Tag Archives: United States

Open Borders and International Migration Policy: Book Summary

December 11, 2015 Joel Fetzer 4 Comments

This blog post summarizes the author’s October 2015 book Open Borders and International Migration Policy. The book is available both electronically and in print from Amazon, Google Books, and the publisher, Palgrave MacMillan.

Although political philosophers debate the morality of open borders, few social scientists have explored what would happen if immigration were no longer limited. This book looks at three historical examples of temporarily unrestricted migration into the United States, France, and Ireland: the arrival of Mariel Cubans in Miami (Florida) in 1980, the flight of Pied Noir and Harki refugees from Algeria to Marseille in 1962, and the migration of Poles and other new European Union ‘Accession 8’ citizens into Dublin in 2004. Based on personal interviews, archival research, and statistical analysis, the study finds that the effects of these population movements on the economics, politics, and social life of these cities were much less catastrophic than opponents of free immigration claim. Detailed chapters cover schools, crime, ethnic politics, unemployment and wages, public finances, housing, and racial violence.

Open Borders: The Case editorial note: See our background page on the Mariel boatlift.

Political philosophers Joseph Carens, Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, and Will Kymlicka have argued for the morality of an open-borders immigration policy, yet such other social theorists as Michael Walzer, Stephen Macedo, and John Isbister dismiss this approach because of the supposed harm that unrestricted immigration would cause to natives. After exploring the normative arguments for and against open borders, the first chapter concludes that the crux of many theoretical objections to unrestricted immigration is empirical. Unfortunately, however, many of the factual assumptions that immigration restrictionists make have not been fully or rigorously tested. This new book therefore aims to see if unregulated immigration actually hurt natives.

The following chapter replicates David Card’s 1990 now-classic, natural-experiment-based article demonstrating that the Mariel migrants had no significant immediate effect on native wages or unemployment rates in Miami. Chapter 2 extends Card’s findings to two European cities that experienced sudden waves of migration comparable to the Mariel Boatlift in south Florida: Marseille, France, which faced the influx of Pieds-Noirs and Harkis “repatriates” from Algeria in 1962; and Dublin, Ireland, which received thousands of new European-Union, “Accession 8” citizens from Eastern Europe beginning in 2004. Based on elite interviews, archival materials, and ARIMA regression models, this study of two additional natural experiments concludes that rapid, “uncontrolled” migration had no statistically significant effect on the native employment market in Marseille or Dublin. The analysis likewise finds that sudden immigration appears to have boosted overall wage rates both in Marseille’s total employment market and in Ireland’s construction sector. Theoretically, this investigation thus confirms Card’s optimistic conclusions about the economic effects of immigration. It also shows that his findings are robust across different Western, industrialized countries.

Open Borders: The Case editorial note: See our background pages on suppression of wages of natives and the US-specific version.

Chapter 3 focusses on public finances. Although popular rhetoric about “immigrants taking our jobs” or “reducing our wages” typically finds little or no support from rigorous empirical studies, such mainstream investigators as the National Research Council conclude that new immigrants sometimes represent a net fiscal burden, especially at the local level in the short run. To estimate the largest-possible immediate effect of various types of migrants on the finances of large cities in particular, this chapter analyzes over-time budgetary data from Miami, Marseille, and Dublin. Based on quantitative panel models, elite interviews, and archival documents, the study concludes that the overall fiscal impact on localities of rapid, “uncontrolled” migration was effectively nil in Miami and Marseille, but positive in Dublin. Theoretically and empirically, this investigation helps estimate the upper bounds of the possible tax- and social-services-related effects of rapid, unrestricted immigration into an urban area and partly confirms the relevant literature on the differing fiscal influences of refugees versus economic migrants and high- versus low-skilled labor.

The fourth chapter looks at the housing market. Unless public authorities and the private real estate market immediately increase the number of available dwellings, a sudden wave of immigration may increase residential overcrowding. According to standard economic theory, greater demand for housing should likewise boost prices in the rental market, where most immigrants would initially seek shelter. In contrast, interpretations based on a dual housing market predict that immigration-caused demand will not be as likely to boost natives’ housing costs where newcomers are highly segregated. To test these two explanations, this chapter uses interviews with local economists and real estate agents, historical documents, and panel regression models for the three historical natural experiments. Quantitative data include official census statistics on the number of people per room and public or private estimates of changes in rents. Regression models suggest that increased overcrowding occurred in Miami but not in Marseille or Dublin. In contrast, the analysis shows a significant migration-caused rent increase in the normal housing market of only Marseille, the least-segregated city. Theoretically, this work thus tends to confirm the theory of dual housing markets for immigrants versus natives but only partially supports the standard economic model of housing.

Open Borders: The Case editorial note: See Nathan Smith’s post The great land value windfall from open borders.

Chapter 5 concerns itself with schools. Popular rhetoric claims that because of immigration, native schoolchildren have “no room to learn” and educational standards are being “dumbed down.” Yet relatively few empirical social scientists have examined whether immigration actually causes school overcrowding. A larger group of statistically oriented scholars has examined migration and academic achievement, but they tend to focus more on how well migrant students do in school than on whether immigration hurts native children in the same district. The smaller pool of investigators who have looked at this latter question usually aim to test the “peer effects” theory of immigration effects but often are confronted with the serious methodological problem of endogeneity via immigrant and native self-selection into particular districts. To estimate the largest-possible immediate effects of various types of migrants on the degree of overcrowding and academic achievement in secondary schools in large cities in particular, this chapter therefore analyzes official over-time classroom-density and test-score data from these three natural experiments where immigration is clearly exogenous to the choice of school district. Based on interviews with teachers and school officials, examination of archival materials from relevant institutions, and quantitative panel analysis of educational and census data, my study concludes that the rapid, unrestricteded migration of immigrant secondary-school students neither substantially increased classroom density nor affected the overall test scores in these districts. Theoretically and empirically, this investigation helps estimate the upper bounds of the possible education-related effects of rapid, unrestricted immigration into an urban area and disconfirms an immigration-based “peer effects” model of academic achievement. Massive immigration does not necessarily cause a decline in student learning, and it does not even seem to boost classroom overcrowding very much if at all.

Crime is the main topic in Chapter 6. Although xenophobic popular rhetoric about “foreign-born criminals” abounds, relatively few empirical social scientists have examined what, if any link, actually exists between immigration and crime. Those quantitatively oriented investigators who do look at this question, moreover, typically focus on a single country or region and tend to find little or no overall effect from migration. This chapter thus uses cross-national statistics to test the “strain” and “importation” models of migration and criminal deviance. To estimate the largest-possible immediate effects of various types of migrants on the level of violent or “serious” crime (i.e., homicide and burglary) in large cities in particular, I analyze official over-time crime data from the three cities. Elite interviews, archival materials, and quantitative panel models of police and census data indicate that the rapid, “uncontrolled” migration of working- or middle-class refugees or workers did increase burglary rates in all three cities. However, the sudden arrival of primarily low-skilled individuals—some of whom had already served prison time in Cuba—appears to have boosted the homicide rate in Miami only. This investigation therefore helps estimate the upper bounds of the possible crime-related effects of rapid, unrestricted immigration into an urban area and partly confirms the importation model of homicide and strain theory of burglary. Though massive immigration does not necessarily cause a large rise in all forms of urban crime in the host country, the entry of many poor migrants with few economic opportunities and/or with criminal backgrounds may.

Open Borders: The Case editorial note: See our crime page, our backgrounder page on Hispanic crime and illegal immigration in the United States, and Vipul Naik’s speculative post about crime in the US under open borders.

The last body chapter examines ethnic politics and racial violence. Although some scholars of “realistic group conflict” argue that immigration-related ethnic conflict usually increases with a sudden influx of foreign-born residents, Daniel J. Hopkins’ theory of “politicized places” suggests that the effect of immigrant flows may partly depend on “salient national rhetoric.” To help adjudicate between these two theoretical explanations cross-nationally, this chapter analyzes over-time, aggregate voting data and qualitative accounts of inter-ethnic violence from the three urban natural experiments. Relying on elite informants, archival materials, newspaper accounts, and Gary King’s method of ecologically inferring the degree of ethnic voting, the study generally confirms the “politicized places” interpretation. While rapid, “uncontrolled” migration fueled ethnic voting and violence in Miami, where the media and many elites blamed economic woes on the immigrants, migrant inflows had few such effects in Marseille and Dublin, where media treatment was relatively positive and most leaders welcomed the newcomers relatively early on. Theoretically, this investigation thus expands Hopkins’ theory to immigrant-rich urban settings in three different industrialized countries. The chapter might also guide local and national political leaders wishing to avoid a popular backlash against an unexpected wave of recent immigrants.

Open Borders: The Case editorial note: See our background page on nativist backlash.

Chapter 8 summarizes the book’s findings and discusses their implications. Overall, this study concludes that the empirical case against open borders is overstated. The analysis does find overcrowding of housing and a higher burglary rate for all three cities. In Miami only, migration also appears to have led to more homicides, racial violence, and ethnic voting. Residential overcrowding eventually dissipated over time, however, as municipalities built more apartments for the newcomers. Burglaries did increase, but many of the victims were probably the immigrants themselves. Ethnic scapegoating by political and media elites lies at the root of ethnic voting and racial violence, and the many additional murders in Miami arguably represent an atypical case of a sending country deliberately inducing the emigration of violent criminals. With the exception of crime, then, any significant effects from large-scale immigration seem manageable.

On the other side of the coin, what if anything good came of these three migrant streams? First, moving to the U.S., France, or Ireland was undoubtedly good for almost all of the immigrants themselves. Most Mariel Cubans were able to rejoin their families in Miami and eventually move up into the American middle class. Pieds Noirs in Marseille escaped near-certain death at the hands of the Algerian FLN and eventually were able to re-establish their cultural institutions and economically integrate into southern France. And Poles in Dublin found reasonably well-paying jobs, a compatible cultural environment, and a chance to perfect their English. Second, however, these newcomers also contributed greatly to their host societies. Mariel migrant Mirta Ojito grew up to become a journalism professor at Columbia University and win the Pulitzer Prize. The Jewish Pied Noir singer Enrico Macias (born Gaston Ghrenassia in what is today Constantine, Algeria) continues to charm French and global audiences with his Andalusian melodies. At least at the height of the attendant labor shortage, meanwhile, Irish employers eagerly hired Eastern-Europeans to help fuel the Republic’s “Celtic Tiger” economic expansion.

Of course, these three case studies do not constitute the most extreme scenarios of unrestricted immigration, where tens of millions of people might cross international borders suddenly. Within the North Atlantic communities, however, these three examples represent some of the most dramatic and highly concentrated migration flows in modern memory (the not-yet-concluded Syrian refugee crisis aside). A complete lack of enforcement on the southern borders of the E.U. or U.S. would of course encourage larger numbers of poorer migrants to attempt the journey and might cause more significant socio-economic effects on the receiving countries. Yet until such immigration actually occurs, we are reduced to speculating about the consequences. And the analysis of historic cases in this book would be a good place to start developing models of the short-term, localized results of such overwhelmingly large flows should they present themselves. For now, however, any estimation of the socio-economic effects of truly massive, hemisphere-wide open borders requires forecasting beyond historically available data.

Open Borders: The Case editorial note: See also John Lee’s blog post How did we come to be so certain that closed borders are our salvation?

Perhaps the most morally defensible but cautious immigration policy politically imaginable would be the late economist Julian Simon’s recommendation to “increase the volume of total immigration in substantial steps [i.e., up to double the number of entrants per step] unless [or until?] there appear negative effects that are unknown at present.” As my book shows, actual harm from immigration is much harder to find than allegations of deleterious effects. If North Americans are to adopt immigration laws in keeping with their high professed ideals, they might profitably consider following the lead of the Europeans and South Americans–who have already adopted limited open-borders systems–instead of using racialized rhetoric to scapegoat men and women who desire nothing more than an opportunity to earn decent wages and live in peace.

Open Borders: The Case editorial note: See also Vipul Naik’s post Slippery slopes to open borders and John Lee’s post Constitutionally entrenching migration as a fundamental human right: Argentina and open borders.

How Would a Billion Immigrants Change the American Polity?

August 14, 2015 Nathan Smith 41 Comments

[UPDATE: See the follow-up blog post A Billion Immigrants: Continuing the Conversation by Nathan Smith, where he responds to comments on and criticisms of this blog post. You may also be interested in the Open Borders Action Group discussion of this post, where Smith articulates some aspects of his views in more detail, and others offer criticism.]

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called “The American Polity Can Endure and Flourish Under Open Borders.” I would not write that post today. The American polity might endure and flourish under open borders, but I wouldn’t claim that confidently. What changed my mind? A greater familiarity with the theoretical models that are the basis for “double world GDP” as a claim about the global economic impact of open borders, especially my own. It turns out that these estimates depend on billions of people migrating internationally under open borders. Previously, my vague and tentative expectations about how much migration would occur under open borders were akin to Gallup poll estimates suggesting that 150 million or so would like to migrate to the USA. Others may disagree, but I was fairly confident at the time that the US polity was robust enough to absorb 150-200 million immigrants (over, say, a couple of decades) and retain its basic political character and structure. I do not think the US polity is robust enough to absorb 1 billion immigrants (even, say, over the course of fifty years) and retain its basic political character and structure.

For more educated guesswork about the number of migrants under open borders, see also our reference article on swamping; Joel Newman’s article “If Open Borders are Instituted Gradually, What Should be the Initial Number of Immigrants Admitted?”, which, among other things, details how the threat of swamping gives open borders advocates like Joseph Carens and Michael Huemer pause, as well as Joel Newman’s latest post; and Vipul Naik’s explorations of whether the case for open borders can be combined with radical agnosticism about how many would migrate and whether the number of migrants under open borders would be “too high” or “too low” (e.g., by utilitarian-universalist criteria). In this post, I’ll argue that swamping probably will happen, and that open borders is the right thing to do anyway.

To the question of what kind of polity and society the US would become with a billion immigrants, I have only the vaguest and most speculative notions, but for this post to make sense at all, I’ll have to outline my guesses as best I can. I’m focusing on the US case because I’m most familiar with US institutions and they’re most well-known, but I’d expect other Western countries to have similar experiences. As an aid to intuition, think of the way Roman and British institutions evolved when they came to govern far more people (albeit due to territorial expansion rather than immigration). In both cases, the polity in question survived in the sense that a continuous thread of sovereign authority was maintained. But the character of the polity was transformed.

In the Roman case, the participatory institutions of the Republic gradually broke down. The family farmer, backbone of the old Republic, was crowded out by latifundia, large farms worked by slaves. The Roman populace was largely turned to a mob dependent on public handouts. Finally, the Republic gave way to a permanent dictatorship by the emperors, which, though the loss of the Republic was felt keenly by Rome’s aristocratic intellectuals, was not all bad. Historian Edward Gibbon, writing in the 18th century, celebrated the reigns of the “five good emperors” Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius (2nd century AD) as the happiest time in the history of mankind. The Senate still met, and Romans still called their state the “Republic,” but the real constitution had changed.

The British case is quite different in that the acquisition of a globe-girdling empire “on which the sun never set” didn’t influence the governance of the UK all that much. In four centuries of British empire, from the settlements at Jamestown and the Caribbean sugar islands to the relinquishing of Hong Kong, the British home constitution certainly underwent profound transformations, towards liberalism (the change took place from about 1750 to 1850), democracy (from about 1830 to 1910) and socialism (from the Liberal/Labor victory of 1906 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979), but these had far more to do with the influence of Enlightenment ideas and the Industrial Revolution, than with the empire. The empire, meanwhile, was never governed by the same liberal-democratic principles that prevailed in Britain. It was governed in a manner at once authoritarian and improvisational. Since London was so far away and could rarely understand local circumstances and difficulties, it tended to ratify what the “man on the spot” had done. Often, in effect, public power passed into private hands, as when the East India Company ended up governing India. Often, too, the British Empire was conservative, in the sense that British officialdom tried to co-opt and collaborate with local, traditional institutions. At the same time, a kind of ideology developed, according to which it was the British imperial mission to gradually foster liberal, democratic, representative institutions– not Christianity, interestingly: imperial institutions weren’t particularly friendly to missionary efforts– among the empire’s subject peoples. British political thought provided the templates for both the conservative (Edmund Burke; Winston Churchill) and the liberalizing (Locke; Adam Smith; J.S. Mill) strands in British imperial governance.

I would tentatively envision the US experience under open borders as resembling the British and Roman cases, inasmuch as the protocols and ideals of the US polity, as well as its merely ethnic characteristics, would persist in attenuated form, but governing a much larger population would necessitate improvisational and sometimes authoritarian expedients that would cumulatively transform the polity into something quite different, even as it claimed descent from the historic constitutional polity of the United States as we know it. The illusion of continuity would deceive the subjects of the new polity, native-born and immigrant, to a considerable extent, though on the other hand there would be a good deal of lamentation and triumphalism, and only after several generations would historians be able to look back and assess the bewildering transformation in a sober, balanced way.

Certain American ideals would die of their own increasing impracticality, e.g., “equality of opportunity,” the social safety net, one person, one vote, or non-discrimination in employment. Americans might continue to feel that these ideals were right long after they had ceased to be practiced, as the Romans seemed to feel that Rome ought to be governed by its Senate long after real governance had passed to the emperors. I don’t see how public schools could adapt to a far larger and more diverse student body. I think there would have to be a transition to some sort of vouchers combined with individual and/or community responsibility for education, e.g., the government pressures the Chinese neighborhoods to set up Chinese schools. Jefferson’s cry that “all men are created equal,” which today is sometimes mistaken, almost, for an enforceable policy rule, would retreat until wasn’t even an aspiration, but only a dream. Of course, open borders would actually mitigate global inequality, but American egalitarianism is a sheltered creed that needs the border as blindfold to retain its limited plausibility as an ideal.

If open borders included open voting, US political institutions would be overhauled very quickly as political parties reinvented themselves to appeal to the vast immigrant masses, but I’ll assume the vote would be extended gradually so that native-born Americans (including many second-generation immigrants) would always comprise a majority of the electorate. This would put an end to majority rule, for a large fraction, likely a majority, of the resident population would lack votes. As it did in the British empire, minority governance would clash with democratic ideas to undermine the legitimacy of the regime, though not, I think, fatally. This could be a benefit, in that defenders of the regime would need to appeal, as Edmund Burke once did, more to the regime’s performance in fostering prosperity and adhering to objective norms of justice, than to crude majoritarian math (which in any case has long since been exposed as logically incoherent). The Republican and Democratic parties would be likely to maintain their duopoly, but their ideologies would go through a continual metamorphosis, not only to appeal to new immigrant voters, but perhaps even more, to adapt to the realigned interests of the natives, who would derive their incomes more from land, shareholding, and government subsidies, and less from wages.

Spontaneous Schelling segregation, even if not enforced by, or even if actively opposed by, the law (but I doubt the law would resist for long), would make neighborhoods and workplaces, and a fortiori churches and community organizations, far more homogeneous than the resident population as a whole. I have advocated legalizing and de-stigmatizing private discrimination against immigrants, but even if it remained illegal, I think private discrimination would be widely practiced, simply because statistical discrimination is efficient, and in the more complex and dynamic economy of an open-borders America those efficiencies would be more worth capturing than ever. Many natives would retreat into gated communities, not so much from fear of crime as simply from love of the familiar. There would be large immigrant neighborhoods dominated by particular ethnicities, where English was rarely spoken, yet English in the US would remain a lingua franca for all the immigrant groups and wouldn’t be threatened as the national language (though German in Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc., might). Overall crime rates might or might not rise, but law enforcement would often be baffled by new and complex challenges. The overworked and puzzled courts would have to improvise and compromise and decline a lot of cases, and would end up leaving a lot of stuff in an emerging domain of private law. I’d expect gaps to emerge where representatives of the official courts feared to tread and a kind of anarcho-capitalist natural law would prevail, and these might be the most productive, innovative, prosperous places in the new, open-borders America. As in the Dark Ages, the Christian churches would likely be more effective than the government in reaching out to, serving, and cultivating a sense of community and identity in many immigrant populations. As in ancient Rome, native-born Americans would find themselves increasingly unable to govern a larger and more diverse subject population through traditional institutions of self-government– they might often find it expedient, as the British empire did, to let public power slip into private hands– but on the other hand, they could easily vote themselves increasing handouts from a burgeoning treasury.

There would probably be an increasing role for private security companies, both to supply protection to private firms that didn’t trust the police to handle the strange new situation, and as contractors for the government. I don’t think it would be too difficult for a regime claiming descent from the US Constitution to fend off open contestation of its sovereignty. Still, if you remember America’s national reaction to 9/11, it isn’t difficult to imagine that even intermittent, local stirrings of revolt would transform the American psyche enough to make weapons training in schools or even universal conscription into some sort of national police force attractive, in order to empower the citizenry physically to defend its sovereignty against a possible immigrant revolution. The vote and citizenship would likely be bestowed opportunistically on immigrant groups deemed especially loyal or effective, both for national security reasons, and for partisan advantage when Republicans or Democrats found themselves favored by some immigrant group.

The least tentative part of my forecast is that all this would take place amidst a continuous surge of booming economic growth, with fortunes being made galore, but this might take forms that some would find disturbing. We would see some modern latifundia, worked not by slaves this time but by voluntary immigrants, but working for pay rates that would strike native-born Americans as a form of slave labor. Meanwhile, we would likely see modern equivalents of the ancient Roman mob, privileged idlers demanding bread and circuses paid for by taxes collected from non-citizens. Entrepreneurs would thrive with so many new workers and customers. The Dow would rise, and rise, and rise. Landowners would see their assets appreciate rapidly and would face a bewildering variety of opportunities to put them to profitable use. Educators and medical personnel would enjoy an almost limitless demand for their services. Of today’s middle-class Americans, even many who failed to find ultra-productive niches in the new open-borders economy would find domestic servants suddenly affordable. The cruel dilemma now faced by educated women, career vs. children, would be greatly mitigated as live-in nannies would become abundant and cheap. American seniors, too, would flourish as the quantity and quality of eldercare workers rose sharply, and paid drivers became affordable to anyone with a little income over and above their Social Security check. But while two-income professional couples would find their domestic arrangements greatly eased, employment rates among native-born Americans would probably fall significantly, partly because lower wages for unskilled labor would make working too unremunerative to bother with for those without special skills, partly because many Americans would be able to live rather comfortably on dividends, land rentals, and government subsidies. For some, this comfortable rentier lifestyle would rankle, clashing as it does with Americans’ traditional disdain of parasitic aristocracies. People need to feel like they have a function. But some sort of general conscription into a national police force might help here. Americans cognitively or culturally ill-equipped to thrive in the dynamic new open-borders economy would be useful to their fellow citizens, and would justify the increasingly valuable privileges and subsidies to which citizenship entitled them, by serving as a kind of praetorian guard.

In short, I think the most wild-eyed predictions of the open borders optimists will come true, and to spare, but I think a lot of the forebodings of the grimmest open border pessimists will also prove more than justified.

All these forecasts are so tentative that I’m embarrassed to write them down at all, but they are necessary to help readers to understand what I mean when I doubt that the American polity can endure and flourish under open borders. It’s not that I’d expect a complete civilizational collapse, or a revolution. On the contrary, I’d expect superficial continuity. But an open-borders America of a billion people would, in substance, be as different a polity from the polity that the United States of America is today, as the Roman Empire of the 2nd century AD was from the Roman Republic of the 3rd century BC. At the end of this post, I’ll write a bit about whether the end of the American polity as we know it should be regretted or welcomed. But first, would billions really migrate under open borders?

It may seem foolish of me to have so much altered my view of what an open-borders future would look like, in response to a few mere economic models. To be sure, I certainly don’t believe that these models are anything like exact descriptions of an open borders future. The authors, including myself, make all sorts of simplifications, some of them obviously unrealistic, to create a platform from which to launch heroic feats of extrapolation. The wisest course, which Paul Collier for example seems to adopt, may seem to be to dismiss the guesses as unrealistic. But my former guesses had, and any other guesses I could now formulate without reference to the models would have, even less basis. I believe the economic models of open borders, flawed and fallible as they are, represent the most rational estimates available of how many would migrate under open borders. I’ll try to anticipate and reply to a few objections in order to consolidate this point.

1. What about the Gallup polls? That’s easy. Gallup can’t take diaspora dynamics (also see Bryan Caplan and Paul Collier on this) into account. It can only find out how many people would now like to emigrate. But under open borders, after a little while, many people would be more willing to emigrate because there would be large communities of their fellow nationals abroad, including some of their loved ones.

2. What about Europe? Contemporary Europe stands as an apparent counter-example to claims that open borders would trigger an epic transformation of human geography. The European Union is said to have internal open borders, and though a glance at the relevant European Commission webpage suggests that EU citizens’ rights to live and work elsewhere in the EU are subject to some red tape, it surely comes close. And while this has led to many millions of internal EU migrants, the migrant share is an order of magnitude less than what the global economic models of open borders predict. I think there are several reasons for this. First, GDP per capita doesn’t vary that much within Europe, which not only mitigates the pressure to migrate but may prevent diaspora dynamics from achieving critical mass. Second, EU countries are among the world’s oldest, with most having a median age above 40, whereas young people are more inclined to migrate. Third, far more than any other region of the world, Europe has been carved into national homelands through centuries of cultural genius and military jostling, so that local ties are probably more important there than elsewhere. Fourth, EU “cohesion” policies deliberately subsidize the poorest European regions, mitigating pressure to migrate. Fifth, migration within the EU seems to be accelerating as a result of the economic crisis that began in 2008, so slow migration may turn out to have been a temporary anomaly. Puerto Rico, which has enjoyed open borders with the USA for a century, has experienced so much emigration that most (about 60%) people of Puerto Rican descent live on the US mainland, even though Puerto Rico isn’t all that poor, with a GDP about half that of the USA as a whole. Puerto Rico’s experience, or that of 19th-century Ireland, may be more predictive of an open borders future than contemporary Europe is. In that case, many billions would migrate, and the global economic models of open borders are getting the order of magnitude right.

3. It’s never happened before. Even in the 19th century golden age of open borders, the share of migrants in world population was well below 10 percent. Before and since, it’s been lower. And now we’re predicting a rise in the share of international migrants to around 50 percent of world population! But of course, just because it’s never happened before doesn’t mean it won’t. The Roman Empire and its fall, the medieval cathedrals, the circumnavigation of the world, and the Industrial Revolution hadn’t happened till they happened.

4. People are loyal to their homelands. Another reason for skepticism is that the models apparently leave out of account that people feel affection and love for their homelands, while foreign countries are scary and forbidding. That’s why international migration has always been something “exceptional people” do. But first, the models don’t actually leave this completely out of account. My estimates of global migration under open borders, for example, assume that everyone stays put unless (relative to the status quo) migration offers higher pay for raw labor and/or human capital. No one would emigrate from the USA, since both raw labor and human capital would be attracted to the USA. Yet a recent poll suggests that 1 in 3 Americans would like to emigrate if they could. Few can have a strong economic motive to do so, since the USA is one of the richest countries on Earth, so either weak economic motives suffice (do they want to earn Australia’s minimum wage? to enjoy the Swedish social safety net?) or else cultural preferences (the fun loving culture of Brazil? the ancient dignity of Japan? the beauty and charm of western European cities?) actually motivate them to leave rather than to stay. I agree that people’s attachment to their homelands, along with simple inertia, would probably keep migration down to hundreds of millions in the short run, but in the long run, e.g., over the course of a few decades, I think diaspora dynamics would overwhelm local ties. Also, the globalization of culture (see me and Bryan Caplan) has made migration (especially to the US, the chief source of the globalizing culture) much easier, and will continue to make it easier in future. (Language is one of the more quantifiable elements of this trend. This site estimates that there are almost 1 billion. The British Council expects two billion English speakers by 2020. Of course, you can also immigrate first and learn English later, or immigrate into a diaspora bubble and never learn English.)

5. Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Wouldn’t epic mass migrations be self-halting, because the desirable properties that make wealthy countries such attractive immigration destinations would be erased by mass migration? Don’t the economic models ignore this? Actually, no. In particular, my model allows for some total factor productivity (TFP) reduction in destination countries. Even if epic mass migrations degraded institutions (or whatever causes TFP) in rich countries, they’d still be attractive to billions.

6. Backlash. Paul Collier, in Exodus, contemptuously dismisses the economic models of open borders, but hardly pretends to give any reason why. To the extent that his implicit reason for dismissing them can be deduced from the book, it’s that he thinks there would be a huge nativist backlash. More recently, Ryan Cooper at The Week argued that “a massive wave of immigration is not a magic fix for the economy” because “air-dropping a billion random foreigners into the country would do, of course, is create the mother of all nativist backlashes.” But this begs the question. It’s certainly unlikely that open borders will be adopted by any country anytime soon, but the question is what would happen if it were.

My new doubts that the American polity could survive and flourish under open borders do not in the least undermine my support for open borders. For one thing, the American polity is too small a thing to have much weight in these scales, when the well-being of so many billions is at stake. But my estimation of the value of the American polity as an institution has also dwindled considerably of late. Daron Acemoglu’s thesis in Why Nations Fail, basically that the prosperity of the West depends mainly on its representative and democratic institutions, has quite a few adherents in contemporary development economics, but I attach little credence to it. I was actually surprised, in the data exercise undergirding my open borders forecasts, by how much of the wealth and poverty of nations seems explicable by human capital, broadly understood, so I’ve downgraded “institutions” (and “total factor productivity”) as explanatory factors in the wealth and poverty of nations. Even to the extent that institutions are important, I think democracy is less important than things like the thousand-year-old British common-law tradition, or norms of religious freedom and free speech, that predate and are quite separable from democracy. I don’t think the US polity, as it was founded in 1789, is or ever was the chief explanation of the enviable economic prosperity that the US has enjoyed throughout its history. But I do attach some value to what that polity was historically.

In particular, I see the US Constitution of 1789 as one of the wisest systems of government ever devised, albeit seriously marred by its tolerance for slavery. There followed almost 80 years of what may be called “Tocqueville’s America,” a time when a Jeffersonian political philosophy was in the ascendant, government was mostly small and local and highly participatory, and the way the Constitution was implemented in practice was reasonably conformable to its intended meaning. Then came the Civil War, which erased slavery, a magnificent achievement, while at the same time replacing the loose social contract among states with a powerful federal government from which there was no right of secession. Nonetheless, for a few more decades, the US still enjoyed a genuinely limited government, wherein elected officials really felt that the Constitution endowed them with limited powers, and they simply had no right to do more than it had authorized them to do. This limited, constitutional government was lost forever in the 1930s, when Roosevelt bullied the Supreme Court into elastic interpretations of the Constitution, especially the commerce clause, that rendered obsolete the enumerated powers strategy for restraining the federal government on which the founders had principally relied. From the 1930s onward, the federal government was still somewhat constrained by the Bill of Rights, but other than that, a kind of absolutist democracy was born, where elected majorities could do anything they liked, very high tax rates produced a substantial economic leveling of the population, and conscription fostered a sense of shared citizenship and made foreign policy much more participatory than it has been before or since. Meanwhile, the most distinctive and important feature of the American polity, religious freedom, traced its origins back before the 1789 Constitution to the original pious motives of the Puritans who settled Massachusetts, and the English-speaking peoples of North America maintained an almost unblemished record of respect for religious freedom through all the other changes that took place, until the past few years.

Starting with the school prayer decisions of the 1960s, this absolutist democracy was in its turn eviscerated by a creeping secularist coup d’etat emanating from the courts, which claimed a warrant from the Constitution. The courts were certainly mistaken in thinking the Constitution warranted a comprehensive secularization of American governance, but they seem to have been sincere. Later, as the rising imperial judiciary also became a key patron of the Sexual Revolution, the courts’ reasoning became so disgracefully inept that the possibility that the courts sincerely think they are doing anything other than arbitrarily legislating from the bench is hard to take seriously. Roe v. Wade was a brazen attack on democracy, and while it’s hard to say when the Rubicon was definitely crossed, in the wake of the Obergefell decree, I agree with Justice Scalia that “my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.” A country whose Constitution can suddenly, poof!, take on a new meaning that no one can seriously doubt would have amazed and disgusted its authors, and thereby override many democratically-passed laws and rob the people of the ability to legislate according to the majority will on an absolutely crucial social question, is not aptly described as a democracy. It might be best described as a judicial oligarchy in which elected elements play the chief administrative and a subordinate legislative role.

I’m not so fond of democracy that my loyalty to a regime would depend very greatly on its democratic character, but I am very, very fond of telling the truth, and I can have no respect for, and no loyalty to, judges who, in decreeing gay marriage, pretend that they’re interpreting the Constitution. Modern constitutional law is a lot like the Catholic Church’s theology of indulgences in the 15th and early 16th centuries. It makes very little sense, and every critical thinker more or less feels that it’s a disgraceful travesty, but people are afraid to challenge it as aggressively as reason demands, because it underpins the order of society. Reams and libraries are dedicated to rationalizing it, precisely because it’s rationally indefensible, yet is a crucial currency of power. And yes, I’d like to see modern constitutional law immolated in a kind of Lutheran Reformation, and would gladly pay a high price in chaos to see the dragon slain. Thanks to my low opinion of the US constitutional regime as it currently exists is one reason, I can contemplate with very little distress the immigration of a billion or so people from all over the world, unschooled in the peculiar mythology of early 21st-century American democracy and its ever-more-irrational cult of equality.

It would be interesting to hear the reactions to the billion-immigrant scenario, of people with a more favorable view of the legitimacy and beneficence of the present US regime.

Editor’s note: You might be interested in reading Nathan Smith’s follow-up blog post to this piece, A Billion Immigrants: Continuing the Conversation, where he fleshes out some of the arguments outlined in this blog post, and responds to some comments and criticisms of it.

The bait-and-switch from fiscally realistic to humane, or, the weakness of the mainstream moderate case against deportations

August 4, 2015 Vipul Naik 2 Comments

This post is going to critique some arguments against deportation that start out from concerns of fiscal responsibility. I’m going to argue that, even while correct, these arguments often don’t prove as much as their proponents think they do, both in theory and in terms of their practical effects.

Note what I am not arguing here. I am not claiming that anybody who opposes deportations must therefore support open borders. The relationship between opposing deportations and supporting open borders will be the topic of another post (I do believe they are linked, but taking a no-deportation position without endorsing open borders is not inconsistent per se). Second, I am not arguing against immigrant rights groups and civil rights groups who advocate stronger due process protections for migrants facing detention and deportation, without categorically opposing deportation. That perspective is internally consistent and has value, so even though I have disagreements with it I don’t think it’s fundamentally confused.

I’m critiquing some flawed arguments whose core is characterized by concerns about fiscal realism and practicality surrounding deportations. I believe these flawed arguments, that might have evolved in an attempt to build a broader coalition around reducing deportations, offer a fragile case against deportations. I also think that many of the people who make these arguments aren’t offering their true reasons for not wanting there to be deportations, and some of the surprise and shock they express when policies turn out differently than they hoped could have been avoided with more clarity.

Now, it is possible that I am factually right about the inconsistency, but deploying these flawed arguments has actually been the most realistic path for immigration moderates to achieve some gains against deportations. I don’t understand politics very well and I won’t rule out that possibility. If so, the pushback from people like me can probably help them bolster the case that they are not extremists of the sort that people at Open Borders: The Case are. So even if I’m wrong I don’t expect what I say to hurt moderates’ chances.

This post of mine will focus on arguments deployed in the United States. Interestingly, many of these arguments are specific to the United States, because the mass deportation versus amnesty debate is one that has been much more prominent in the United States. In an Open Borders Action Group post, I asked people about whether similar rhetoric was found in other countries, and got interesting responses, some of which I reference in the post.

Some examples

A while back, co-blogger Nathan responded to a post by Victor Reppert, highlighting the contradictions in Reppert’s apparent moderate stance on migration. Here’s Reppert’s overall stance:

I seriously doubt that 1070 is going to result in very many deportations. The cost in ill will between the Hispanic community and the rest of us, to my mind, far outweighs the improvement in will provide in law enforcement, which I suspect will be minimal.
So, without actually having done a full cost-benefit analysis on all of this, I would say start with security at the border, make the process of immigration more rational but don’t just throw it wide open, and then provide some path to citizenship that involves a serious penalty and isn’t just simple amnesty.

Below are some excerpts from a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed:

No matter how you parse it, all those people are here in violation of federal law, and are thus subject to deportation. Yet the size of that population is precisely what makes deportation on a grand scale impractical.

[…]

The bottom line: It’s easy to say, “deport them all,” but to do so would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention disruptive for employers and, of course, wrenchingly hard on those who would be swept up.

[…]

The solution: a congressional fix to make the system more humane — by granting relief to many who have lived and worked in the country for years — and also more tailored to the nation’s needs, including making accommodations for agricultural workers and others whose labors are desired here. It’s a new year, and a new Congress, so who knows, maybe a legislative miracle can happen. Regardless, the answer is not “deport them all.”

Or, consider CNN’s coverage of then-President Barack Obama’s November 2014 deferred action announcement:

A key element of Obama’s plan is to instruct immigration authorities to target those undocumented immigrants who are dangerous rather than law-abiding undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and residents and others.

[…]

He said they will go after “felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a Mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.”

“We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day,” he said.

[…]

The President argued that ordering a mass amnesty would be unfair but mass deportation would “be both impossible and contrary to our character.”

The Immigration Policy Center says:

Many political pundits, GOP presidential aspirants, and Members of Congress want to have it both ways when it comes to federal spending on immigration. On the one hand, there is much talk about the need for fiscal austerity, and a Congressional “super-committee” is currently working on slashing federal spending in order to reduce the deficit. On the other hand, even though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just announced a record high number of deportations, some still want to increase federal spending on immigration enforcement; putting more Border Patrol boots on the ground, completing the border fence, and deploying an array of high-tech gadgetry. However, they miss one very important fact: piling on more immigration enforcement without immigration reform is a practical and fiscal dead-end.

Over the past decade, the federal government has spent tens of billions of dollars trying to keep unauthorized immigrants out of the United States, or trying to get them out of the country if they are already here. The end result? Roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants now call the United States home, the majority have been here for more than 10 years, and many have U.S.-born children. In short, the “enforcement only” approach to unauthorized immigration has proven to be costly and ineffective.

But many political candidates and Members of Congress have yet to get the news that the enforcement-only approach has been tried and failed. They seek to forge ahead with expensive new immigration-enforcement measures, such as a mandatory employment-verification system (E-Verify) for all businesses and workers in the country—and a dramatic expansion of the nation’s system for long-term detention of unauthorized immigrants. At a time when the federal government is looking for fiscal restraint, anti-immigrant hawks are proposing that we spend billions of dollars more in an endless quest to remove 11 million unauthorized men, women, and children from the United States.

Yet there is a fiscally sound alternative to the enforcement-only approach: immigration reform which includes the creation of a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants already living in the United States, as well as flexible mechanisms for regulating future immigration. Research indicates that unauthorized workers who attain legal status will earn higher wages, spend more in U.S. businesses, and pay more in taxes. Moreover, if unauthorized immigrants living in the United States could acquire legal status, the federal government would no longer waste billions of dollars every year trying to capture and deport them. Enforcement dollars that are now used to track down unauthorized dishwashers and gardeners could be used to find criminals and terrorists. In other words, bringing immigration policy in line with reality is good for the public treasury, good for public safety, and good for national security

Perhaps the best summary of the mainstream moderate view that I wish to critique is provided in a Center for American Progress report, whose summary reads:

That legislative battle for immigration reform now looms again on the horizon. There are three options for restoring order to our immigration system:

Live with the dysfunctional status quo, pouring billions of dollars into immigration enforcement programs at the worksite, in communities, and on the border without reducing the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the country

Double down on this failed enforcement strategy in an attempt to apprehend and remove all current undocumented immigrants

Combine a strict enforcement strategy with a program that would require undocumented workers to register, pass background checks, pay their full share of taxes, and earn the privilege of citizenship while creating legal channels for future migration flows

The first alternative would leave in place policies that have allowed 5 percent of our nation’s workforce—approximately 8.3 million workers in March 2008—to remain undocumented in our country. This is clearly an unsustainable position in a democratic society—permitting a class of workers to operate in a shadow economy subject to exploitation and undermining all workers’ rights and opportunities.

The second option, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, is essentially the enforcement-only status quo on steroids. As this paper demonstrates, this option would be prohibitively expensive and trigger profound collateral consequences.4 Our analysis is comprised of a detailed review of all federal spending to prevent unauthorized immigration and deport undocumented immigrants in FY 2008, the last fiscal year (ending in October 2008) for which there is complete data (see box on page 5). It shows that the total cost of mass deportation and continuing border interdiction and interior enforcement efforts would be $285 billion (in 2008 dollars) over five years.

Specifically, this report calculates a price tag of $200 billion to enforce a federal dragnet that would snare the estimated 10.8 million undocumented immigrants in the United States over five years. That amount, however, does not include the annual recurring border and interior enforcement spending that will necessarily have to occur. It would cost taxpayers at least another $17 billion annually (in 2008 dollars) to maintain the status quo at the border and in the interior, or a total of nearly $85 billion over five years. That means the total five-year immigration enforcement cost under a mass deportation strategy would be approximately $285 billion.

When viewed through this most narrow but most telling fiscal lens, it should be clear that a deportation-only strategy is highly irresponsible. In these challenging economic times, spending a king’s ransom to tackle a symptom of our immigration crisis without addressing root causes would be a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. Spending $285 billion would require $922 in new taxes for every man, woman, and child in this country. If this kind of money were raised, it could provide every public and private school student from prekindergarten to the 12th grade an extra $5,100 for their education. Or more frivolously, that $285 billion would pay for about 26,146 trips in the private space travel rocket, Falcon 1e.

The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has clearly diminished the number of people attempting to enter the country illegally–the absence of jobs eliminates the predominant incentive to migrate. And yet, even with diminished pressure at the border, the dramatic increases in spending on immigration enforcement have not significantly altered the net number of undocumented immigrants in the country. In fact, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, reports that the undocumented immigrant population as of January 2009 stood at 10.8 million, or 300,000 more than it was in 20052 In other words, the massive outlays in enforcement resources are barely making a dent in the current population.

That leaves the third course, comprehensive immigration reform, as the only rational alternative. The solution to our broken immigration system must combine tough border and workplace enforcement with practical reforms that promote economic growth, protect all workers, and reunite immediate family members. Among other things, that means we must establish a realistic program to require undocumented immigrants to register with the government while creating legal immigration channels that are flexible, serve the national interest, and curtail future illegal immigration.

A few threads emerge in these arguments, that I wish to critique.

The all-or-nothing argument, that because it’s hard to deport everybody, deportation is not a sensible solution at the margin.
The priority argument, that immigration enforcement should be applied only to high-priority cases because enforcement resources are limited.
The numbers game, where amnesty and deportation are viewed as two solutions to the same problem: bringing the number of people in unauthorized status down to zero.

#1, the all-or-nothing argument. Objection: the impossibility of deporting everybody is not an argument against deportation at the margin

One of the strands of argumentation that appears frequently, often in the form of a fait accompli, is:

The number of people eligible for deportation is very large (estimates range between 10 and 20 million). At a cost of a few thousand dollars per deportation, the total cost of using deportation to completely solve the problem of illegal immigration is prohibitive. Therefore, we need to think of better, more creative, more humane solutions.

My problem with this “all-or-nothing” line of thinking is that it places too much importance on what might be called an ideal state: a state where there are no illegal immigrants. And rather than acknowledging partial steps to that end state, it treats the end state as a binary: either you’re completely free of illegal immigrants, or you have them, and if you can’t solve the problem completely, then it’s hopeless to even try.

I believe that when (some) immigration moderates reason in this way, they believe they are accurately describing not just their own views but also the views and desires of more outspoken restrictionists and other critical of illegal immigration. However, my impression is that most fervent critics of illegal immigration don’t think of it this way. While these critics definitely want to see an end state where illegal immigration is a negligible phenomenon, they value partial progress in that direction. That’s why they favor deportations and enforcement measures at the current margin while knowing that those measures won’t free the world of illegal immigration.

The “all-or-nothing” type calculus also doesn’t make sense in many other contexts: when we think of charity, we don’t (or at any rate shouldn’t) think that an individual act of charity will make only a marginal fractional dent in the problems it’s trying to solve, and therefore it’s not worth doing. Rather, the relevant metric is to look at the absolute good that can be accomplished for a given quantity of resources. This idea is neatly demonstrated in the story of The Girl and the Starfish (quote from Everything2.com):

Once there was a great, great storm. Waves high as mountains, winds strong as giants.

But that’s not important

What is important is the next day, when Old Man Acha comes walking down the beach, looking for bodies and treasure, the last remnants of ships gone to sleep in the storm. He has to pick his way carefully, ’cause the beach is littered in starfish, castaways from the deep. The storm plucked them from their watery beds and deposited the poor souls on the sandy shore. Acha steps around them – many still alive. He keeps ambling up the beach, minding his own business, when he spies a youngling. She’s throwing starfish into the ocean, many as she can, but still not makin’ a dent in the piles. The Old Man, he wonders at this and says:

“Why bother to throw back any? How can it matter when there are so many? You throw back one, you still left with a ton? You never save them all.”

That little girl she doesn’t even pause to glance his way. She just keeps on flinging those ‘fish back in the sea. She stops only long enough to say:

“It matters to this one”

as she flings it into the ocean.

To take an opposite example, when we think of enforcing crimes, a high crime rate is no reason to give up on the idea of law enforcement. Rather, the relevant question is how much crime reduction can be accomplished with a given amount of law enforcement resources.

Now, one could argue that the larger the population of illegal immigrants, the harder it is to hunt them down and deport any at the margin. But this seems unlikely — if anything, the size of the population means that there should be particularly low-hanging fruit for deportation.

To be clear, I don’t endorse deportations. But this position has nothing to do with the size of the illegal immigrant population. The size of the population is definitely relevant to determining the size of the issue at stake. If, for instance, like most of the bloggers on this site, you believe that deportations are (presumptively) morally wrong, the size of the population affected by this moral wrong is relevant to determining how important it is to spend resources opposing this moral wrong. But that step comes only after you have decided on the moral legitimacy of deportation.

If, on the other hand, you grant the legitimacy of the end goal of successfully enforced immigration restrictions, and also of deportation as a means to achieve that goal, then size should not be a barrier. Rather, the question becomes: given that only a small fraction of the affected population can be deported, how can the deportations be selected to achieve the maximum bang for the buck? And here we turn to the next flawed argument.

It’s interesting to compare this size-based argument made in the United States with the rhetoric opposing deportation in other countries. Australia and Japan, for instance, have very small “illegal immigrant” populations, and most of these are people who overstay visas after entering with authorization. When the size of the illegal immigrant populations is small enough, however, we don’t generally see immigration moderates jumping in and saying “there are so few illegal immigrants, it’s actually feasible to round them all up and deport them, let’s do that!” I suspect that instead the reaction would be “there are so few of them, let’s just legalize them and move on!” Assuming I’m right about this (and I may not be) I think the all-or-nothing size-based resistance to deportation is a bit of a red herring (for more, see the Open Borders Action Group post comments).

#2, the priority argument. Objection: limited resources for deportation necessitate prioritization, but this does not mean that only the “worst” people should be deported

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims that it has resources to deport 400,000 people a year, or a little over 30,000 a month. Given limited deportation resources, it makes sense to give higher priority to the deportation of people who pose more of a public safety threat. I’ve previously argued that it is not wise to use deportation as a key crime-fighting strategy. But, many people, perhaps even those who support open borders, might agree that if you had to choose between a criminal and a non-criminal to deport, it’s better to deport the criminal. Hence, the Obama administration has repeatedly issued internal memos (starting with the 2011 Morton memos) urging the CBP and ICE to prioritize the deportation of people with criminal records and those who have committed aggravated felonies.

There are a couple of mistakes that people make when thinking about such prioritization. The first is that such prioritization recognizes or affirms the rights of non-criminals to stay in the United States. It does not. It simply says, “in an ideal world, we [the government] would deport you, but we’re currently too busy deporting others.” Obama himself has contributed to (and perhaps also been confused by) the ambiguity. In an article for Vox, Dara Lind explains:

The irony here is that the new policy is in line with what ICE agents have long claimed they’re under orders to do — and management’s long denied. Chris Crane, head of the National ICE Council, testified under oath in 2011 that his agents were being given secret, unwritten instructions not to arrest unauthorized immigrants except in very limited circumstances. When pressed by Democrats in Congress, Crane said he couldn’t offer any documentation to support his claims, and that no other agents would be willing to corroborate them out of fear — so his claims of a super-secret unwritten policy started seeming a lot like the West Wing’s “secret plan to fight inflation,” and were generally ignored by Democrats and the press. (So while the new guidance is being described as “catch and release 2.0,” it’s not clear whether the agents believe catch and release 1.0 ever went away.)

But for all that agents complain, ICE field offices have demonstrated — especially during Obama’s first term — that they didn’t have much of a problem deporting immigrants who were supposed to be “low priorities” anyway. This was actually the entire reason the initial deferred-action program was developed in 2012 to begin with. There were already memos asking ICE agents not to deport unauthorized immigrant students who’d been in the US for years. And on the basis of those memos, President Obama and senior officials said confidently that they weren’t “rounding up students.” But those memos weren’t actually sufficient to keep students from getting deported. So the administration had to develop a way for immigrants to apply themselves, proactively, for protection from deportation — rather than relying on ICE and CBP agents to follow guidance.

Obama himself has clarified that not being a priority does not mean legal status, and a person who’s not a priority now can become a priority any time:

“Deferred action is not a pathway to citizenship. It is not legal status. It simply says that for three years, you are not a law enforcement priority and are not going to go after you,” said one senior official. “It is temporary and it is revocable.”

The second mistake is the belief that, just because limited deportation resources mean that particular kinds of deportations need to be prioritized, that implies that the optimal quantity of other deportations is zero. In addition to directly removing people, deportations also serve a deterrent goal: they deter future immigration of people who are at risk of being deported (in this case, illegal immigration). And they may also encourage some others to “self-deport” (i.e., they could be part of a broader strategy of attrition through enforcement that in general makes life harder for the affected set of immigrants). If the goal with deportation is not merely to remove people but also to deter migration and encourage attrition, then it makes sense to deport people who would not otherwise be deportation priorities. Why? The idea is that if a few such people are deported, then that sends a message to everybody that they could be deported, and therefore serves the deterrent effect. If, on the other hand, the administration only carries out high-priority deportations, those who know they won’t qualify as high-priority feel (relatively) safer migrating and staying on. Again, this is similar to how a law enforcement agency might handle a mix of crime types: while the focus would be largely on the most serious crimes, action would be taken for at least some of the less serious crimes. It’s probably not optimal to spend all law enforcement resources investigating murders and effectively saying that cold burglaries won’t be investigated at all.

Would focusing only on high-priority deportations be a feature or a bug? From an open borders perspective, it’s clearly a feature if large numbers of people can carry out their lives with little fear of deportation. It heightens the contradictions between the stated objective of immigration enforcement and the reality on the ground. For the same reason, however, from the perspective of somebody interested in enforcing immigration laws, focusing entirely on high-priority deportations is a suboptimal way of using limited enforcement resources.

The problem here is that people who oppose deportations have latched on to some reasons for doing so that, while true, offer only partial justification for it and not exactly in the desired direction. It’s true that deportation costs money and resources, and it’s true that prioritization makes sense. But it does not follow from these that the optimal enforcement strategy would involve zero deportations of low-priority people. If you think that even one deportation of a person in a low-priority category is a moral travesty, then that belief does not stem from arguments typically provided about deportation costs and the need for enforcement priorities.

#3, The numbers game. Objection: It doesn’t make logical sense from most perspectives, including the open borders and restrictionist perspectives

One of the most puzzling attitudes I’ve seen to the phenomenon of illegal immigration is that people view it as a numbers game: adopt a mix of strategies to somehow or the other bring down to near-zero the number of people classified as not being in lawful status in the United States. It is because of this numbers game approach that people can view both amnesty and mass deportation as two alternative solutions to the same problem — despite their diametrically opposite goals and their diametrically opposite effects on the ground.

The view that reducing the number of people currently classified as not being in authorized status can be an end goal in itself can be justified based on a twisted territorialist perspective. Why twisted? The typical territorialist perspective is concerned with protecting the rights and interests of all who are currently present in the geographical territory of the nation-state. But if we adopted a strictly territorialist perspective, we’d be opposed to deportations.

The twisted territorialist perspective I’m describing here is one that gives importance not so much to the welfare of all those currently in the geographical territory, but to achieving an end state at which point the rights and interests of everybody in the geographical territory are protected. Getting to that point might involve deportation or legalization or whatever it takes. But once everybody in the territory is in legal status, law enforcement and civil society can flourish without the problem of people having to worry about getting deported and therefore having to live in the shadows.

While this perspective has some merit, the numbers approach to illegal immigration (that treats deportation and amnesty as competing solutions to the same problem) does not make sense from the several other perspectives that are more common:

The pure territorialist perspective is opposed to deportation, because of its effect on the people currently in the territory.
The right-to-migrate (open borders) perspective is opposed to deportation. From this perspective, the fundamental problem is that the state’s definition of authorized status is at odds with the morality of freedom of migration, so that the state deems as unlawful the presence of persons who had a right to be present.
From the restrictionist viewpoint,the people currently classified as being in unlawful status should not be here at all (with perhaps a few exceptions). If they could be here legally, they wouldn’t need to enter illegally. So legalizing their status only makes the problem worse because it legitimizes the presence of people who should not be here.
From the law-and-order viewpoint, even if the people involved might have been allowed to come under a different regime, the fact that they migrated illegally makes them worthy of punishment.

What I find interesting about rhetoric that seems to treat illegal immigration as a numbers game is that, even though it can be justified based on the twisted territorialist perspective, that perspective is rarely articulated or justified. Thus, I’m not sure if people actually subscribe to that perspective or just made a careless logical error. Either way, probably a lot more people subscribe to one of the four perspectives I discussed, or something close, and in none of those perspectives can deportation and amnesty be treated as substitutes.

Treating illegal immigration as a numbers game is somewhat similar conceptually to treating balanced budgets as a numbers game. Crudely put, there are two ways of trying to reduce the budget deficit (or increase the budget surplus): increase revenues, or decrease spending. Revenues for governments generally come from taxes. So budgets can be balanced by increasing taxes or decreasing spending. These two actions can therefore be presented as alternate “solutions” to the “problem” of a budget deficit. From a perspective of minimizing budget deficits (or maximizing budget surpluses) high taxes and low spending is the best combination. Note that this perspective is at odds both with the fiscally conservative perspective (low taxes, low spending) and the progressive perspective (high taxes, high spending). That said, I believe that reducing illegal immigration to a numbers game is less well-grounded than using budget surplus maximization as a driving goal for taxation and spending decisions.

True rejection of deportations

I think that many immigration moderates who adopt the arguments I discussed above are not articulating their true rejection of deportations. I don’t quite know what their true reasons are — I suspect it’s mostly a visceral feeling that deportation is presumptively morally wrong, a view that could be influenced by ordinary human decency, with a dash of territorialism thrown in. The moral basis for opposing deportations, and how it ties in with open borders, will be the subject of a separate and long post. But just as a thought experiment, let’s review the typical lines of argumentation:

The all-or-nothing view that since there are so many illegal immigrants, deportation isn’t a feasible solution: Would advocates of this view enthusiastically support deportation if the number of illegal immigrants were comparable to the number that could be deported over a year? This doesn’t even have to be a purely theoretical question: the size of the illegal immigrant population population, as well as legalization policies, vary heavily by country, so looking at the differences in rhetoric employed by moderates would be interesting. My impression is that mainstream liberal moderates rarely support deportation whether the numbers are small or big, suggesting that size isn’t the real reason — it’s just deployed as an add-on argument when it fits.
The priority argument: Again, it’s not clear that moderates who argue that enforcement resources should be prioritized for criminals actually believe that once all the criminals are rounded up, it will be time to start deporting the others. Crime rates of immigrants (and natives) vary heavily by country, but I haven’t seen examples where moderates say, “Okay, now that we’ve managed to deport most of the criminals and have the deportation resources to spare, it’s time to start deporting law-abiding and honest illegal immigrants.”
The numbers game: I believe many of those who use that framing don’t actually treat it as a numbers game, because they generally come down heavily on the side of one solution (deportation or amnesty) while rhetorically claiming that they are substitutes. Perhaps a better model is that a lot of people think that others treat it as a numbers game, and therefore tailor their argumentation accordingly.

A recent Open Borders Action Group post by me asked for thoughts on moderates’ emphasis on the fiscal costs, and whether other things that were later regarded as moral travesties were initially opposed for fiscal reasons. The ensuing discussion was informative, and included examples such as laws against the death penalty, killing horses, and war. A comment by John Lee is particularly illuminating, and I quote it here:

Well, I think [moderates’ invocation of fiscal costs are] also a form of intellectual gymnastics where you’re trying not to appear to be a raving open borders dreamer. If you admit that undocumented immigrants have done nothing wrong, if you say that deportations are categorically immoral, then you’re basically advocating open borders. Which makes your position verboten given where the Overton window currently is.

So your best bet is to try to sound “reasonable” on the issue by crafting some argument contoured around the particular issue you want to address (the existing stock of undocumented immigrants, child asylum-seekers, etc.) and limiting the scope of your premises to only issues that have bearing on this narrowly-focused area of immigration policy.

That way, you don’t have to admit to yourself you’re being hypocritical — hey, it is true that it is fiscally wasteful to spend money treating families and workers as if they’re drug lords — and you don’t have to worry about defending a much broader claim — that all deportations and/or border controls are unjustifiable — which you don’t feel prepared to make.

Conclusion

I’ve looked at three different styles of argument used by immigration moderates to articulate and justify their dislike for deportations, while also staying within the framework of accepting the legitimacy of mainstream immigration enforcement. I think many of these don’t reflect their true reasons for being uncomfortable with deportations. When such arguments are made, and conflated with the true reasons, it gets in the way of clear thinking of the consequences of such policies. It can give people a false sense of security that a right to stay has been established, when nothing of the sort has happened.

Bernie Sanders and open borders: OBAG highlights

August 2, 2015 Vipul Naik 1 Comment

United States 2016 Democratic Presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders was recently interviewed by wonk-cum-journalist Ezra Klein for Vox, a publication whose writers include open borders advocate Dylan Matthews and fellow-traveler Matt Yglesias. Matthews has frequently linked to Open Borders: The Case and did a lengthy open borders write-up based on an interview with Bryan Caplan. Klein, not himself an open borders supporter (to my knowledge) has likely been influenced by his colleagues to treat the position with more seriousness than most journalists do. So he asked Sanders about open borders. Below is the relevant excerpt from Ezra Klein’s interview of Bernie Sanders:

Ezra Klein

You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing …
Bernie Sanders

Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.
Ezra Klein

Really?
Bernie Sanders

Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …
Ezra Klein

But it would make …
Bernie Sanders

Excuse me …
Ezra Klein

It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?
Bernie Sanders

It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?

I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.
Ezra Klein

Then what are the responsibilities that we have? Someone who is poor by US standards is quite well off by, say, Malaysian standards, so if the calculation goes so easily to the benefit of the person in the US, how do we think about that responsibility?

We have a nation-state structure. I agree on that. But philosophically, the question is how do you weight it? How do you think about what the foreign aid budget should be? How do you think about poverty abroad?
Bernie Sanders

I do weigh it. As a United States senator in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free public colleges and universities. I believe we should create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. I believe we should raise the minimum wage to at least 15 bucks an hour so people in this county are not living in poverty. I think we end the disgrace of some 20 percent of our kids living in poverty in America. Now, how do you do that?

What you do is understand there’s been a huge redistribution of wealth in the last 30 years from the middle class to the top tenth of 1 percent. The other thing that you understand globally is a horrendous imbalance in terms of wealth in the world. As I mentioned earlier, the top 1 percent will own more than the bottom 99 percent in a year or so. That’s absurd. That takes you to programs like the IMF and so forth and so on.

But I think what we need to be doing as a global economy is making sure that people in poor countries have decent-paying jobs, have education, have health care, have nutrition for their people. That is a moral responsibility, but you don’t do that, as some would suggest, by lowering the standard of American workers, which has already gone down very significantly.

Although Open Borders: The Case the website played a very small role in the ensuing debate (it got linked to by Dylan Matthews for the double world GDP page and then by an unsympathetic AlterNet writer as a “Libertarian” website), the fact that this discussion happened at all, and the attention it got, reveals the increased recognition of “open borders” as a position worth considering and responding to. If the open borders movement didn’t exist, Matthews may not have been referencing “open borders” that frequently in his writing (even if he believed in it). And without Matthews constantly harping on it, Klein may not have chosen to bring up “open borders” — he might simply have asked a question about migration policy without positing open borders as an end state. Insofar as influencing politics goes, this is a small step that rounds down to zero. The biggest gains will happen when global public opinion turns to favoring open borders. But it’s a proof of concept that the fringe “open borders” movement can create ripples, however temporary, in mainstream political discourse.

Rather than review the details or go into my own opinions, I’m going to lay out the chronology by linking to and quoting comments form posts about the subject in the Open Borders Action Group.

First post by Nathan Goodman about the Vox interview

Nathan Goodman posted about Ezra Klein’s interview of Bernie Sanders on July 28, the day it was published. Goodman excerpted the part of the post that interested him most and offered his own summary:

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal… That’s a right-wing proposal, that says essentially there is no United States.” –Bernie Sanders

He then follows this with a bunch of economic ignorance, claiming open borders would make Americans drastically poorer.

The post was one of the most liked and commented, with 37 likes and 36 comments. Most liked (21 likes) was my own comment, that made a simple but important point:

I’m glad political candidates are being asked for their views on open borders!

This is an important accomplishment, because as Fabio Rojas wrote:

This may sound like a modest, even trivial, proposal. The opposite is true. Currently, the public has no idea that there are other people who even believe in the concept of open borders. Political debate focuses on whether a few lucky persons might get amnesty, not whether we should make our borders open. That indicates to me that the average person doesn’t appreciate that open borders is even a position that one might consider. That has to change.

Another popular comment was by John Lee, that noted the incongruity of Bernie Sanders viewing open borders as a right-wing position:

“That’s a right-wing proposal, that says essentially there is no United States.”

Apparently “imagine there’s no countries” is a right wing idea today.

After seeing the favorable response, John tweeted this from the @OpenBordersInfo Twitter account, where it was also well received:

Apparently "imagine there's no countries" is a right-wing idea today. https://t.co/cQ0u79eY55

— Open Borders (@OpenBordersInfo) July 28, 2015

A number of commenters noted that Sanders’ opposition to open borders was driven by his support from labor unions that represented the interests of organized labor, to whom immigration was a (real or perceived) threat. Another point noted was that the kind of welfare state that Sanders envisioned would not be feasible under open borders, and so his opposition to open borders was rational. Anthony Gregory:

I don’t think he would support [open borders] in any case. You can’t have open borders and the type of economic policies he wants.

Jameson Graber:

It is amusing that he calls open borders a “right wing” idea, because the right wing is overwhelmingly against it in almost every developed nation. Still, I think he’s being perfectly consistent, here. As a socialist he believes his first responsibility is to take care of the middle class “here at home,” where “home” is defined as the nation state. Socialism and open borders are fundamentally incompatible.

David Kraft:

Can’t say I’m surprised that someone who describes himself as socialist – and by implication seeking support from trade unions – advocates artificially restricting the supply of new labour in order to artificially strengthen the position of the representatives of the existing labour force.

Ben Smith noted that Sanders might be better than many other candidates:

In fairness, when it comes to political candidates, when working on radical reform like open borders, you have to pick the candidate that comes closest, and Bernie Sanders endorses policies closer to open borders more than any Republican candidate.

Second post by Carl Shulman on Sanders’ immigration views and the relation with territorialism

Carl Shulman posted a link to Bernie Sanders doesn’t easily fit either side of the immigration debate. Here’s why. by Dara Lind for Vox. He connected it to the idea of territorialism (the idea that the interests of those already present in the country matter, even if their presence is unauthorized, but those outside the country don’t matter). He also quoted two excerpt from the article:

“Sanders is specifically worried about guest-worker programs…For most politicians, what to do with the unauthorized is the trickiest part of the immigration debate. But for labor and business groups, the most important question is whether, and how, the immigration system should be changed for future legal immigration — what’s called “future flow.” Of course, labor and business have very different answers to that question.

Sanders also sees unauthorized immigrants and future flow as different issues, as he made clear to Jose Antonio Vargas during his town hall at Netroots Nation earlier this month…

Sanders is clearly worried that more immigration to the US is going to drive down wages for the native-born. In that respect, he is drawing a clear line: He cares a lot about the treatment of workers in the United States, whatever their legal status, and is not equally concerned with workers who aren’t yet living in the US.”

“If Bernie Sanders is going to be a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination, he’s going to have to do better than the single-digit support he’s currently attracting from Latino voters. And his immigration position isn’t a deal breaker. But it is a liability.

Latino voters are personally invested in immigration reform — but they’re especially invested in the fate of the unauthorized. While future flows matter to Latinos — many of whom have relatives stuck in years-long immigration backlogs — they’ll be affected much more by preserving and expanding family-based immigration than by what happens with employment-based immigration.

Sanders certainly isn’t winning over any Latino voters by talking about how more immigrants would drive down wages, and the rhetoric alone could be a turn-off. But there’s no reason it would have to be a deal breaker on its own. When it comes to the most important immigration issues to Latino voters, Sanders is saying all the right things.”

Andy Hallman responded with a perceptive comment:

Moderate pro-immigrant groups typically believe states have the right to control their border, unlike OB advocates and many libertarians. That means Bernie Sanders can appear pro-immigrant by saying things like “immigrants helped build this country” while also wanting to keep out those “helpful” immigrants.

I read Jorge Ramos’s book “La Otra Cara de America” (The Other Face of America), which is largely about Hispanics in the United States. Ramos, a journalist for Univision, said he didn’t mind immigration controls, he just thought a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment was racially motivated. I think that is the most common attitude among moderate pro-immigration voices.

Third post by Kirien Eyma on AlterNet’s defense of Sanders

Kirien Eyma posted a link to an AlterNet piece by Zaid Jilani titled How the Latest Smear Campaign Against Bernie Sanders Collapsed Before It Started. The Vermont senator’s words were completely twisted. Here’s what he actually said.

John Lee comments with a criticism of Sanders’ proposal:

So the article says it’s twisting Sanders’s words to say he opposes open borders and therefore actively disregards the interests of billions of lower-income people.

But then the article says Sanders does oppose open borders, he just supports slightly less-closed borders than most politicians. And its discussion of how his immigration proposals will help lower-income people focuses entirely on the ~12 million undocumented immigrants already present in the US, ignoring completely how his active opposition to looser immigration controls actively harms billions of lower-income people around the world.

To the extent that the article critiques the claim that looser immigration controls will empower low-income people outside the US, it predicates this on the outlandish assumption that the only reason people would ever want to migrate to the US is because free trade ruined their countries’ economies.

John Lee’s post on Ryan Cooper’s critique of open borders in The Week

John Lee posted a link to Why a massive wave of immigration is not a magic fix for the economy by Ryan Cooper in The Week, which cited nativist backlash as a reason to be skeptical of open borders. John excerpted and commented on it thus:

“What air-dropping a billion random foreigners into the country would do, of course, is create the mother of all nativist backlashes.”

You know what else creates the mother of all bigoted backlashes? Freeing slaves, giving women equal rights, letting black people move into white neighbourhoods…

The most liked comment was by Charles W. Johnson:

Who in the world suggests “air-dropping a billion random foreigners into the country”? I advocate removing all barriers to individual migration. But of course, migrants don’t move *randomly*; they move with a purpose of their own and generally respond to economic incentives at least as well as anybody else does in dispersing towards or converging on available economic opportunities. I suppose if you just dumped a huge pile of random university graduates from around the U.S. on Silicon Valley, that wouldn’t do much to keep the tech industry running from day to day; but fortunately that’s not how mobile labor markets work in a rational society.

However, there was some pushback from others. Jameson Graber:

As much as I would like to just trash this article because of its conclusion, I think the author makes a fair point about the nation state: it really is the most reliable institution develop thus far for allowing large markets to exist. In Hayekian terms, I think this is a major victory in cultural evolution. Whereas ancient people were loyal mainly to their own tribe, modern people are capable of holding onto rather abstract notions of “nation,” and this allows for an amazing level of trust among large numbers of people who would be otherwise totally unrelated. However, moving beyond this to simply eliminating the nation state altogether is, I think, a utopian ideal. Perhaps one day (a long time from now) we might have some sort of global federation uniting all the peoples of the world….

In the meantime, I don’t think the author makes the case that open borders is actually a bad idea. But I do think that making the open borders case based on anti-statism is a bad idea. Better to make an argument rooted in the very traditions which have made great nation states great.

Omar Benmegdoul:

Sure, under open borders immigrants wouldn’t be randomly selected, but there would certainly be a lot more of them than there are now, which is really all there needs to be for a backlash. And I don’t think pointing out that the abolition of slavery and other such forms of progress also created backlash is going to be very convincing, even though it’s a good argument from our perspective.

As it stands, the Harms (theoretical) > “Nativist backlash” and “Culture clash” are pretty weak on counterarguments. We should probably have a keyhole solution at least (“increase immigration by 1% each year until all hell is about to break loose”).

Paul Crider’s post about Bernie Sanders’ response on his website

Paul Crider linked to “Open Borders”: A Gimmick, Not a Solution by Richard Eskow on Bernie Sanders’ official website. Crider wrote:

If only I had time to do a point-by-point response essay to this, it could provide for some interesting engagement …

Andy Hallman:

From the article:

“Open borders is a recipe for the further commodification of human beings. It treats people as economic inputs to be moved about the globe at the whim of global capital.”

If only the refugees knew that we were turning their boats back for their own good, to save them from a life of exploitation.

I’ve been reading about the Khmer Rouge lately, and this is the kind of thing its leaders believed, that nearly any sacrifice of human beings could be justified on the grounds you were saving them from the horrors of materialism.

Carl Shulman:

“Bier fails to consider a fundamental principle of economics: when the supply of labor increases, wages go down. A massive influx of foreign workers would lead to a steep plunge in those multiples. What’s more, there are often significant cost-of-living differences between the United States and these workers’ countries of origin.”

The paper DOES adjust for cost-of-living differences. Although it’s true that wages for migrants (who are substitutes for each other even if they complement natives) would fall with massive migration, and Clemens nods to that when estimating total benefits of open borders (at a lot less than ‘double world GDP’ though).

One fair complaint from the Sanders camp: why single out Sanders vs Clinton, who is probably no better or worse on the issue?

Admittedly, the questioning by Klein was opportunistic, but will Clinton manage to avoid answering any such question? Getting such questions into town halls or any other opportunity to bypass Clinton’s media screening might be helpful for furthering this conversation.

Nathan Goodman’s response:

The other issue is that people willing to adopt radical views look up to Bernie Sanders. If he successfully demonizes open borders for them, that’s a real harm.

Nathan Smith:

I wonder whether Bernie Sanders is sincere. It would almost certainly hurt any presidential candidate openly to support open borders. That’s a downside of asking presidential candidates about their position on this: if they secretly agree with us, we may be forcing them to lie.

Lant Pritchett:

Sanders just clarified that while he is a socialist he is a national socialist.

Other news and opinion pieces on Sanders’ remarks

The following pieces didn’t get directly discussed in OBAG, but received some attention and some of them were referenced in the pieces that got discussed on OBAG.

Bernie Sanders explodes a right-wing myth: ‘Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal’ by Travis Gettys in Raw Story, July 28.
Bernie Sanders’s fear of immigrant labor is ugly — and wrongheaded by Dylan Matthews in Vox, July 29. This is the piece to which many other pieces, including the AlterNet piece, were responding.
Bernie Sanders on Immigrants: Silly, Tribal and Economically Illiterate by Daniel Bier in Newsweek, July 30.
Bernie Sanders criticizes ‘open borders’ at Hispanic Chamber of Commerce by David Weigel in the Washington Post, July 30.

When the Border Crosses You

July 31, 2015 Ruben Pacheco 2 Comments

American Indian communities on the Southwest border have become ground zero for immigration enforcement. In many cases border surveillance, checkpoints, and the construction of border fences takes place on their aboriginal homelands. Between the restriction of movement, increased drug trafficking activity, and Border Patrol’s abuse of authority, the consequences of immigration and drug laws threaten traditional lifestyles and cultural identities. In American Indian communities within the borderlands, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency closely resembles yet another occupying force.

Tohono O'odham Nation Map — Tohono O’odham Nation Map. Contemporary reservation in Red, Historical lands in Orange.

Prior to the colonization of the Americas, the Tohono O’odham inhabited what is today considered southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. The homeland of the Tohono O’odham was split in two in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase. Though their religious and cultural practices are connected to this geographic location, colonial powers never consulted the tribes when they made the international boundaries. At first, the border was merely symbolic, but as immigration laws changed the O’odham found themselves stopped, searched and sometimes “returned” to Mexico.

With the US-Mexico border cutting their sovereign territory in half, the people of Tohono O’odham are restricted from traveling freely within their own traditional homelands. According to Resolution 98-063 passed by the Tohono legislative council, “enforcement of the U.S. Immigration laws has made it extremely difficult for all Tohono O’odham to continue their sovereign right to pass and re-pass the United States- Mexico border as we have done for centuries as our members are routinely stopped by the U.S. Border when others have been actually ‘returned’ to Mexico even though enrolled”. In addition to the restriction of movement, the occupation of their traditional homelands includes 24-hour border surveillance that uses high-powered lights, drones, and black hawk helicopters.

Border Patrol prohibits tribal members from crossing the border anywhere but the official border crossings, even though some of these routes date back thousands of years and are relevant to their cultural and religious beliefs. The Tohono O’odham nation is the only tribe in the U.S. that grants enrollment to its people who happened to be born in Mexico. Regardless of Mexican citizenship, enrolled tribal members are entitled to health care services provided by the tribe in Arizona. Unfortunately, immigration restrictions have made routine healthcare visits less frequent and more dangerous. For the elders trying to seek medical attention for life threatening diseases, crossing the border often results in returning home if they lack the proper documentation. Enrolled tribal members are supposed to be allowed to freely travel across their land when they present a tribal identification card, birth certificate, or baptismal records. In practice however, this doesn’t always work out, especially for O’Odham elders who were never issued a birth certificate. According to American Indian Policy scholar Eileen Luna-Firebaugh, restrictive border enforcement on tribal land is viewed as an “assault on indigenous sovereignty, as well as an assault on the cultural integrity of native societies.”

Clinton era polices, such as the Southwest Border Strategy, sought to curb unauthorized entries at the busiest illegal crossing points. These policies would force immigrants to enter through the more remote areas or disincentivize immigration all together. One unintended consequence of increased restrictions was that immigrants and drug smugglers started to utilize entry points on tribal land. In 1999 tribal police officers assisted federal border officers with 100 undocumented immigrants per month; by 2002 Tohono O’odham police were assisting with over 800 per month. In 2008, roughly 210,000 pounds of marijuana was confiscated in the territory, increasing to 319,000 pounds in 2009. In 2002 alone, the Tohono O’odham reported about 4 million pounds of trash on tribal lands, as well as 4,500 vehicles abandoned by smugglers or immigrants. Luna-Firebaugh explains that tribes have “been concerned about the degradation of tribal land by federal officials, the cutting of roads in sensitive and/or sacred lands, and high speed pursuits over tribal roads, some of which are unpaved, which endanger tribal members and livestock.”

Within their traditional territory, the Tohono O’odham often encounter desperate immigrants seeking food, water, and shelter. Tribal members are also approached by organized crime. Cartels have been known to approach a Tohono household south of the border with a wad of cash and a bale of marijuana asking that they bring the package up north. The O’odham often worry that if they refuse they will be aggressed against by the cartels. Even without coercion, a poverty rate nearly 3 times that of Arizona creates plenty of incentives for taking advantage of this supplemental income. Many tribal members have been prosecuted for drug smuggling and/ or human trafficking, and in some cases both parents of a household are incarcerated. The problems faced by American Indian communities within the borderlands are a direct consequence of drug prohibition and increased enforcement within the border region. As other contributors to Open Borders have argued, reducing immigration restrictions and ending the war on drugs would weaken criminal gangs that operate within the US-Mexico border region. The tribe is squeezed by organized crime on one hand, and a belligerently unaccountable border patrol on the other.

On the Tohono O’odham nation the Border Patrol routinely violate the rights of American citizens on tribal land. There are countless testimonies by the Tohono O’odham that illustrate the on going abuses ranging from punching, kicking, and/or pepper spraying detainees, to shooting into vehicles. Border Patrol also claims the right to enter onto people’s property- without a warrant- if they are in a “hot pursuit” of an alleged immigrant or drug smuggler. A 2012 report by Amnesty International details how American Indians are subjected to harassment, intimidation, and frequent verbal and physical abuse at the hands of Border Agents.

The Tohono O’odham aren’t the only tribe affected by heightened border security; there are nearly 30 American Indian tribes living with the consequences of border enforcement. The Lipan Apache of the Texas-Mexico border find their property divided by a recently constructed border fence. In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which allowed the government to waive laws that would interfere with the construction of a border fence. Using this law, the DHS waived a total of 36 federal and state laws including laws protecting indigenous territory and environmental protection regulations. A recent report on the Racially Discriminatory Impact of the Border Wall on the Lipan Apache People of Texas outlines the injustices that the Lipan Apache endure within the borderlands such as restricted access to traditional lands, resources, sacred spaces, the abuse of eminent domain, and the construction of the border wall on the burial ground of Apache elders.

The current situation faced by communities like the Tohono O’odham demonstrates the unintended consequences of poorly constructed policies. On American Indian land within the border regions we find the bloody intersection of the war on drugs, restrictive immigration policies, and the politics of manifest destiny. A policy of open borders would reduce the inadvertent damage done to indigenous people and land while strengthening tribes’ ability to assert sovereignty and self-determination.

Open Borders: The Case

Tag Archives: United States

Open Borders and International Migration Policy: Book Summary

Related reading

How Would a Billion Immigrants Change the American Polity?

Related reading

The bait-and-switch from fiscally realistic to humane, or, the weakness of the mainstream moderate case against deportations

Some examples

#1, the all-or-nothing argument. Objection: the impossibility of deporting everybody is not an argument against deportation at the margin

#2, the priority argument. Objection: limited resources for deportation necessitate prioritization, but this does not mean that only the “worst” people should be deported

#3, The numbers game. Objection: It doesn’t make logical sense from most perspectives, including the open borders and restrictionist perspectives

True rejection of deportations

Conclusion

Related reading

Bernie Sanders and open borders: OBAG highlights

First post by Nathan Goodman about the Vox interview

Second post by Carl Shulman on Sanders’ immigration views and the relation with territorialism

Third post by Kirien Eyma on AlterNet’s defense of Sanders

John Lee’s post on Ryan Cooper’s critique of open borders in The Week

Paul Crider’s post about Bernie Sanders’ response on his website

Other news and opinion pieces on Sanders’ remarks

Related reading

When the Border Crosses You

Related reading

"The Efficient, Egalitarian, Libertarian, Utilitarian Way to Double World GDP" — Bryan Caplan