors behind social change. There has now been decades of research focusing on issues such as public opinion, policy change, and political mobilization.

A personal note

Before, I get into the question of “how do we get there,” I’d like to take a few moments to discuss “how did I get there?” In other words, why do I believe in free immigration and open borders? As with John Lee, the answer for me is a mix of biography and argument. First, my parents immigrated to the United States in the late 1960s. They were school teachers and came to study at New York University. Eventually, they landed jobs in American schools. Thus, my experience of immigration was fairly positive. By moving to America, my mother was rescued from poverty. My father came from a middle class family and was able to study science at a leading university. I immediately knew that immigration was good. If you were stuck in a bad situation, you could always move. My father used to tell me, “Everyone in the world is a citizen of two countries – the place where you were born and America.” I was grateful to be in America.

As I grew up, I came to realize that not everyone viewed immigration in such positive terms. A lot of people were personally hostile towards immigrants. Many people wished to limit immigration to very low levels. Some people were even violent towards immigrants. This led me to ask, “What was so bad about immigration? What had my parents done that was so horrible, so threatening that they deserved the scorn of others?”

Over time, I realized that there weren’t very good answers to these questions. Immigrants were simply people who wanted better jobs, to be left alone by their government, or simply didn’t like where they were living. These are the same things that motivate people to move within their country, but we have few barriers for migration between cities and states. Is a man who moves from Tijuana to San Diego more of a problem than the man who moves from Oklahoma City to San Diego? This question appeared more absurd when I read my history books in school. Until the early 20th century, America had relatively unrestricted immigration. Millions upon millions came to America. There were contentious arguments about immigration, about how immigrants would undermine this country. Yet, America continued to be a great nation. Surely, immigration was not the threat that it was made out to be.

As an adult, I earned my doctoral degree in sociology and I was more able to assess anti-immigration arguments. There’s little evidence that the mass migration of the 1800s made Americans worse off, or that the influx of immigrants in the 1960s was such a bad thing. Much sociological research shows that the children of most immigrants assimilate very quickly into American society. They speak English, they get jobs, they go to college.

What to do about it

The purpose of this essay is not to comprehensively argue that immigration bans are wrong. There are many other essays on this website that make the case for free immigration. Instead, this essay is aimed at those who are already accept that immigration restrictions are cruel. This essay is for people who believe that building a massive wall for the purpose of preventing someone who crossing the border to work in a restaurant is crazy. This essay is for those who say, “What do we do now?”

I have good news and bad news for these readers. The good news is that I honestly believe that there is an effective and rational path to much freer immigration policy. The bad news is that social change of this sort is usually slow, incremental and difficult. Open borders will not appear simply because an economist has shown that immigrants don’t put people out of work. Rather, social change of this sort happens when there is a concerted effort to change public opinion coupled with an organized attempt to change policy through electoral politics, litigation, and protest. The formula is “public opinion + politics = success.” It’s hard to pull off, but it can be done.

In two more posts, I’ll outline some concrete strategies for change. For now, I’ll describe the way that sociologists tend to think about social change and how that can help us think about undermining anti-immigration sentiment in America. First, a policy, such as immigration restriction, is based on public opinion. Public opinion is what “the people” think about a topic. As a rule of thumb, government policies follow public opinion. Thus, any attempt to create open borders must start with a strategy for making the public more tolerant of immigration.

Second, institutions are a big factor in public policy. Even if a policy is unpopular, someone has to take the time and effort to write a new law, fight for it, and defend it in court. Often, there are people who benefit from bad policies. There are many law enforcement officers, for example, who take pride in border control and whose livelihood depends on the fences that separate people. People with vested interests will often vigorously fight for the status quo. That is why you need political work to end bad policy. You need to lobby public officials, you need to file lawsuits, and you need to protest. Somebody has to work “the system” to make change happen. If you don’t do that, vested interests will win the day. In other words, after you change public opinion, you then have to “do politics.”

Transforming public opinion and building the infrastructure for politics is long, hard work. It is often selfless and unrewarded. However, it is often the only path that may be successful. The next two posts will explain how open borders advocates can build a movement for change. My ideas are drawn from my own reading of research on political change and social movements. The next post will discuss public opinion and how open borders advocates can create the intellectual climate needed for open borders. My last post will discuss the nitty gritty of politics.