Tag Archives: United States

The Tanton memo and restrictionism among US Republicans

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A few months ago, I blegged for readers’ views on the relation between immigration and US politics. Here’s what I wrote:

Logically, I can make out four broad positions one can stake on immigration and US politics. I’m curious to hear from readers and co-bloggers about the relative merits of the positions:

  1. Immigration good for Democrats, bad for Republicans regardless of either party’s position on immigration. In other words, even if the Republicans took a pro-immigration stance, more immigration would still hurt them. The electing a new people argument offered by Peter Brimelow of VDARE has this structure. Mark Krikorian of CIS also makes similar arguments. This argument naturally appeals to:
    • Those trying to sell restrictionism to the Republican Party.
    • Those trying to sell pro-immigration policies to the Democratic Party.
  2. Immigration good for Republicans, bad for Democrats regardless of either party’s position on immigration. I don’t know anybody who has taken this position, but I’m adding it for logical completeness. This argument naturally appeals to:
    • Those trying to sell pro-immigration policies to the Republican Party.
    • Those trying to sell restrictionism to the Democratic Party.
  3. Immigration good for whichever party adopts a more pro-immigration stance: In this view, both parties need to compete to be more pro-immigration, and whichever party manages to be more pro-immigration will benefit more from immigration. This seems to be the view of many open borders advocates and other pro-immigration forces, such as my co-blogger Nathan here and here. This argument naturally appeals to pro-immigration forces trying to simultaneously make inroads into both parties, setting up a “race to open borders” between both parties.
  4. Immigration bad for whichever party adopts a more pro-immigration stance: In this view, both parties gain from adopting a more restrictionist stance. Restrictionists who are trying to make a broad-based appeal to both parties would find this argument appealing. In this view, the vote of people with restrictionist sympathies matters a lot more than the votes of potential immigrants and their apologists. Thus, whichever party adopts a more pro-immigration stance will lose a lot more in terms of restrictionist votes, even if they gain a few immigrant votes. Such an argument, if believed, would lead to a “race to closed borders” between both parties. Some restrictionists have made these types of arguments, though they’ve largely focused on (1).

The general consensus in the comments, which saw a fair bit of participation from people who are not Open Borders bloggers and have a somewhat critical/skeptical take on open borders, was in favor of point (1). Namely, immigration is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans, and this holds mostly regardless of the parties’ respective stances on immigration. In other words, if the Republicans adopt a more pro-immigration stance, they will see some gains among immigrants, but still won’t get a majority of the immigrant vote, and the overall increase in immigrant numbers would swamp the slight increase in immigrant share (basically, a small increase in the share within the immigrant vote could be overridden by a greater increase in the immigrant vote share relative to the total vote — this is the electing a new people argument).

Nathan in particular dissented from this view. He suggested that there may be more of a case for (3) in the somewhat longer run, i.e., either party could gain from immigrant votes by marketing itself well. This would of course be ideal from the open borders perspective, as I noted above. In this post, I discuss a memo sent out by John Tanton and the extent to which it sheds light on the discussion above.

The Tanton Memo

The Cafe Con Leche Republicans website’s self-description reads: “We are Republicans who think the GOP should be more welcoming to immigrants.” The site recently published a memo by John Tanton (here’s the PDF of the memo) from 2001. For those unfamiliar with John Tanton, he is an anti-immigration activist who played an important role in helping found leading US restrictionist groups such as CIS, FAIR, and NumbersUSA. Many people on the pro-immigration side view Tanton as a mastermind responsible for much of the success of restrictionism in the United States. I suspect that people have a tendency to overplay Tanton’s role (just as critics of libertarianism overplay the influence of the Koch brothers) but his contribution to the human condition (positive or negative, depending on your perspective) is far more than that of most people. I quote the memo in full below (emphasis mine):

Roy Beck [referencing Roy Beck, CEO of NumbersUSA] and I think we have come up with an idea that can actually move the battle lines on the immigration question in our favor. While we are working on other ideas to move Democrats, this one involves using the recently released census data to show Republican members of Congress, the Administration, and the party’s leadership how massive immigration imperils their political future. The goal is to change Republicans’ perception of immigration so that when they encounter the word “immigrant,” their reaction is “Democrat.”

Here’s what the Census Bureau tells us: There are 28.4 million foreign-born persons living in the U.S. (This was before the Census Bureau recently added another 5 millionto their totals, probably mostly more illegals.) The Center for Immigration Studies breaks the numbers down this way. Of the 28.4 million, 5.5 million are illegals, and 500,000 are here on temporary visas, like the HI-9. Of the 22.4 remaining, 10.6 are already citizens. That leaves approximately 12 million legal non-citizens, about 8 million of whom, having lived here the required five years, could be naturalized. The other 4 million are still in the waiting period. And, of course, we’re adding about 1 million or more to the queue each year.

We know about the heavy tilt of recent immigrants toward the Democratic Party, both from polling booth exit surveys, and from regular surveys like the Harris Poll, enclosed as Item 1. These folks vote at least 2 to 1 for Democrats, and even up to 9 to 1 – see The Boston Globe article (Item 2). Mr. Bush got 35% of the Hispanic vote overall; i.e., Mr. Gore got about 65% – a landslide. I could send many similar articles, but will stop with a U.S. News & World Report (Item 3) confirming the saliency of this view.

Our plan is to hire a lobbyist who will carry the following message to Republicans on Capitol Hill and to business leaders: Continued massive immigration will soon cost you political control of the White House and Congress, given the current, even division of the electorate, and the massive infusion of voters about to be made to the Democratic side. We are about to replay the Democratic hegemony of 1933-53, fueled back then by the massive immigration of 1890-1924.

We have a candidate for the lobbying work in James Edwards, a former staffer for a member of the House Immigration Subcommittee, recently a lobbyist with a trade association, and the co-author of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform. He has just joined an independent lobbying firm. He’s solidly in our camp, is very well connected in Republican circles, and is willing and able to take on this assignment. We would like to hire him half-time for a year to give this a try. Our budget for this project is $1 00,000. Mr. Edwards would pay his expenses out of his hourly fee of $1 00.00.

May we have your frank opinion of this idea? If you think it plausible, would you be willing to help support it financially?

Implications of the memo

The memo, if legitimate, suggests that Tanton sought funding to promote the position which I label as (1) in my list: immigration good for Democrats, bad for Republicans. The points I make below assume the authenticity of the memo.

  • This memo certainly indicates a definitive strategy on the part of John Tanton and others in restrictionist circles to appeal to Republicans’ political concerns.
  • Tanton wasn’t the first restrictionist to make this sort of argument. Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE, in which Tanton hasn’t played an important founding or ongoing role, made the electing a new people argument in the pages of National Review back in 1997 (four years before the Tanton memo).
  • Judging by the mostly consistent stance that restrictionist groups have taken in support of this position over the last few years, this strategy seems to have been selected for, though Tanton’s role as an individual in selecting this strategy for all restrictionist groups is questionable.
  • Of course, just because restrictionists chose to focus their resources on the argument doesn’t mean that it is false (unlike what Cafe Con Leche Republicans seems to suggest). In contrast, the reason they selected that argument is possibly because of its element of plausibility and truth. The ideal position from the restrictionist perspective, after all, isn’t (1) but position (4) on my list: Immigration bad for whichever party adopts a more pro-immigration stance. That Tanton and other restrictionists chose to adopt (1) instead of (4) reveals that they were constrained in their narrative by the facts. More in the next point.
  • This and related evidence make it reasonably clear that restrictionists are restrictionists first and foremost, and their political party loyalties, if any, are secondary. Their choice to align with the Republican Party is a strategic choice based on a belief that they can convince the Republican Party more easily about the synergy between restrictionism and the Republican Party, not out of a principled loyalty to the Republican Party. Specific restrictionists may well be Republicans, but others may well feel more at home with the Democratic Party. Even in the memo, Tanton says in the very first para that he will be searching for parallel strategies to woo Democrats. For this reason, Republicans would be well advised, from the perspective of electoral success, to view restrictionists with a good deal of skepticism when restrictionists claim to have Republicans’ best interests at heart. It may so happen that on a particular issue, the restrictionist position coincides with what is electorally favorable to Republicans. But restrictionists have an incentive to exaggerate their case.
  • I don’t think that restrictionists are overall wrong in terms of their very basic numbers (I’m excluding restrictionists such as Ann Coulter for the purpose of this statement). Where I think Republicans may go wrong (from their own electoral success perspective) is in taking restrictionists sufficiently seriously that they don’t consider the possible gains from new, somewhat untested, pro-immigration configurations.

My co-blogger John Lee has argued (here and here) that Republicans may well benefit electorally from smartly chosen pro-migration and pro-migrant strategies, though he is fairly qualified and cautious in selling his case (for instance, John rejects the view that immigrants are likely to become majority Republican, at least in the near future). While I think John makes a fairly good case, a Republican strategist whose job is to provide Republican candidates advice to win elections would surely be advised to account for the possibility of bias in John’ assessment. Insofar as the discussion above suggests that the “immigration good for Democrats, bad for Republicans” meme was deliberately selected and exaggerated by people who are restrictionists first and Republicans second (if at all), similar caution is advised for Republican strategists listening to restrictionists.

CBO Dynamically Scores Immigration Bill

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This post was originally published on the Cato-at-Liberty blog here and is republished with the permission of the author.

The Congressional Budget Office has fiscally scored the Senate’s immigration bill, S. 744, and found that it will decrease fiscal deficits over the next 20 years—giving a huge boost to reform proponents.  In line with criticisms made by me and others, the CBO departed from orthodoxy and assumed that S. 744 would affect economic growth (i.e., they dynamically scored the bill)—arguing that the economic and fiscal gains from immigration reform are clear.  These findings are broadly consistent with Cato’s findings here.

The CBO produced two scores of S. 744.  The first was less dynamic, assuming that GDP and the workforce would grow as a result of immigration. Increased numbers of workers will add to GDP, producing growth by definition, and not displacing many other workers.  The second score is more dynamic, taking into account many of the economic effects of immigration reform using an enhanced Solow model.

The less-dynamic CBO score found that immigration reform will reduce the federal deficit by about $197 billion by increased GDP and tax revenues through adding six million people to the workforce by 2023.  Over a period of 20 years, the CBO estimated that this legislation would reduce deficits by about $700 billion—a sizeable decrease.  In what seems to be a specific dig at the 50-year span of the recent Heritage study, the CBO wrote that, “we cannot determine whether enactment of S. 744 would lead to an increase in on-budget deficits … in any of the three 10-year periods starting in 2033.”

The more dynamic CBO score found that S. 744 would not affect the budget by 2023.  However, because the dynamic economic effects of S. 744 would affect the economy slowly, the CBO predicts a $300 billion decrease in deficits from 2023-2033 greater that the $700 billion reported in the less-dynamic score.

The more-dynamic CBO model predicts $1.197 trillion in reduced deficits over the next 20 years if immigration reform is passed.

Delving into the details of the CBO’s more-dynamic score, they estimated that S. 744 would increase GDP by 3.3 percent in 2023 and 5.4 percent in 2033, relative to the baseline.  Per capita GNP would lower by .7 percent by 2023 but be higher by .2 percent in 2033.  Wages would be .5 percent higher in 2033 under S. 744.

The more-dynamic score takes into account these effects from S. 744:

  1. Increased size and employment in the economy.
  2. Increased average wages after 2025.
  3. Slightly increased unemployment rate through 2020.
  4. Increased quantity of capital investment.
  5. Increased productivity of labor (due to complementary task specialization).
  6. Increased productivity of capital (due to increase in supply of labor and TFP).
  7. Higher interest rates.

The CBO took account of some of the main findings in the economic literature about the economic effects of immigration.  For example, the CBO predicts there will be a 12 percent increase in the wages of legalized immigrants.

Conceptually, dynamically scoring legislation is a big step toward rationally judging the costs and benefits of policy changes.  Legislation that changes the size of the economy or the pace of economic growth will affect future tax revenues that will, in turn, affect the fiscal state of the federal government.  CBO scores have been inaccurate over time—many wildly so.  They should never be the final word on the estimated net fiscal costs of immigration reform, but this is the most thorough examination to date. The CBO’s findings broadly confirm Cato’s research that immigration reform will be economically beneficial to immigrants and the country as a whole.

Why I Am Not An American

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Aaron Swartz, taken from us too soon, wrote a piece that really spoke to me. As someone who wishes for equality yet avoids labels (especially on myself), I felt this piece captured my thoughts exactly. It also inspired me (with a small nudge from a good friend) to write a similar piece on the subject of immigration.

Until relatively recently, most travel in the world was limited by actual, physical factors. The incredible time it took to make long journeys was also fraught with danger and expense. Months of travel could be required to go even a short distance; and with those months came the price of equipping and feeding the travelers. Ships sank, horses died, and (if video games played in middle school taught me anything) lots of people died of dysentery. Despite these difficulties, people DID travel, to all corners of the Earth. However, while these intrepid travelers of yore overcame rivers and oceans, mountains and deserts, they rarely had to contend with a group of soldiers keen on preventing them from moving around.

People have, throughout the ages, had all sorts of “identities” based on all sorts of criteria. People have identified themselves with clans and families, with religions and ethnicities, with movements and beliefs, even with diets and movie franchises. The phrase “I am a…” is ubiquitous today. How many times do you hear someone say “I practice a vegetarian diet?” or “I ascribe to the Catholic belief structure?” Rarely, if ever. People define themselves by these groups – it’s not just an action or a belief, but a group to belong to. Maslow in action. People ARE Catholics or Vegetarians or Trekkies or what have you. But the modern age has given us a new identity as well: Nationality.

Nationality is often aligned with ethnicity, but certainly not always. It’s become vogue to identify with your nationality, though Nationality has some major differences with other identity groups. For one, Nationality is entirely an accident as far as you’re concerned. Maybe your parents were wealthy and savvy enough to make a conscious choice to have you in the country they did, but chances are good it was just where they happened to be. Unless you happen to be a naturalized immigrant, then you didn’t join this club, and nothing you could do (or fail to do) would make its leaders kick you out.  In fact, you’d have to try really hard to leave voluntarily – which would make you think that the club really hungered for members.  Yet most importantly, unlike nearly all other clubs, this one actively tries to prevent others from joining. Different factions within the club want to make it harder than others – and some want to make it downright impossible – but few want to launch a massive recruitment campaign.

A major goal of the Catholic club as a whole is to convert others into it. A major goal of Vegetarians is to convince other people that they should also be Vegetarians. While some elitism is natural among many groups, it’s mostly directed at those who have tried and failed to get in, or those who never tried at all. Members of one religion or belief structure or whatever kind of group might think they’re better than outsiders, but they don’t usually try to prevent outsiders from joining. Most clubs follow the pattern of setting criteria for membership and then letting the chips fall. Catholics have to follow Catholic doctrine, Vegetarians have to avoid meat, and Trekkies have to occasionally dress up like a Starfleet Officer. But Americans? The only criteria for default entry are that you were born in America or to Americans – and that’s that.

While people can pose all of the arguments they want in terms of whether borders should be open, closed, or somewhere in between, does it make sense to have Nationality as an identity? Imagine if the only way you could be a Catholic was if your parents were Catholics, but if that were true, you didn’t have to do anything else. You didn’t have to obey any rules, you didn’t have to attend church, you didn’t have to even believe in the teachings – yet you got all the benefits of a vast social support network and prime seating in the afterlife. Would it make sense to take pride in that identity anymore? Would it be just and right to make laws benefiting only those people, and harming all others?

Of course, in the real world, many people DO identify with groups that are nothing more than accidents of birth. People take pride in their ethnic cultures. Sometimes it makes sense, too – if you appreciate a particular kind of behavior associated with that ethnic culture. I like being an Italian – but to me, that means I value good wine, family loyalty, and minding your own business. If I knew nothing of the actual culture of Italians, I would think it silly to be proud of being one. However, I’ve also made plenty of my friends over the years “honorary Italians” if they ALSO loved good wine, were good to their mothers, and knew when to keep their mouths shut. In short, I turned my ethnic identity into a voluntary club.

When most people say “I’m proud to be an American,” they don’t mean that they’re proud of having been born between a certain latitude and longitude. They mean they’re proud of a certain set of characteristics. I could even imagine a subset of those characteristics that I would guess few Americans would disagree with: Bravery, hard work, the willingness to sacrifice for others, and perseverance. Those are all spectacular qualities – but Americans don’t have a monopoly on them.

In fact, those sound EXACTLY like the set of qualities it would take to leave your homeland, taking impressive risks for the sake of a better life for you and your family, and put in the effort to overcome the grueling task of making a life for yourself in a new land.

So that’s why I’m not an American. I don’t identify with the cowardly, the lazy, the selfish and the quitters – even if they were born inside the same arbitrary lines I was. But I do identify with, sympathize with, and long to help the brave, the diligent, the selfless and the driven – wherever they were born, and wherever they’re going.

The “Health Tolls” of Immigration (And Why They Don’t Matter All that Much)

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Post by Evan (occasional blogger for the site, joined June 2013). See:

Sabrina Tavernise’s  recent New York Times article on the “health tolls of immigration” doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong pro or anti-immigration agenda.  If anything it’s more along the lines of one of the “obesity epidemic” polemics which condemn western lifestyles for promoting chubbiness and poor health.  To get the best men’s health advice, click on the link here. Still, it does make some statements about the wellbeing of immigrant populations which it is worthwhile to address.

The main argument of the article is that, in their native countries, immigrants often develop eating habits that are more conducive to good health than the eating habits of the average American.  They typically develop these habits out of necessity rather than desire, they simply cannot afford the large helpings of calorically dense food that Americans regularly enjoy.  When they arrive in America, the article argues, they often lose these habits, and their children often do not develop them at all.  The main statistical support the article uses is a series of studies finding that immigrants have longer lifespans, and lower rates of certain health problems, than demographically similar American-born people. (The studies also mention a factor the article downplays, the simple fact that immigrants tend to self-select for health, since they usually need to by healthy enough to work in order to stay in the country, while their children may regress to the mean).

While any reduction in lifespan is obviously bad, it is not a particularly good argument against increased immigration, due to a number of factors.  The first, and most obvious one is that a small reduction in the quantity of one’s life may be easily made up for in the increase of one’s quality of life.  Even if immigration results in a greater amount of obesity-related health problems for the migrants and their descendants, the greater standard of living they will enjoy due to increased opportunities will likely more than make up for this.

To further put this in perspective, imagine an American politician proposed a program of economic contraction as a solution to the “obesity epidemic.”  Imagine this politician advocated a program where the government would actively destroy high-paying jobs and replace them with jobs so low-paying and menial that those who held them simply could not afford enough food to become obese.  Such a politician would be ejected from office by outraged voters.  This is because, as most people understand, a high standard of living is well worth a certain amounts of health problems.

It is also important to note that the studies compare the lifespans of immigrants to the lifespans of the native-born people of the same ethnicity.  A very different picture emerges when the lifespans of people in the immigrant’s originating country are introduced into the comparison (this is similar to a point that co-blogger Chris made in a previous blog post).  According to Singh and Miller (2004), one of the studies cited by the article, the average life expectancy (at birth) of a Hispanic immigrant from 1986-1994 was 77.1 years for men and 84.1 years for women.  The average life-expectancy of an American-born Hispanic was 72.8 years for men and 81.1 years for women.  This seems bad, until one considers that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1990 the average lifespan for a Mexican man was 68 years, and the lifespan for a Mexican woman was 74 years.  The other Latin American countries were mostly similar, many even had shorter average lifespans than Mexico did.  In 1990 the only Latin American country that beat the USA in even one category was Costa Rica, Costa Rican men lived 75 years on average in 1990 (Costa Rican women, however, only lived 79).

The picture is similar in non-Hispanic countries.  Singh and Miller have American-born Chinese lifespans  from 1986-1994 at 81.6 years for men and 87.1 for women.  By contrast, the average lifespan for a Chinese citizen in 1990 was, according to WHO, 67 years for men and 71 years for women.  And then there is the mortality rate of many African countries, many of which have average lifespans well under 60, or even under 50.   US-born African Americans, who average 64 years for men and 75.5 years for women, seem like Galapagos tortoises by comparison.

The simple fact is, if the inhabitants of a third world country wants to maximize their lifespan, and the lifespan of any children they might have, emigration to the United States still seems like a great bet.  Even if their children don’t live quite as long as their parents, they will still live longer than the children the parents would have had in their native country.  And they will be spending those longer lives enjoying more wealth than their hypothetical siblings in their parent’s native lands would have.  Any increase in health problems the American lifestyle creates are far outweighed by its many benefits.

The Simplicity and Fairness of Open Borders

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“It is not up to the British state to decide where people should or should not live, or anyone else but migrants and refugees themselves. We support the unfettered right of entry of the feckless, the unemployable and the uncultured.” This quote comes from the 2003 Manifesto of the No One Is Illegal (United Kingdom) organization and is a favorite of mine in the literature supporting open borders.  These sentences appear in a paragraph opposing having to justify the immigration of people based on their contributions to the receiving country, but their appeal is that they communicate that borders should be open to everybody, with rare exceptions such as when an individual immigrant is determined to be likely to commit terrorism in the receiving country.  A policy which allows everybody to enter, stay, and work in a second country regardless of their occupational skills, their family or employment connections in the receiving country, their country of origin, or other factors, is both simple and fair.

The opposite exists under the current restrictionist immigration policy of the U.S., which is anything but simple or fair.  Kevin Johnson of the University of California, Davis notes its complexity: “By many accounts, only the much-maligned Internal Revenue Code rivals the intricate, lengthy, and frequently obtuse Immigration & Nationality Act of 1952, which is the centerpiece of modern American immigration law…  The areas of complexity of the U.S. immigration laws are too numerous to review here in detail. The labor certification process for certain employment visas is one of those areas. The myriad of exclusions, criminal removal provisions (and removal grounds generally), judicial review provisions, and many other rules also are incredibly complex, cumbersome, ambiguous, and obtuse. As a result of their complexity and ambiguity, the U.S immigration laws create much work for immigration attorneys…” (The complex laws also keep government lawyers, officials, and judges busy.  There are over two hundred immigration judges, who are employed by the Department of Justice and not part of the judiciary, applying the law to cases.  Federal judges all the way up to the Supreme Court also rule on matters of immigration law.)

Consider the intricacies of the immigration laws concerning marriage, a flashpoint in the current debate over the immigration bill proposed in the Senate.  U.S. citizens and permanent residents can sponsor foreign born spouses to become permanent residents.  But what about same sex couples?  Current law does not allow this, and efforts to change the law to include the sponsorship of immigrants who have a same sex citizen or permanent resident partner face significant opposition in the Senate.  It is also not necessarily a simple legal path for heterosexual spouses, especially if there have been prior violations of immigration laws. Even without prior violations, what about situations in which married couples are separated? (Answer: it depends on the type of separation.)  Another aspect is that the government tries to determine whether a marriage is based on love or is really only a means of gaining legal status for one of the spouses.  In New York, a unit of 22 immigration officers is devoted to examining marriages, based on which immigration applications are filed, for fraud.

Consider the complexity of laws concerning asylum.  To obtain asylum, “an individual must prove that he is unable or unwilling to go back to his home country ‘because of persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.’” Legal decisions distinguish between prosecution, when the individual is subjected to “fairly administered laws” that are applied to all citizens of that country, and persecution.  In one case an Iranian national sought political asylum for, among other things, distributing movies and concert videos made in the Western Hemisphere. His request for asylum was denied, even though he faced a two-year prison sentence and 19 lashes under Islamic law if he returned to Iran. A federal court of appeals held that, standing alone, asylum seeker’s prosecution for distributing movies and videos was not persecution, but prosecution “for an act deemed criminal in Iranian society, which is made applicable to all people in that country.”  Also, how persecution is defined determines case outcomes.  “Generally, harassment and discrimination will not constitute persecution. Persecution is regarded as an extreme concept that differs from general discrimination against minority groups.” In a 2011 opinion by the a federal court of appeals, Richard Posner, one of the judges, identified “three forms of oppressive behavior toward a group despised by the government or by powerful groups that the government can’t or won’t control. The three forms are discrimination, harassment, and persecution. The first refers to unequal treatment, and is illustrated historically by India’s caste system and the Jim Crow laws in the southern U.S. states. Discrimination normally does not involve the application of physical force, except as punishment for violation of the discriminatory laws.  Harassment involves targeting members of a specified group for adverse treatment, but without the application of significant physical force. Had Lions furious at Naumov’s being soft on Albanians followed his taxi (he was a taxicab driver in Macedonia) and ticketed him whenever he exceeded the speed limit by one mile per hour, that would be an example of harassment… Persecution involves, we suggest, the use of significant physical force against a person’s body, or the infliction of comparable physical harm without direct application of force (locking a person in a cell and starving him would be an example), or nonphysical harm of equal gravity…” Additionally, sometimes how the five grounds on which persecution can be based (race, religion, etc.) are applied to asylum cases determines how they are decided.

The issue of fairness arises for almost every aspect of the American restrictionist system.  For asylum cases, problems of fairness have abounded, and historically politics appears to have intruded on decisions.  During the Cold War, asylum seekers from the Soviet Union were favored over those from non-Communist countries like  El Salvador, Haiti, and Guatemala, according to Bill Frelick and Court Robinson (International Journal of Refugee Law, Vol. 2, 1990). The U.S. has had a much more restrictive policy towards Haitians seeking asylum compared to Cubans.  Furthermore, Stephen Legomsky notes that research “has brought home the extraordinary extent to which the outcome of an asylum claim hinges on the particular adjudicators who are assigned the case.”

Beyond asylum cases, here are a few examples.  There is the unfairness of the administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). There is the fact that lower skilled workers are allotted very few permanent residence visas compared to more highly skilled individuals.  Same sex spouses are excluded from sponsoring a spouse for permanent residence.

At the same time, complete fairness would not be achieved even if same sex couples were allowed to sponsor a spouse, if there were equal numbers of visas for unskilled workers as for skilled  workers, if the deferred action program protected more people from deportation, or if other modifications were made to the restrictionist system.  Some people would still be barred from immigrating.  As the No One Is Illegal Manifesto observes:  “…what about the single gay person, the celibate, the lonely, those of no sexual orientation or the promiscuous of any sexual orientation? Including gay couples within immigration law and its spurious ‘rights’ means that all these other people are by definition excluded… The way forward is to fight for the rights of all gay women and men along with everyone else to be able to come and remain irrespective of personal circumstances or relationships. The only equal opportunities immigration controls are no immigration controls.”

So aside from improving the lives of massive numbers of people and being morally preferable to having immigration restrictions, an open borders policy offers the advantages of simplicity and fairness.  Resources currently devoted to navigating complex immigration laws or attempting to make the laws fairer could be devoted to more productive uses under an open borders policy.